Geneticists Breach Ethical Taboo By Changing Genes Across Generations

by Rob Stein October 24, 2012 3:00 PM Geneticist reported Wednesday that they had crossed a threshold long considered off-limits: They have made changes in human DNA that can be passed down from one generation to the next. The researchers at Oregon Health & Science University in Portland say they took the step to try to prevent women from giving birth to babies with genetic diseases. But the research is raising a host of ethical, social and moral questions. "That kind of genetic engineering has been ruled off-limits," says Marcy Darnovsky of the Center for Genetics and Society. "And it's a very bright line that has been observed by scientists around the world." There have been lots of reasons for that line. One big one is purely practical, says Dartmouth bioethicist Ronald Green. "If we make mistakes, we'll effectively be introducing a new genetic disease into the human population — for generation after generation," Green says. But beyond the risks, Green says taking that step has long raised more far-reaching fears. It's the kind of technology that could be used to try to create genetically superior humans. "It could easily move into the realm of gene enhancement," Green says. "Higher IQ. Improved physical appearance. Athletic ability. That's a worry to some people — to many people." But in this week's issue of the scientific journal Nature, Shoukhrat Mitalipov of Oregon Health & Science University and colleagues report that they have crossed that line. They have figured out a way to change the DNA in a human egg. Why? Mitalipov says his team is trying to prevent some rare but horrible disorders: genetic conditions caused by defects in a certain kind of DNA known as mitochondrial DNA, which only mothers pass down to their kids. "They are caused by mutations in this mitochondrial DNA, which is pretty small — only encodes 37 genes," Mitalipov says. So Mitalipov's team figured out a way to pluck these little packets of defective mitochondrial DNA out of eggs and replace them with healthy genes from eggs donated by other women. They fertilized the transplanted eggs in the laboratory and showed they could create healthy embryos. "What we showed is that the faulty genes, which are usually passed through the woman's egg, can be safely replaced. And that way, the egg still retains its capacity to be fertilized by sperm and develop," he says. The researchers haven't taken the next step yet: They haven't tried to make babies out of these modified embryos. But they have made baby monkeys this way, increasing their confidence it would work. And some other doctors hope so, too. Mary Herbert of Newcastle University is part of a team that has prompted a national debate in England by doing similar research. She also hopes to help women who have gone through the trauma of giving birth to a baby with one of these genetic conditions. "In severe cases, the child will die in the first days of life, or they might live, you know, a few years and then die," Herbert says. "It's like a game of Russian roulette." But the work raises a long list of questions. One is about the morality of creating embryos in the laboratory for research and destroying them, which some consider immoral. Another is about the safety of the women donating the eggs. And, of course, it's far from clear that the resulting babies will be healthy. But even if they are, there are still more questions. One is about the very genetic identity of any babies made this way. They'd inherit DNA from three separate people instead of the usual two: from the father's sperm; from the egg of the woman whose egg was fixed; and from the egg of the woman who donated some of her DNA to fix the problem. "So yes, we're going to have to, perhaps, get used to the fact that people can have three genetic parents in the future," Dartmouth bioethicist Green says. But beyond that, the move raises those early fears about manipulating DNA to create a brave new world of genetic haves and have-nots, according to Darnovsky. "Socially, what this would mean is we would be moving toward a world in which some people — and it would be people who could afford these procedures — would have either real or perceived genetic advantage," she says. Despite the concerns, Mitalipov and Herbert say the real benefits of preventing genetic diseases outweigh such hypothetical risks. Herbert is awaiting a decision by the British government on whether she can proceed to the next step in her research. Mitalipov has already asked the Food and Drug Administration if he can try to make a healthy baby by genetically altering human eggs.

Hello, Tiffanys? Astronomers discover gigantic diamond planet

From REUTERS Last Updated: 3:23 PM, October 11, 2012 LONDON — Forget the diamond as big as the Ritz. This one's bigger than planet Earth. Orbiting a star that is visible to the naked eye, astronomers have discovered a planet twice the size of our own made largely out of diamond. The rocky planet, called '55 Cancri e', orbits a sun-like star in the constellation of Cancer and is moving so fast that a year there lasts a mere 18 hours. Discovered by a U.S.-Franco research team, its radius is twice that of Earth's but it is much more dense with a mass eight times greater. It is also incredibly hot, with temperatures on its surface reaching 3,900 degrees Fahrenheit. "The surface of this planet is likely covered in graphite and diamond rather than water and granite," said Nikku Madhusudhan, the Yale researcher whose findings are due to be published in the journal Astrophysical Journal Letters. The study — with Olivier Mousis at the Institut de Recherche en Astrophysique et Planetologie in Toulose, France — estimates that at least a third of the planet's mass, the equivalent of about three Earth masses, could be diamond. Diamond planets have been spotted before but this is the first time one has been seen orbiting a sun-like star and studied in such detail. "This is our first glimpse of a rocky world with a fundamentally different chemistry from Earth," Madhusudhan said, adding that the discovery of the carbon-rich planet meant distant rocky planets could no longer be assumed to have chemical constituents, interiors, atmospheres, or biologies similar to Earth. David Spergel, an astronomer at Princeton University, said it was relatively simple to work out the basic structure and history of a star once you know its mass and age. "Planets are much more complex. This 'diamond-rich super-Earth' is likely just one example of the rich sets of discoveries that await us as we begin to explore planets around nearby stars." "Nearby" is a relative concept in astronomy. Any fortune-hunter not dissuaded by "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz", F.Scott Fitzgerald's jazz age morality tale of thwarted greed, will find Cancri e about 40 light years, or 230 trillion miles, from Park Avenue.

