Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory scientists trace a novel way cells are disrupted in cancer

A research team at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) is clarifying a previously unappreciated way that cellular processes are disrupted in cancer.

Last year, scientists from the same CHSL team discovered that a "splicing factor" called SF2/ASF--a protein that changes the instructions for how other proteins are assembled--can induce tumors in cell cultures. The team's newly published results show that, in ways not yet fully understood, this same splicing factor acts on a group of other molecules that has long been known to affect cancer.

A Cascade of Molecular Interactions Leading to Cancer

Understanding such complex molecular interactions may one day lead to new approaches to cancer treatment. Cancers are enormously complex, and eventually, in most instances, they find ways of disrupting a large fraction of cellular processes. To untangle and reverse the changes, researchers seek to identify sequences of events in which molecules each affect one another in turn, ultimately inducing cancer-cell behavior.

For example, one protein may affect another by chemically disabling it, or by slowing the gene expression that produces it from the "instructions" contained in DNA. A drug that blocks any step in such a "pathway" has a chance to slow or prevent the disease.

Until recently, however, cancer researchers have paid scant attention to factors that affect others through "alternative splicing," a mechanism that changes how DNA instructions are cut and pasted together at the level of RNA intermediaries to form final templates for the production of proteins.

"Splicing is a critical step in gene expression," said Adrian R. Krainer, Ph.D., a CSHL professor who is an expert on RNA splicing. "Like other steps in gene expression, it seems to malfunction in cancer." Last year, Krainer and his colleagues found that several known splicing factors are present at higher-than-normal levels in some tumors. For example, a factor known as SF2/ASF was elevated in more than 20% of lung and colon tumors. Moreover, laboratory cultures of mouse or rat cells developed characteristics of tumors when they were programmed to make higher-than-normal levels of this splicing factor.

Changes in the PI3K-mTOR Pathway

In the new research, Krainer's team looked for specific molecules whose concentrations or enzymatic activities changed in cells in which SF2/ASF induced cancer. They found changes in some proteins in a group known as the PI3K-mTOR pathway, which is well known for its involvement in cancers.

The team speculated that SF2/ASF, as it influences how a gene's instructions are translated into protein, might cause a protein to be assembled without a key section that is normally modified by other proteins in the pathway. Krainer cautioned that the splicing factor may act on other proteins or in other ways in the cell, so further research is needed. Nonetheless, the team's research suggests that measuring SF2/ASF levels could eventually lead to a way to identify patients who will respond to existing drugs that block the PI3K-mTOR pathway.

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Very cold ice films in laboratory reveal mysteries of universe

The universe is full of water, mostly in the form of very cold ice films deposited on interstellar dust particles, but until recently little was known about the detailed small scale structure. Now the latest quick freezing techniques coupled with sophisticated scanning electron microscopy techniques, are allowing physicists to create ice films in cold conditions similar to outer space and observe the detailed molecular organisation, yielding clues to fundamental questions including possibly the origin of life. Researchers have been surprised by some of the results, not least by the sheer beauty of some of the images created, according to Julyan Cartwright, a specialist in ice structures at the Andalusian Institute for Earth Sciences (IACT) of the Spanish Research Council (CSIC) and the University of Granada in Spain.

Recent discoveries about the structure of ice films in astrophysical conditions at the mesoscale, which is the size just above the molecular level, were discussed at a recent workshop organised by the European Science Foundation (ESF) and co-chaired by Cartwright alongside C. Ignacio Sainz-Diaz, also from the IACT. As Cartwright noted, many of the discoveries about ice structures at low temperatures were made possible by earlier research into industrial applications involving deposits of thin films upon an underlying substrate (ie the surface, such as a rock, to which the film is attached), such as manufacture of ceramics and semiconductors. In turn the study of ice films could lead to insights of value in such industrial applications.

But the ESF workshop's main focus was on ice in space, usually formed at temperatures far lower than even the coldest places on earth, between 3 and 90 degrees above absolute zero (3-90K). Most of the ice is on dust grains because there are so many of them, but some ice is on larger bodies such as asteroids, comets, cold moons or planets, and occasionally planets capable of supporting life such as Earth. At low temperatures, ice can form different structures at the mesoscale than under terrestrial conditions, and in some cases can be amorphous in form, that is like a glass with the molecules in effect frozen in space, rather than as crystals. For ice to be amorphous, water has to be cooled to its glass transition temperature of about 130 K without ice crystals having formed first. To do this in the laboratory requires rapid cooling, which Cartwright and colleagues achieved in their work with a helium "cold finger" incorporated in a scanning electron microscope to take the images.

As Cartwright observed, ice can exist in a combination of crystalline and amorphous forms, in other words as a mixture of order and disorder, with many variants depending on the temperature at which freezing actually occurred. In his latest work, Cartwright and colleagues have shown that ice at the mesoscale comprises all sorts of different characteristic shapes associated with the temperature and pressure of freezing, also depending on the surface properties of the substrate. For example when formed on a titanium substrate at the very low temperature of 6K, ice has a characteristic cauliflower structure.

Most intriguingly, ice under certain conditions produces biomimetic forms, meaning that they appear life like, with shapes like palm leaves or worms, or even at a smaller scale like bacteria. This led Cartwright to point out that researchers should not assume that lifelike forms in objects obtained from space, like Mars rock, is evidence that life actually existed there. "If one goes to another planet and sees small wormlike or palm like structures, one should not immediately call a press conference announcing alien life has been found," said Cartwright.

On the other hand the existence of lifelike biomimetic structures in ice suggests that nature may well have copied physics. It is even possible that while ice is too cold to support most life as we know it, it may have provided a suitable internal environment for prebiotic life to have emerged.

"It is clear that biology does use physics," said Cartwright. "Indeed, how could it not do? So we shouldn't be surprised to see that sometimes biological structures clearly make use of simple physical principles. Then, going back in time, it seems reasonable to posit that when life first emerged, it would have been using as a container something much simpler than today's cell membrane, probably some sort of simple vesicle of the sort found in soap bubbles. This sort of vesicle can be found in abiotic systems today, both in hot conditions, in the chemistry associated with 'black smokers' on the sea floor, which is currently favoured as a possible origin of life, but also in the chemistry of sea ice."

This is an intriguing idea that will be explored further in projects spawned by the ESF workshop. This may provide a new twist to the idea that life arrived from space. It may be that the precursors of life came from space, but that the actual carbon based biochemistry of all organisms on Earth evolved on this planet.

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Ants may help researchers unlock mysteries of human aging process

NYU School of Medicine researcher Dr. Danny Reinberg was awarded a Howard Hughes Institute of Medicine Collaborative Innovation Award for new research on ant epigenetics- helping to unravel the impact lifestyle and environment have on genes. The research will investigate what ants can teach us about aging and behavior. Results of the ant study may translate to other species including humans, using gene regulation in ants as a model for aging.

"Ants live exceptionally long lives, they are social creatures, and they engage in stereotypical behaviors that befit their station in life, whether it be worker ant, soldier or queen," said Dr. Reinberg, professor of Biochemistry at NYU School of Medicine's Smilow Research Center. "Ants seem to be a perfect fit for study about whether epigenetics influences behavior and aging."

According to Dr. Reinberg, ants can assume either reproductive or non-reproductive roles in their colonies. The different reproductive roles also have a strong impact on the longevity of queens and workers. Released from the everyday activity of the colony and focused only on reproductive tasks, queens live up to 10 times longer than worker ants. As a consequence of differential aging and different behaviors, some regions of the queen's brain, such as the visual system, are not as well developed as those of the workers. Even though these two types of ants begin life remarkably similar, their individual experiences and differences in aging sculpt their brains and behaviors in vastly different ways. Reinberg hopes that it will be easier to pinpoint the changes in gene expression that drive the changes in adaptation to specific social roles in the ant community.

"I truly believe that this project will open the door for my next 20 years of science," said Dr. Reinberg, who is a Howard Hughes Medical Institute researcher at NYU and lead investigator for the award. Dr. Reinberg and his collaborators, Dr. Shelley L. Berger of The Wistar Institute and Dr. Juergen Liebig of Arizona State University, are one of eight scientific teams receiving research support through a $10 million pilot program, totaling $40 million over four years, from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI).