Discovery of living mammoth cells claimed

YAKUTSK, Russia, Sept. 12 (UPI) -- Researchers with an expedition in Russia's northeastern republic of Yakutia say they've found the "living cells" of a mammoth frozen in permafrost. "In a unique area at the depth of about 100 meters (330 feet) we discovered some rich material for research -- soft and adipose tissues, fur and bone marrow of a mammoth," expedition leader Semyon Grigoryev told a meeting at a university in the region's capital city, Yakutsk. The discovery has attracted the attention of controversial South Korean scientist Hwang Woo-Suk, who has already announced his intention to clone a woolly baby mammoth from a specimen discovered in permafrost on the coast of the Laptev Sea last year, RIA Novosti reported Tuesday. Hwang, the leader of Sooam Biotech Research Foundation, was hailed as a national hero in South Korea until some of his research on human embryos was declared fraudulent in 2006. He received a suspended jail term in 2009 for embezzlement and accepting millions of dollars in grants under fraudulent circumstances. Responding to the reports of the latest discovery, experts from the Institute of Paleontology of the Russian Academy of Sciences said the discovery of living mammoth cells is unlikely. "The cell structure with nucleus can be preserved [only] under special conditions in deep-freeze," Alexander Agadzhanyan, the chief of the Institute's mammal laboratory, said. Cells needed a stable exchange with the environment to stay alive, he said Read more: http://www.upi.com/Science_News/2012/09/12/Discovery-of-living-mammoth-cells-claimed/UPI-68251347486709/#ixzz26uu7qGV4

When did modern humans first arrive in Asia? Skull pieces could hold clues.

By Charles Choi, LiveScience Contributor / August 20, 2012 Newfound pieces of human skull from "the Cave of the Monkeys" in Laos are the earliest skeletal evidence yet that humans once had an ancient, rapid migration to Asia. Anatomically modern humans first arose about 200,000 years ago in Africa. When and how our lineage then dispersed out of Africa has long proven controversial. Archaeological evidence and genetic data suggest that modern humans rapidly migrated out of Africa and into Southeast Asia by at least 60,000 years ago. However, complicating this notion is the notable absence of fossil evidence for modern human occupation in mainland Southeast Asia, likely because those bones do not survive well in the warm, tropical region. Now a partial skull from Tam Pa Ling, "the Cave of the Monkeys" in northern Laos helps fill in this mysterious gap in the fossil record. [See Photos of "Monkey Cave" Fossils] "Most surprising is the fact that we found anything at all," researcher Laura Lynn Shackelford, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Illinois, told LiveScience. "Most people didn't think we'd find anything in these caves, or even in the region where we're working in mainland Southeast Asia. But we're stubborn, gone where no one's really looked before, or at least in almost a century." Rough terrain, persistent scientists The fossils were discovered in 2009 in the limestone cave, which is located at the top of the Pa Hang Mountain 3,840 feet (1,170 meters) above sea level. "The cave is surrounded by lots of papaya and banana trees, so a troop of monkeys likes to come and forage there, therefore its name," Shackelford said. There were many challenges working in this area. "It's incredibly difficult to access the site — it's only 150 miles (240 kilometers) from the capital, but it takes us two days to drive there because of the rough terrain," Shackelford said. "We have to hike up the side of a cliff, do a bit of rock-climbing to get to the mouth of the cave, and then going in, we have to go 60 meters (200 ft) down a slope of wet clay. We also have to carry a generator and lights with us to see in the cave. We have to push pigs out of the way to get through the jungle — there are just pigs wandering around there." [Amazing Caves: Photos of Earth's Innards] "Every bit of clay has to be removed and taken back up by hand, trowel and bucket, so work is incredibly slow," she added. "We only go in the dry season in the winter, so we don't really have to deal with insects and snakes — well, we did have snakes fall into the pit while excavating. And in the cave, we've had more than our fair share of spiders and Oldest bones of modern humans No artifacts were found at the site, nor were signs of human occupation. "We think this fossil was outside with other fauna and flora, and during the rainy season, rain washed it into the cave," Shackelford said. "In subsequent seasons, more sediment washed into the cave and covered it." The shape of the bone and teeth is distinctly anatomically modern human, not like those of an extinct lineage such as the Neanderthals. A variety of dating techniques of the sediments surrounding the fossils suggests they are at least 46,000 to 51,000 years old, and direct dating of the bone suggests a maximum age of about 63,000 years. This makes these fossils the earliest skeletal evidence for anatomically modern humans east of the Middle East. These findings "change the thinking regarding modern human migration routes into Asia, that there were more routes of dispersal than previously thought," Shackelford said. "The typical thinking was that once modern humans hugged the coastline to go from India to Southeast Asia, they went southward into Indonesia and Australasia (the region comprising Australia, New Zealand and neighboring Pacific islands)," she explained. "We think they absolutely did that, but we're also suggesting other populations probably went north or northeast toward China, and some went through the mountains into mainland Southeast Asia, taking advantage of river systems. Beforehand, no one thought they would have gone into the mountains of Laos, Vietnam and Thailand." The researchers are now attempting to extract DNA from these fossils to see how related they may or may not be to later humans that once lived or currently live in the area. In the future, "the work we have is pretty boundless — there are literally thousands of limestone caves we can work on in this area to look for early modern humans," Shackelford said. "We can work here for the rest of our careers or lives and not see all the caves." The scientists detailed their findings online Aug. 20 in the journal the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

New theory says Big Bang was more like water freezing to ice

By Natalie Wolchover updated 8/21/2012 9:31:36 PM ET How did the universe begin? The Big Bang is traditionally envisioned as the moment when an infinitely dense bundle of energy suddenly burst outward, expanding in three spatial directions and gradually cooling down as it did so. Now, a team of physicists says the Big Bang should be modeled as a phase change: the moment when an amorphous, formless universe analogous to liquid water cooled and suddenly crystallized to form four-dimensional space-time, analogous to ice. In the new study, lead author James Quach and colleagues at the University of Melbourne in Australia say the hypothesis can be tested by looking for defects that would have formed in the structure of space-time when the universe crystallized. The universe is currently about 13.7 billion years old. "Think of the early universe as being like a liquid," Quach said in a statement. "Then as the universe cools, it 'crystallizes' into the three spatial and one time dimension that we see today. Theorized this way, as the universe cools, we would expect that cracks should form, similar to the way cracks are formed when water freezes into ice." If they exist, these cracks should be detectable, the researchers said, because light and other particles would bend or reflect off of them as they trek across the cosmos. [The History & Structure of the Universe (Infographic)] The notion that space and time are emergent properties that suddenly materialized out of an amorphous state was first put forth by physicists at Canada's Perimeter Institute in 2006. Called "quantum graphity," the theory holds that the four-dimensional geometry of space-time discovered by Albert Einstein is not fundamental; instead, space-time is more like a lattice constructed of discrete space-time building blocks, just like matter looks continuous, but is actually made of building blocks called atoms. Originally, at extremely high temperatures, the building blocks were like liquid water: they contained no structure, "representing a state with no space," the researchers wrote in their paper. At the moment of the Big Bang, when the temperature in the universe dropped to the space-time building blocks' "freezing point," they crystallized to form the four-dimensional lattice we observe today. The math describing the theory checks out, but "the challenge has been that these building blocks of space are very small, and so impossible to see directly," Quach explained. From the human vantage point, space-time looks smooth and continuous. However, while the building blocks themselves might be too small to detect, the physicists hope to observe the boundaries that would have formed as regions of crystallizing building blocks butted against one another at the time of the Big Bang, creating "cracks" in the universe. More work is needed to predict the average distance between the cracks — it isn't known whether they are microscopic, or light-years apart — in order to characterize their effects on particles. The research by Quach and his team is detailed in this month's edition of the journal Physical Review D.

Girl With Bubonic Plague Saved by Quick-Thinking Doctor

By KEVIN DOLAK (@kdolak) and CHANDANI PATEL, M.D. Sept. 6, 2012

A pediatric critical care doctor's quick, outside-the-box thinking saved the life of a 7-year-old girl who'd contracted a rare case of bubonic plague while camping in southwest Colorado. Sierra Jane Downing had come upon a half-eaten squirrel while on a picnic with her family on Aug.19 in Pagosa Springs. A passionate animal lover, the young girl asked her parents if she could bury the animal. Her mother said no. "We told her to stay away from it, but when she went down to the creek to play with her 13-year-old sister, Sierra Jane went back to the squirrel, put her sweatshirt down next to it, and then picked up the sweatshirt and put it around her waist," her mother, Darcy Downing, told ABC News. Five days later, Sierra Jane woke up with a fever and was vomiting, and by 9 p.m. her father found her lying on the bathroom floor. When he picked her up to bring her back to bed, the girl threw up again and then had a seizure. At that point the girl's dad knew something was very wrong, and he rushed her to the local hospital near their Pagosa Springs home. Sierra Jane's clear chest X-ray and only slightly elevated white blood cell count offered local doctors no clue that Sierra Jane had contracted the disease that wiped out one-third of Europe's population in the 14th century. While the doctors called around to other Colorado hospitals, they managed to bring Sierra Jane's temperature down from 107 to 103 degrees. After speaking with doctors at the Rocky Mountain Hospital for Children in Denver, they had Sierra Jane flown there. When she arrived at 5 a.m. the next day she still very sick but stable, so doctors placed her in the hospital's intermediate care unit under continuous monitoring. By 6:30 p.m. Saturday, Sierra Jane's condition had worsened and she was transferred to pediatric ICU for septic shock. "It was touch-and-go for a while, and all we could do is pray," her father, Sean Downing said. Read: Plague, Hantavirus, West Nile: How to Avoid Them Doctors initially thought that Sierra Jane's altered mental state -- which included delirium and hallucinations -- was a result of a dose of the antibiotic ceftriaxone. Dr. Jennifer Snow, the pediatric critical care specialist whose quick thinking proved so important, ran some blood tests on Sierra Jane, as the girl was in disseminated intravascular coagulopathy, meaning her blood would not clot. Snow then reinterviewed the family about where Sierra Jane had been and what she might have been exposed to. "Mom told us the story of the exposure to the dead squirrel, and exposure to mouse droppings in chicken coops, and exposure to a dead skunk," Snow told ABC News. By then Snow was getting an inkling of what Sierra Jane might have contracted. Snow did an immediate literature search, and found a report of a 16-year-old with fulminant septic shock in the chest whose cause of death was listed as bubonic plague. Snow promptly contacted Dr. Wendi Drummond, a pediatric infectious disease specialist, who recommended starting the girl on gentamicin, an antibiotic used to treat many types of bacterial infections. Sierra Jane completed her course of antibiotics on Wednesday and could be going home by the end of the week, according to Drummond. This is the first case of bubonic plague that either Snow or Drummond had seen in their careers. In Colorado, the disease, that had killed an estimated 25 million Europeans more than 500 years ago and was once called the Black Death, had not been seen since 2006.