Dr. Reinberg's and his collaborators' first goal is to deliver the first complete sequence of an ant genome. The group plans to sequence the genomes of three ant species in all. Researchers set out to discover whether changes in the brain and behavior occur as a consequence of living in a particular type of environment investigating the genetic underlying differences in longevity, social behavior and brain aging among queen and worker ants.

"Whether these modifications are indeed epigenetically inherited along with the gene is exactly what the team is seeking to discover in ants," said Dr. Reinberg. "There is not much known about epigenetic changes that may underlie behavior, but I intend to change that," concludes Dr. Reinberg.

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Unlocking mysteries of the brain with PET

Inflammatory response of brain cells as indicated by a molecular imaging technique could tell researchers more about why certain neurologic disorders, such as migraine headaches and psychosis in schizophrenic patients, occur and provide insight into how to best treat them, according to two studies published in the November issue of the Journal of Nuclear Medicine.

By using positron emission tomography (PET)a noninvasive molecular imaging technique researchers were to able to identify neuroinflammation, which is marked by activated microglia cells (brain cells that are responsive to injury or infection of brain tissue) in patients with schizophrenia and in animal models with migraines. Although neuroinflammation has been shown to play a major role in many neurodegenerative disorders such as multiple sclerosis, Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's diseaseonly limited data exists about the role of neuroinflammation in schizophrenia and migraines. The two studies in the Journal of Nuclear Medicine are the first to identify neuroinflammation in specific regions of the brain a development which could be used to effectively evaluate the treatment response to anti-inflammatory drugs and become transformative for diagnosis and care.

"This study shows that molecular imaging can play an important role in better understanding the processes involving psychiatric and other neurological disorders," said Janine Doorduin, M.Sc., a researcher at the University Medical Center Groningen in the Netherlands and lead author of "Neuroinflammation in Schizophrenia-Related Psychosis: A PET Study." Doorduin added: "Without molecular imaging, the only way to look at inflammation in the brain, as well as other molecular processes, would be to use post-mortem brains."

Not much is known about the cause of schizophreniaa chronic and disabling brain disease characterized by psychotic episodes of delusions and hallucinations. Previously, evidence from post-mortem studies suggested the presence of activated microglia cells in the brain. However, the results of those studies were inconsistent. Using PET imaging to noninvasively image the living brains of schizophrenic patients, researchers in the Netherlands were able to pinpoint the neuroinflammation to an exact location in the brain, called the hippocampus. Now, researchers can target the hippocampus for further study and evaluate therapeutic treatments that could improve the quality of life for patients living with schizophrenia.

Likewise, PET imaging is also useful for identifying neuroinflammation associated with migraines. In the article, "11C-PK11195 PET for the In Vivo Evaluation of Neuroinflammation in the Rat Brain After Cortical Spreading Depression," researchers in Japan were the first to noninvasively visualize neuroinflammation in an animal model of migraine using a PET technique. Neuroinflammation is thought to be a key factor in the generation of pain sensation in migraine headaches. Observations from the study suggest that an inflammatory process may be involved in the pathologic state of migraines and that PET is a useful tool for evaluating the neurogenic inflammation in vivo.

"For physicians and patients, it is important to develop an objective method for the diagnosis of migraines and monitor therapeutic efficacy," said Yi-Long Cui, Ph.D., a researcher at the RIKEN Center for Molecular Imaging Science in Kobe, Japan, and lead author of the study. "The present study will bring about these possibilities to us since the PET probe used in the paper has already been applied to patients in other diseases."

Halloween

Halloween (also spelled Hallowe'en) is an annual holiday celebrated on October 31. It has roots in the Celtic festival of Samhain and the Christian holy day of All Saints. It is largely asecularcelebration but some have expressed strong feelings about perceived religious overtones.