Oregon man recovering from rare case of the plague

An Oregon man who contracted a rare case of the plague trying to take a mouse from the jaws of a choking cat is no longer in a critical condition, and has talked about his fears of losing all of his fingers as a result of the disease. The family of Paul Gaylord, a welder from Prineville in rural Oregon, released pictures showing his hands withered by the cell-killing infection and darkened to the colour of charcoal. "I don't think I can do my job," he told the Associated Press in a phone interview from hospital. "I'm going to lose all my fingers on both hands. I don't know about my thumbs. The toes – I might lose all them, too." He faces a difficult recovery now that he is no longer in intensive care, and his family is trying to raise money to get him into a new house, because the manufactured home he was living in has a leaky roof, a mouldy bathroom and mice – dangerous living conditions for someone with a weakened immune system. "We didn't even know the plague was around anymore," said his sister, Diana Gaylord. "We thought that was an ancient, ancient disease." The disease, which rampaged through Europe in the middle ages and is thought to have wiped out between a quarter and a third of the population, is caused by the Yersinia pestis bacterium. It can develop into three kinds of plague including the bubonic plague, which swells lymph nodes across the body. The other two are septicaemic plague, which affects the bloodstream, and pneumonic plague, which affects the lungs. Gaylord's illness began after he saw a stray cat with a dead mouse jammed in the back of his throat. The cat appeared to be choking, so Gaylord and a friend attempted to dislodge the mouse. The distressed cat bit his hand. Unable to remove the mouse, Gaylord shot Charlie to end his suffering and buried him in the yard. Two days later, he awoke with a fever and chills. He spent nearly a month on life support and only recently left the intensive care unit. At one point, doctors thought he was going to die, said Debbie Gaylord, his wife. A hospital chaplain baptised the unconscious patient and Gaylord's son, Jake, arrived from Austin, Texas, to say goodbye. Hours later, doctors told his family that he had improved. The cat's body was dug up, and tests confirmed it had the plague. Other cats and dogs in the area were tested and none had the disease.

Caravaggio claims spark Italian art world dispute

ROME – Caravaggio was notorious for his brawling, so it might be fitting that a claim by two Italian art historians that they discovered as many as 100 drawings by the painter in his boyhood has sparked an art world uproar. The researchers say they found dozens of early drawings by Caravaggio in the collection of master Milanese artist Simone Peterzano, the painter's teacher from 1584 to 1588. Many experts have responded with skepticism to the startling claim: Over the centuries, art historians have never definitively attributed any drawings to Caravaggio, who shook up 16th-century art by using models from the lower walks of life for religious scenes and dramatically counterpointing light and dark. On Friday, the curator of the drawings collection at Milan's Sforzesco Castle, where the collection of 1,500 painting generally attributed to Peterzano is kept, challenged the seriousness of the researchers' methods and contended that the pair had never set foot in the room to scrutinize the works. "We would be happy to have a Caravaggio," Francesco Rossi said, cautioning that it's difficult to be sure of the works' provenance. Making it especially difficult to pin works on Caravaggio was the artist's habit of not signing his own work. Attempts at fakes and uncertain claims of authenticity have been frequent. He dismissed the historians' methods as naive. "What surprised us about this thing is the fact that these experts never came here in the drawings department to see the works," Rossi told The Associated Press. "They evaluated (the drawings) using black and white photographs." The researchers defended their claim, which they made public on Thursday in an interview with the Italian news agency ANSA. Adriana Conconi Fedrigolli, told the AP in a phone interview that some of their research team studied the drawings firsthand. When pressed to identify the other researchers, she said she wasn't authorized to reveal their names and passed the phone to the other art historian, Maurizio Bernardelli Curuz. "I saw the originals," Bernadelli Curuz said. The art historian said he was able to visit the collection `'after hours," thanks to his contacts with a high-level city official who was authorized to enter the drawings department. He declined to identify the city official. But he insisted that he and Conconi Fedrigolli worked `'in a very scientific way" using photos of the drawings and comparing details to those in well-known Caravaggio works. He said it was not logical that among the Peterzano collection drawings there wouldn't be any by Caravaggio, a star pupil then known as Michelangelo Merisi. The artist is better known by the name of the Italian town where he was born. He contended they were able to distinguish drawings by Peterzano from those of his pupils, including Caravaggio. Among the prominent skeptics was Antonio Paolucci, the director of the Vatican Museums and one of Italy's most esteemed art historians and restoration experts, who pointed out that many experts have seen the drawing and "not one of those experts had come up with the name of Caravaggio." Paolucci described the claim as "pure inductive optimism" in the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano on Friday, though he acknowledged it was always possible that "researchers with lesser credentials but with an especially gifted eye, sensitivity and also luck" had pinpointed something new. Paolucci has experienced first-hand the perils of attributing works to great artists, particularly Caravaggio. Two summers ago, the Vatican Museums director wrote an article under the headline "A New Caravaggio? Not really," a week after the Vatican newspaper first suggested that a painting depicting St. Lawrence could be that of Caravaggio -- but then backtracked. Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/world/2012/07/06/caravaggio-claims-spark-italian-art-world-dispute/#ixzz1zzROzXb0