The colours black and orange have become associated with the celebrations, perhaps because of the darkness of night and the colour of fire or of pumpkins, and maybe because of the vivid contrast this presents for merchandising. Another association is with the jack-o'-lantern. Halloween activities include trick-or-treating, wearing costumes and attending costume parties, ghost tours,bonfires, visiting haunted attractions, pranks, telling scary stories, and watching horror films.

Historian Nicholas Rogers, exploring the origins of Halloween, notes that while "[s]ome folklorists have detected its origins in the Roman feast of Pomona, the goddess of fruits and seeds, or in the festival of the dead called Parentalia, [it is] more typically [l]inked to the celtic festival of Samhainor Samuin (pronounced sow-an or sow-in)", which is derived from Old Irish and means roughly "summer's end". A similar festival was held by the ancient Britons and is known as Calan Gaeaf(pronounced kalan-geyf).

Snap-Apple Night by Daniel Maclise showing a Halloween party in Blarney, Ireland, in 1832. The young children on the right bob for apples. A couple in the center play a variant, which involves retrieving an apple hanging from a string. The couples at left play divination games.

The festival of Samhain celebrates the end of the "lighter half" of the year and beginning of the "darker half", and is sometimes regarded as the "Celtic New Year".

The celebration has some elements of afestival of the dead. The ancient Celts believed that the border between this world and the Otherworld became thin on Samhain, allowing spirits (both harmless and harmful) to pass through. The family's ancestors were honoured and invited home whilst harmful spirits were warded off. It is believed that the need to ward off harmful spirits led to the wearing of costumes and masks. Their purpose was to disguise oneself as a harmful spirit and thus avoid harm. In Scotland the spirits were impersonated by young men dressed in white with masked, veiled or blackened faces. Samhain was also a time to take stock of food supplies and slaughter livestock for winter stores. Bonfires played a large part in the festivities. All other fires were doused and each home lit their hearth from the bonfire. The bones of slaughtered livestock were cast into its flames. Sometimes two bonfires would be built side-by-side, and people and their livestock would walk between them as a cleansing ritual.

Another common practise was divination, which often involved the use of food and drink.

The name 'Halloween' and many of its present-day traditions derive from the Old English era.

Origin of name

The term Halloween, originally spelled Hallowe’en, is shortened from All Hallows' Even – e'en is a shortening of even, which is a shortening ofevening. This is ultimately derived from the Old EnglishEallra Hālgena ǣfen. It is now known as "Eve of" All Saints' Day, which is November 1st.

A time of pagan festivities, Popes Gregory III (731–741) and Gregory IV (827–844) tried to supplant it with the Christian holiday (All Saints' Day) by moving it from May 13 to November 1.

In the 800s, the Church measured the day as starting at sunset, in accordance with the Florentine calendar. Although All Saints' Day is now considered to occur one day after Halloween, the two holidays were once celebrated on the same day.

On All Hallows’ eve, many Irish and Scottish people have traditionally placed a candle on their western window sill to honor the departed. Other traditions include carving lanterns from turnips or rutabagas, sometimes with faces on them, as is done in the modern tradition of carving pumpkins. Welsh, Irish and British myth are full of legends of the Brazen Head, which may be a folk memory of the ancient Celtic practice of headhunting. The heads of enemies may have decorated shrines, and there are tales of the heads of honored warriors continuing to speak their wisdom after death. The carving ofpumpkins is associated with Halloween in North America where pumpkins are both readily available and much larger- making them easier to carve than turnips. Many families that celebrate Halloween carve a pumpkin into a frightening or comical face and place it on their doorstep after dark. The American tradition of carving pumpkins preceded the Great Famine period of Irish immigration and was originally associated with harvest time in general, not becoming specifically associated with Halloween until the mid-to-late 1800s.

Halloween spiders at a row house in Washington DC

The imagery surrounding Halloween is largely a mix of the Halloween season itself, works of Gothic and horror literature, in particular the novels Frankenstein and Dracula, and nearly a century of work from American filmmakers and graphic artists, and British Hammer Horror productions, also a rather commercialized take on the dark and mysterious. Modern Halloween imagery tends to involve death, evil, the occult, magic, or mythicalmonsters. Traditional characters include the Devil, the Grim Reaper, ghosts, ghouls, demons, witches,goblins, vampires, werewolves, zombies, skeletons, black cats, spiders, bats, and crows.