Mysterious planet-sized object spotted near Mercury

By Eric Pfeiffer | The Sideshow – Thu, Dec 8, 2011

Is a giant, cloaked spaceship orbiting around Mercury?

That's been the speculation from some corners aftera camera onboard NASA's STEREO spacecraft caught a wave of electronically charged material shooting out from the sun and hitting Mercury.

Theorists have seized on the images captured from the "coronal mass ejection" (CME) last week as suggestive of alien life hanging out in our own cosmic backyard. Specifically, the solar flare washing over Mercury appears to hit another object of comparable size. "It's cylindrical on either side and has a shape in the middle. It definitely looks like a ship to me, and very obviously, it's cloaked," YouTube-user siniXster said in his video commentary on the footage, which has generated hundreds of thousands of views this week. Now, how this user was able to determine that the object was "obviously" a cloaked spaceship with no other natural explanation remains as much a mystery as the object itself.



Of course, there's another scientifically sanctioned explanation for the curious images, though we're not certain that skeptics and UFO enthusiasts such as SiniXster will endorse it. Natalie Wolchover of Life's Little Mysteries put the question to scientists in the solar physics branch at the United States Naval Research Laboratory (NRL). They're the people who analyze data from the Heliospheric Imager-1 (HI-1)--better known in this context as the camera that shot the footage in question.



Head NRL group scientist Russ Howard and lead ground systems engineer Nathan Rich say the mysterious object is in fact Mercury itself. And what we're seeing in the footage is the equivalent of Mercury's wake, "where the planet was on the previous day," as it travels through the solar system on its natural gravitational path:


To make the relatively faint glow of a coronal mass ejection stand out against the bright glare of space—caused by interplanetary dust and the stellar/galactic background—the NRL scientists must remove as much background light as possible. They explained that they determine what light is background light, and thus can be subtracted out, by calculating the average amount of light that entered each camera pixel on the day of the CME event and on the previous day. Light appearing in the pixels on both days is considered to be background light and is removed from the footage of the CME. The remaining light is then enhanced.

The analysts say the practice works even better when applied to far-off objects such as stars, which don't move much relative to the sun. But for moving objects, especially planets, the process is a little more complicated. And making matters even trickier is Mercury's staus as the closest planet to the sun.

"When [this averaging process] is done between the previous day and the current day and there is a feature like a planet, this introduces dark (negative) artifacts in the background where the planet was on the previous day, which then show up as bright areas in the enhanced image," Rich explained in an email

Real Jurassic Park? Scientists to bring back woolly mammoth

by Michael Henrich

Doesn't anybody remember Jurassic Park?

Perhaps a certain group of Japanese and Russian scientists does not.

Thanks to the finding of well-preserved bone marrow in a woolly mammoth thigh bone recovered from Siberia, these scientists believe they can clone the long-extinct species and bring it back into existence, according to published reports.

The researchers plan to produce embryos with mammoth DNA by replacing the nuclei of egg cells from an elephant with those taken from the mammoth's marrow cells, the reports state.

Scientists from Russia's Sakha Republic's mammoth museum and Japan's Kinki University are launching the joint research project next year and hope to clone a woolly mammoth within five years.

Mammoths became extinct roughly 10,000 years ago.

NASA Telescope Confirms Alien Planet in Habitable Zone

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — NASA's planet-hunting Kepler spacecraft has confirmed the discovery of its first alien world in its host star's habitable zone — that just-right range of distances that could allow liquid water to exist — and found more than 1,000 new explanet candidates, researchers announced today (Dec. 5).

The new finds bring the Kepler space telescope's total haul to 2,326 potential planets in its first 16 months of operation.These discoveries, if confirmed, would quadruple the current tally of worlds known to exist beyond our solar system, which recently topped 700.

The potentially habitable alien world, a first for Kepler, orbits a star very much like our own sun. The discovery brings scientists one step closer to finding a planet like our own — one which could conceivably harbor life, scientists said.

"We're getting closer and closer to discovering the so-called 'Goldilocks planet,'" Pete Worden, director of NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., said during a press conference today. [Gallery: The Strangest Alien Planets]

The newfound planet in the habitable zone is called Kepler-22b. It is located about 600 light-years away, orbiting a sun-like star.

Kepler-22b's radius is 2.4 times that of Earth, and the two planets have roughly similar temperatures. If the greenhouse effect operates there similarly to how it does on Earth, the average surface temperature on Kepler-22b would be 72 degrees Fahrenheit (22 degrees Celsius).

Hunting down alien planets

The $600 million Kepler observatory launched in March 2009 to hunt for Earth-size alien planets in the habitable zone of their parent stars, where liquid water, and perhaps even life, might be able to exist.

Kepler detects alien planets using what's called the "transit method." It searches for tiny, telltale dips in a star's brightness caused when a planet transits — or crosses in front of — the star from Earth's perspective, blocking a fraction of the star's light.

The finds graduate from "candidates" to full-fledged planets after follow-up observations confirm that they're not false alarms. This process, which is usually done with large, ground-based telescopes, can take about a year.

The Kepler team released data from its first 13 months of operation back in February, announcing that the instrument had detected 1,235 planet candidates, including 54 in the habitable zone and 68 that are roughly Earth-size.

Of the total 2,326 candidate planets that Kepler has found to date, 207 are approximately Earth-size. More of them, 680, are a bit larger than our planet, falling into the "super-Earth" category. The total number of candidate planets in the habitable zones of their stars is now 48.

To date, just over two dozen of these potential exoplanets have been confirmed, but Kepler scientists have estimated that at least 80 percent of the instrument's discoveries should end up being the real deal.

More discoveries to come

The newfound 1,094 planet candidates are the fruit of Kepler's labors during its first 16 months of science work, from May 2009 to September 2010. And they won't be the last of the prolific instrument's discoveries.

"This is a major milestone on the road to finding Earth's twin," Douglas Hudgins, Kepler program scientist at NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C., said in a statement.

Mission scientists still need to analyze data from the last two years and on into the future. Kepler will be making observations for a while yet to come; its nominal mission is set to end in November 2012, but the Kepler team is preparing a proposal to extend the instrument's operations for another year or more.

Kepler's finds should only get more exciting as time goes on, researchers say.

"We're pushing down to smaller planets and longer orbital periods," said Natalie Batalha, Kepler deputy science team lead at Ames.

To flag a potential planet, the instrument generally needs to witness three transits. Planets that make three transits in just a few months must be pretty close to their parent stars; as a result, many of the alien worlds Kepler spotted early on have been blisteringly hot places that aren't great candidates for harboring life as we know it.

Given more time, however, a wealth of more distantly orbiting — and perhaps more Earth-like — exoplanets should open up to Kepler. If intelligent aliens were studying our solar system with their own version of Kepler, after all, it would take them three years to detect our home planet.

"We are getting very close," Batalha said. "We are homing in on the truly Earth-size, habitable planets."

Scientists Solve Puzzle of Black Death’s DNA

By NICHOLAS WADE


After the Black Death reached London in 1348, about 2,400 people were buried in East Smithfield, near the Tower of London, in a cemetery that had been prepared for the plague’s arrival. From the teeth of four of those victims, researchers have now reconstructed the full DNA of a microbe that within five years felled one-third to one-half of the population of Western Europe.

The bacterium that causes plague, Yersinia pestis, is still highly virulent today but has different symptoms, leading some historians to doubt that it was the agent of the Black Death.

Those doubts were laid to rest last year by detection of the bacterium’s DNA in plague victims from mass graves across Europe. With the full genome now in hand, the researchers hope to recreate the microbe itself so as to understand what made the Black Death outbreak so deadly.

So far, the evidence points more toward the conditions of the time than to properties of the bacterium itself. The genome recovered from the East Smithfield victims is remarkably similar to that of the present-day bacterium, says the research team, led by Kirsten I. Bos of McMaster University in Ontario and Johannes Krause of the University of Tübingen in Germany.

This is the first time the genome of an ancient pathogen has been reconstructed, opening the way to tracking other ancient epidemics and how their microbes adapted to human hosts.

The bacterium’s genome consists of a single chromosome, about 4.6 million DNA units long, and three small rings of DNA called plasmids. In the 660 years since the Black Death struck, only 97 of these DNA units have changed and only a dozen of these changes occur in genes and therefore would affect the organism’s physical properties, the researchers report in Wednesday’s issue of the journal Nature. Dr. Krause and others reported the DNA sequence of one of the plasmids in August. The changes in the genome will be studied one by one to see how each affects the microbe’s virulence.

The researchers hope eventually to modify a living plague bacterium so that its genome is identical to that of the agent of the Black Death. Such a microbe could be handled only in special secure facilities. But even if it did infect a person, the bacterium would be susceptible to antibiotics, like its living descendants, said Hendrik Poinar of McMaster University, a team member.

If the microbe’s genome is so little changed, the deadliness of the Black Death may reflect the condition of its medieval victims. Harsh as the economic stresses assailing Europe today may be, they are a breeze compared with problems in the mid-14th century. The climate was cooling, heavy rains rotted out crops and caused frequent famines, and the Hundred Years’ War began in 1337. People were probably already suffering from malnutrition and other diseases when the plague arrived like the fourth horseman of the apocalypse. “People honestly thought it was the end of the world,” Ms. Bos said.

Recovery of the medieval plague bacterium’s full genome is a technical tour de force. The DNA had been degraded into millions of small fragments that were overwhelmed in number by DNA from the human host and from the bacteria that consumed the body after death. Dr. Krause’s team fished out the plague DNA by using DNA from the modern bacterium, relying on the fact that DNA strands bind to DNA of complementary sequence.