Particularly in America, symbolism is inspired by classic horror films (which contain fictional figures likeFrankenstein's monster and The Mummy). Elements of the autumn season, such as pumpkins, cornhusks, and scarecrows, are also prevalent. Homes are often decorated with these types of symbols around Halloween.

The two main colors associated with Halloween are orange and black.

Spider glue may spin bio based adhesives

U.S. scientists have analyzed the sticky substance in spider webs and say their findings might lead to development of a new generation of bio-based adhesives.

The University of Wyoming researchers say their findings are an advance toward bio-based "green" adhesives and glues that could replace existing petroleum-based products for a range of uses.

Omer Choresh and colleagues note much research has been done on spider web silk, but scientists know comparatively little about the glue that coats the silk threads and is among the world's strongest biological glues. Past studies revealed that spiders make web glue from glycoproteins, or proteins with bits of sugar attached.

The new study identified two new glycoproteins in the glue and showed that domains of those proteins were produced from opposite strands of the same DNA.

"Once the cloned genes are over expressed in systems such as insect or bacterial cell cultures, large-scale production of the glycoprotein can be used to develop a new bio-based glue for a variety of purposes," the researchers said.

A report on the study appears in the journal Biomacromolecules.

Controversial Moon Origin Theory Rewrites History

The moon may have been adopted by our planet instead of descended from it.

If a new twist on a decades-old theory is right, conditions in the early solar system suggest the moon formed inside Mercury's orbit and migrated out until it was roped into orbit around Earth.

The idea flies in the face of scientific consensus, known as the giant impact hypothesis, which holds that the moon formed from red-hot debris left over after a Mars-sized object collided with Earth around 4.5 billion years ago.

However, the moon has several curious traits that go unexplained with that theory, and Robert Malcuit of Denison University has argued for decades for an alternative view of our moon's history.

Malcuit's version of events is tantamount to cosmic blasphemy, but scientists have recently found 4 billion-year-old minerals in Australia that suggest our planet was too cool to have sustained a cataclysmic moon-forming impact early in its history.

"Everything in the giant impact model is hot, hot, hot," he said. "It's incompatible with what we see in the geologic record. Earth is cool enough at that time to have ocean water on its surface."

Malcuit's computer modeling studies, which he has worked on since the 1980s, show that it is possible for Earth's gravitational pull to capture the moon.

At first, the moon's orbits would have been highly elliptical, swinging close to Earth and then far away about eight times a year.

The gravitational pull from each pass would have stretched the planet 18 to 20 kilometers (11.2 to 12.4 miles) near the equator, churning the hot mantle and crust. Rocks closer to the poles, like those found today in Australia, would have been spared. The upper layers of the newly-captured moon would have melted from gravitational friction, until the satellite's orbit stabilized about 3 billion years ago.

Malcuit presented his theory at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America in Portland, Ore.

Traditionally, scientists cite the moon's low density and a lack of iron as reasons why it came from Earth -- the giant impact skimmed light material off Earth's upper layers and flung it into orbit.

"I think this it is highly unlikely," that Malcuit's idea is correct, Jack Lissauer of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in Moffett Field, Calif., said. "Capture is very, very difficult. You have to have just the right velocity and very special parameters to all be just right."

Lissauer allowed that the current giant impact theory of the moon's formation may yet be revised, even replaced, but probably not by Malcuit's capture model. The fact that Earth was cool 4 billion years ago doesn't mean the moon was captured.

"Heat from the impact dissipated very quickly," he said. "It wouldn't take 100 million years, and it certainly wouldn't take 500 million. The impact is not going to affect Earth at 4 billion years ago."

The 2009 Orionid Meteor Shower

The false-color images above are composite images from 2009 Orionids meteor shower observations, as seen in the skies over Huntsville, Ala.

"Earth is passing through a stream of debris from Halley's Comet, the source of the Orionids," says Bill Cooke of NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office.

"Flakes of comet dust hitting the atmosphere should give us dozens of meteors per hour."