“This is a major technological step forward, a great advance for the entire field of DNA and pathogens,” said Mark Achtman, an expert on ancient plague at University College Cork in Ireland.

But Dr. Achtman disagreed with one issue in Dr. Krause’s findings, that of whether Yersinia pestis also caused the outbreak in the sixth century known as the Justinian plague. When the full genome of the medieval bacterium is compared with DNA recovered from other known human outbreaks, a tree of descent can be constructed. The Black Death genome lies so close to the root of the tree that the human pathogen probably did not exist much earlier or, if it did, has vanished without any descendants, Dr. Krause’s team says. This implies that the Justinian plague was caused by some other agent.

Dr. Achtman said this conclusion was incorrect because the Krause team had omitted DNA from several human cases that place the root of the tree much further back in time. Dr. Krause said he had left these cases out because they seemed unreliable.

The modern plague bacterium changes its DNA units slowly, but it does quite often rearrange the order of its genes. Some experts believe gene order can affect pathogenicity. Dr. Krause had available only tiny fragments of DNA, so although he was able to reconstruct all the medieval bacterium’s genes he could not establish the exact order in which the genes were arranged, leaving open the possibility that the bacterium was inherently more pathogenic because its genome was differently organized.

Paul Keim, an expert on infectious bacteria at Northern Arizona University, said that work by Dr. Achtman and Dr. Krause had shown that the Black Death “was really a series of epidemics coming out of China and sweeping across the susceptible ecological situation” created by the culture of medieval Europe. The plague in each outbreak probably did not persist very long and was repeatedly re-established by new infections from East Asia, where the bacterium is still endemic in small rodents like marmots.

“We don’t have a human ecological situation comparable today, plus it is really easy to break the transmission cycle with antibiotics and public health,” Dr. Keim said. There are still small outbreaks, like one in Madagascar in the 1990s, but “a multiyear large human outbreak is inconceivable in this day,” he said.

Besides the Justinian plague and the Black Death, a third great wave of plague swept out of China in 1894, causing an epidemic in San Francisco in 1900 and killing millions of people in India.

All the teeth used in the study will be returned to the skulls from which they were taken, now in a London museum whose archaeologists excavated the East Smithfield cemetery in the 1980s.

Report: Cancer is the world's costliest disease

By MARILYNN MARCHIONE (AP)
Cancer is the world's top "economic killer" as well as its likely leading cause of death, the American Cancer Society contends in a new report it will present at a global cancer conference in China this week.

Cancer costs more in productivity and lost life than AIDS, malaria, the flu and other diseases that spread person-to-person, the report concludes.

Chronic diseases including cancer, heart disease and diabetes account for more than 60 percent of deaths worldwide but less than 3 percent of public and private funding for global health, said Rachel Nugent of the Center for Global Development, a Washington-based policy research group.

Money shouldn't be taken away from fighting diseases that spread person-to-person, but the amount devoted to cancer is way out of whack with the impact it has, said Otis Brawley, the cancer society's chief medical officer.

Cancer's economic toll was $895 billion in 2008 — equivalent to 1.5 percent of the world's gross domestic product, the report says. That's in terms of disability and years of life lost — not the cost of treating the disease, which wasn't addressed in the report.

The World Health Organization has long predicted that cancer would overtake heart disease this year as the leading cause of death. About 7.6 million people died of cancer in 2008, and about 12.4 million new cases are diagnosed each year.

Tobacco use and obesity are fueling a rise in chronic diseases, while vaccines and better treatments have led to drops in some infectious diseases.

Many groups have been pushing for more attention to non-infectious causes of death, and the United Nations General Assembly has set a meeting on this a year from now. Some policy experts are comparing it to the global initiative that led to big increases in spending on AIDS nearly a decade ago.

"This needs to be discussed at the UN — how we are going to deal with this" rising burden of chronic disease, said Dr. Andreas Ullrich, medical officer for cancer control at WHO....

Big Bang investigators want new atom smasher

By EMMA VANDORE, AP Business Writer
PARIS – Scientists behind the European particle collider aimed at uncovering the secrets of the universe pushed Monday to build an even bigger machine — with money and partners from around the world.

Instead of whirling atoms in giant rings, as existing colliders in Switzerland and the United States do, scientists want a new-generation machine that will shoot them straight.

Depending on who wants to host it — and how much they are willing to pay — the next-generation collider could potentially be built anywhere in the world. Japan, Russia, the U.S. and Switzerland are all potential hosts, although scientists from China, India, Canada and elsewhere also will be associated with it, said Barry Barish, director of one of the proposed new collider projects.

Scientists gathered in Paris on Monday were encouraged by the results of the $10 billion Large Hadron Collider run by CERN, a particle physics laboratory outside Geneva. A smaller collider called Tevatron is run by Fermilab near Chicago. Both are highly complex machines that took years to bring to fruition.

Rolf Heuer, head of CERN, said at a press conference in Paris that he is "pretty happy" about what scientists have so far discovered from the LHC about how the universe was created.

The machine is "opening a new era of research."

But he said there will be a need for a new linear collider. It is the "interplay and combination of results" between the two different types of atom smashers that allows high-energy physics to advance, he said.

More than 1,000 physicists have gathered in Paris to hear the latest results of the LHC — and the preparations for its successor — at the International Conference on High Energy Physics, which runs through July 28.

The experiments are more about shaping our understanding of how the universe was created than immediate improvements to technology in our daily lives.

Scientists are attempting to simulate the moments after the Big Bang nearly 14 billion years ago, which they theorize was the creation of the universe.

Plans for the next step include a euro10 billion ($12.85 billion), 50-kilometer (31-mile) tunnel called the International Linear Collider, and the Compact Linear Collider, or CLIC, which has not yet been priced.....

iPhone jailbreaking (and all cell phone unlocking) made legal

Owners of iPhones and other smartphones are one step closer toward taking complete control of their gadgets, thanks to a new government ruling Monday on the practice of "jailbreaking."

This weekend has seen a flurry of activity about digital rights, but the biggest news dropped Monday morning, when the Library of Congress announced that it had made the controversial practice of “jailbreaking” your iPhone — or any other cell phone — legal.

Jailbreaking — the practice of unlocking a phone (and particularly an iPhone) so it can be used on another network and/or run other applications than those approved by Apple — has technically been illegal for years. Most jailbroken phones are used on the U.S. T-Mobile network or on overseas carriers, or are used to run applications that Apple refuses to sell, such as Safari ad-blocking apps, alternate keyboard layouts, or programs that change the interface to the iPhone's SMS system and the way its icons are laid out.

While technically illegal, no one has been sued or prosecuted for the practice. (Apple does seriously frown on the practice, and jailbreaking your phone will still void your warranty.) It’s estimated that more than a million iPhone owners have jailbroken their handsets.

Apple fought hard against the legalization, arguing that jailbreaking was a form of copyright violation. The FCC disagreed, saying that jailbreaking merely enhanced the inter-operability of the phone, and was thus legitimate under fair-use rules.

The upshot is that now anyone can jailbreak or otherwise unlock any cell phone without fear of legal penalties, whether you want to install unsupported applications or switch to another cellular carrier. Cell phone companies are of course still free to make it difficult for you to do this — and your warranty will probably still be voided if you do — but at least you won’t be fined or imprisoned if you jailbreak a handset.

In addition to the jailbreaking exemption, the FCC announced a few other rules that have less sweeping applicability but are still significant:

• Professors, students and documentary filmmakers are now allowed, for “noncommercial” purposes, to break the copy protection measures on DVDs to be used in classroom or other not-for-profit environments. This doesn’t quite go so far as to grant you and me the right to copy a DVD so we can watch it in two rooms of the house, but it’s now only one step away....

Scientists find most massive star ever discovered

By RAPHAEL G. SATTER, Associated Press Writer
LONDON – A huge ball of brightly burning gas drifting through a neighboring galaxy may be the heaviest star ever discovered — hundreds of times more massive than the sun, scientists said Wednesday after working out its weight for the first time.

Those behind the find say the star, called R136a1, may once have weighed as much as 320 solar masses. Astrophysicist Paul Crowther said the obese star — twice as heavy as any previously discovered — has already slimmed down considerably over its lifetime.

In fact, it's burning itself off with such intensity that it shines at nearly 10 million times the luminosity of the sun.

"Unlike humans, these stars are born heavy and lose weight as they age," said Crowther, an astrophysicist at the University of Sheffield in northern England. "R136a1 is already middle-aged and has undergone an intense weight loss program."

Crowther said the giant was identified at the center of a star cluster in the Tarantula Nebula, a sprawling cloud of gas and dust in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a galaxy about 165,000 light-years away from our own Milky Way.

7th-Graders Discover Mysterious Cave on Mars

Clara Moskowitz
Senior Writer
SPACE.com – Mon Jun 21, 5:00 pm ET
A group of seventh-graders in California has discovered a mysterious cave on Mars as part of a research project to study images taken by a NASA spacecraft orbiting the red planet.


The 16 students from teacher Dennis Mitchell's 7th-grade science class at Evergreen Middle School in Cottonwood, Calif., found what looks to be a Martian skylight — a hole in the roof of a cave on Mars.


The intrepid students were participating in the Mars Student Imaging Program at the Mars Space Flight Facility at Arizona State University. The program allows students to frame a research question and then commission a Mars-orbiting camera to take an image to answer their question.....

Scientific showman out to dazzle the world with genetics

The Irish Times - Saturday, May 22, 2010
DICK AHLSTROM

When J Craig Venter announced the creation of a synthetic cell this week he was accused of playing God. But stirring up controversy is in the scientist’s DNA

IF EVER the scientific world had a showman, that entertainer would be J Craig Venter. The California-based researcher knows how to do big science – and how to work the media and attract attention.

On Thursday he grabbed global headlines with the announcement that he had created a “synthetic cell”, a living organism built from scratch. He described the resultant organism, a bacterium, as “the first self-replicating species we’ve had on the planet whose parent is a computer”. This was a reference to the fact that its entire genetic blueprint, its DNA, had been assembled rather than grown......

Galileo's finger goes on display in Italy

A wizened finger belonging to Galileo Galilei, the only remaining part of the 17th century astronomer's body, is to go on display in Italy.

By Nick Squires in Perugia
Published: 11:41AM GMT 27 Feb 2009
The finger was removed when the astronomer's body when it was exhumed from his unconsecrated grave and transferred to a mausoleum in a Florentine church in 1737. It is usually on display at Florence's Museum of the History of Science.