The best time to look was before sunrise on Wednesday, Oct. 21st. That's when Earth encountered the densest part of Halley's debris stream.

Orionids appear every year around this time when Earth orbits through an area of space littered with debris from the ancient comet.

Normally, the shower produces 10 to 20 meteors per hour, a modest display. The past few years, however, have been much better than usual. "Since 2006, the Orionids have been one of the best showers of the year, with counts of 60 or more meteors per hour," says Cooke.

Nobel Prize-Winning Science - Springboard For Planet Hunting

The University of Colorado at Boulder and the National Institute of Standards and Technology have been awarded a $495,000 grant to look for Earth-like planets around other stars using technology based on 2005 Nobel Prize-winning research conducted at JILA, a joint institute of the two Boulder institutions.

The funding from the National Science Foundation is to develop a precise "laser ruler" to measure tiny changes in infrared light caused by the gravitational wobble of small, cool stars as they are tugged back and forth by their rocky planets.

The comb makes it possible to measure minute changes in the light waves created by the motions of small, relatively cool M stars as they interact with planets by providing a precise calibration for spectrographs that analyze light coming from stars and planets.

The gravitational dance depends on the size of the star and the size of the planet and produces changes in the star's radial velocity - the speed it is moving toward or away from Earth during such faint wobbles, said CU-Boulder Research Associate Steve Osterman, principal investigator on the project.

While astronomers have used the radial wobble of stars to detect several hundred planets outside our solar system, almost all have been giant, gaseous planets orbiting extremely close to their parent stars, said Osterman.

The new technology involves devices known as mode-locked lasers that deliver ultrashort pulses of infrared laser light less than a billionth of a second long, enabling a much more precise planet detection system, he said.

Linked to an atomic clock, the laser ruler consists of thousands of closely spaced "tick-marks" representing successive infrared light frequencies that resemble the teeth of a comb, said NIST scientist Scott Diddams, a co-investigator on the effort who is collaborating with Osterman.

The comb makes it possible to measure minute changes in the light waves created by the motions of small, relatively cool M stars as they interact with planets by providing a precise calibration for spectrographs that analyze light coming from stars and planets.

The technique will allow the team to observe the stars in the near-infrared spectrum where they shine the brightest, according to the researchers.

The key to finding Earth-like planets is measuring the Doppler shift of the stars as they wobble during planet interactions, said Osterman. When a star is moving toward Earth, its wavelengths "bunch up" and shorten, and when the star is moving away from Earth, the wavelengths stretch out. By detecting extraordinarily faint wobbles, the researchers should be able to deduce the size of the planets and the distance of their orbit from the parent star, said Osterman.

"We have come up with a good ruler for measuring changes in the wobble of these small stars in the near-infrared wavelength of the spectrum," said Osterman of CU-Boulder's Center for Astrophysics and Space Astronomy. "Since these M stars are much more common than larger stars, this gives us a lot more targets and should make it easier for us to detect rocky and perhaps even habitable planets."

The new technology was spun off from research by JILA's John Hall and Theodor Hansch of the Max Planck Institute of Quantum Optics in Munich, Germany, who shared in the 2005 Nobel Prize in physics for their contributions to the development of laser-based precision spectroscopy, including the optical frequency comb technique.

Osterman said M stars can be as small as one-tenth the mass and significantly older than Earth's Sun. "We think our new calibration technology will make it as much as 10 to 20 times easier to detect habitable planets around these M stars," he said.

Astronomers are particularly interested in the habitable zones of planets around other solar systems - zones marked by relatively moderate temperatures and which have the potential to host liquid water. While at least one rocky planet slightly larger than Earth was recently identified by a French-led team, it orbits so close to the parent star that high temperatures and high radiation preclude the chances for life as we know it, said Osterman.

The Boulder researchers plan to take the new laser instrument to the Apache Point Observatory northeast of Las Cruces, N.M., in spring 2010 and integrate it with a new planet-finding instrument being developed at the University of Florida, said Osterman. "This will begin our search for Earth-like planets around these tiny stars."

CU-Boulder is part of a consortium of seven universities that are conducting research using a 3.5-meter telescope at Apache Point Observatory. CU-Boulder shares in the cost of operations and maintenance and is annually allotted one-eighth of the available telescope observing time.

In addition to looking for Earth-like planets around low-mass stars, the comb technology will allow researchers to peer through the dust clouds of young stellar systems more clearly, said co-investigator John Bally of CASA. The technology may make it possible to learn more about the movements of massive, Jupiter-like planets in young planetary systems as they migrate toward their parent stars, he said.

Other projects that will be made possible by the technology include studies of the atmospheres of young or cool stars as well as precise near-infrared observations of planetary atmospheres in our own solar system, according to the team.

Nanotechnology used in biofuel processing

U.S. scientists say they are using nanotechnology to improve the cellulosic ethanol processes involved in producing biofuels.

Louisiana Tech Professors James Palmer, Yuri Lvov, Dale Snow and Hisham Hegab say biofuels will play an important part in sustainable fuel and energy production solutions for the future. But the professors say the nation's appetite for fuel cannot be satisfied with just traditional crops, such as sugar cane or corn. But they note emerging technologies are allowing cellulosic biomass (wood, grass, stalks, etc.) to also be converted into ethanol.

The researchers said the nanotechnology processes they developed can immobilize the expensive enzymes used to convert cellulose to sugars, allowing them to be reused several times, significantly reducing the overall cost of the process.

Savings estimates range from approximately $32 million for each cellulosic ethanol plant to a total of $7.5 billion if a federally established goal of 16 billion gallons of cellulosic ethanol is achieved.

The technology is to be highlighted Nov. 5 during Louisiana Tech's Energy Systems Conference in Shreveport, La .

Toshiba launches portable fuel-cell for mobiles

For people fed up with their mobile telephone or iPod batteries running out, Japan's Toshiba Corp. announced Thursday the launch of a portable fuel-cell that can power up digital gadgets on the move.

With an injection of methanol, the fuel-cell generates electricity through a chemical reaction with oxygen to recharge mobile digital electronic devices via a USB cable.

The high-tech giant, which sees a bright future for fuel cells, said battery exhaustion had become a "major concern" due to the rising power consumption of mobile electronic devices.

It said the palm-sized fuel-cell, called Dynario, "delivers almost instant refuelling that untethers electrical equipment from AC adapters and power outlets."

A single refill of methanol from a dedicated cartridge can generate enough power to charge two mobile telephones, said Toshiba, which describes itself as a world leader in the development of fuel-cells for handheld gadgets.

The company will put 3,000 of the devices on sale in Japan through its direct-order website at a price of 29,800 yen (326 dollars) each. The fuel cartridges cost an additional 3,150 yen for a set of five.

Scientists play down 'superweed'

Cultivated oilseed rape has a number of wild relatives

Scientists have urged caution over a study which may have found a so-called "superweed" growing at a site where GM crops had been trialled.

The charlock, a relative of oilseed rape, failed to shrivel up when daubed with the herbicide used to manage a biotech crop grown in the same field.

The creation of wild plants that pick up the traits of engineered crops has long been feared by anti-GM groups.

But researchers said their work showed the chances of such transfer were slim.

What is more, they argued, the study reinforced the view that the environmental impact was negligible.

"Herbicide-tolerant weeds tend to under-perform compared with wild type, so unless all its competitors have been sprayed out with the same herbicide, it won't thrive," commented Dr Les Firbank, who led the consortium of scientists on the recent UK Farm-Scale Evaluations (FSEs) of genetically modified plants.

"There's lots of evidence for that," he told the BBC News website.

Seed collection

The study was conducted by Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (CEH) researchers.

It looked for any evidence that a genetic trait in an oilseed rape, engineered to be resistant to a particular herbicide called Liberty, would pass to near-relatives growing wild in the field or at the margin.

The degree to which such transfer is possible informs the debate about superweeds, which some have claimed could upset ecological relationships in the countryside and so harm biodiversity.

We're seeing the real possibility of GM superweeds being created, with serious consequences for farmers and the environment Emily Diamand, FoE

The CEH team collected more than 95,000 seeds of wild relatives in and around the FSE trial sites and grew them up in greenhouses. These plants were then sprayed with Liberty (a glufosinate ammonium) to see if they had acquired herbicide tolerance - through their parents being pollinated by the GM rape.

The scientists found just two plants, of Brassica rapa or turnip rape, that showed resistance to the treatment; a rate of 0.000021.

But Brassica rapa is a very close relative of farmed oilseed rape and the discovery of some gene flow is not a huge surprise, say the scientists.

The CEH team also toured fields, daubing Liberty on the tissues of weeds and looking for the expected signs of die-back.

We do... need to improve our understanding of all aspects of gene transfer and this means we must take this into account with individual GM applications Elliot Morley, environment minister

The researchers found just one weed - what they believe was a charlock (Sinapis Arvensis) - which showed no reaction to the application.

DNA analysis on a leaf sample confirmed the gene trait from the engineered oilseed rape was present, but when the researchers returned the following year to the same field they could find no herbicide tolerance in seedlings of the charlocks growing there.

'Serious consequences'

Nonetheless, anti-GM group Friends of the Earth believes the existence of just one tolerant charlock should merit major concern.

It said that if GM oilseed rape were grown commercially, herbicide-resistant weeds could become widespread.

FoE argued that farmers would then have to use more - and more damaging - weedkillers to get rid of them, with knock-on impacts on the environment.

The FSEs were the largest study of their kind ever undertaken

"The government's trials have already shown that growing GM crops can harm wildlife. Now we're seeing the real possibility of GM superweeds being created, with serious consequences for farmers and the environment," commented FoE's GM campaigner Emily Diamand.

Environment Minister Elliot Morley said: "Even if a hybrid did once exist, it has disappeared. We do however need to improve our understanding of all aspects of gene transfer and this means we must take this into account with individual GM applications.

"Our top priority is to safeguard human health and the environment. There are no trials of GM oilseed rape in the UK at the moment. No consents for commercial cultivation in the EU have been issued and there are none in the pipeline."

The £6m FSEs were described as the biggest ecological experiment in the world and a model for measuring the impact of new farming techniques on the environment.

The results for four types of engineered crops - a spring-sown oilseed rape, a winter-sown oilseed rape, a sugar beet and a maize - were tested over a period of three years.

All were engineered to be resistant to a particular herbicide, which meant they would continue to prosper when the weedkiller was applied to the "pest" plants in the field.

Only the maize came through the trials with approval because the field management used to cultivate the bitotech crop appeared to be kinder on wildlife than the regime employed on the conventional maize grown as a controlled comparison.

Flickr tops TIME's list of Best 50 Websites of 2009

The hottest thing on the Internet is not social networking websites like Facebook and Twitter, but Flickr-the popular photo-sharing portal - and the proof is: it has topped TIME's list of the best 50 websites this year.

One of the noticeable trends in this year's list, which was released this week, was on-demand video services, like YouTube, Vimeo and US services Hulu and Netflix.

However, the top two in the list were related to photographs, with California Coastline following Flickr at the second spot.

Third in the list was bookmark website Delicious, while community weblog Metafilter stood at the fourth place.

Popurls, the mashup of the web's most visited social news sites and portals, grabbed the fifth spot in the list.

Twitter ranked sixth and Facebook came 31st in the list, while YouTube and Hulu came at 12th and 14th place in the list.

TIME's list of 50 Best Websites of 2009 is:. Flickr

2. California Coastline

3. Delicious

4. Metafilter

5. popurls

6. Twitter

7. Skype

8. Boing Boing

9. Academic Earth

10. OpenTable

11. Google

12. YouTube

13. Wolfram|Alpha

14. Hulu

15. Vimeo

16. Fora TV

17. Craiglook

18. Shop Goodwill

19. Amazon

20. Kayak

21. Netflix

22. Etsy

23. PropertyShark.com

24. Redfin

25. Wikipedia

26. Internet Archive

27. Kiva

28. ConsumerSearch

29. Metacritic

30. Pollster

31. Facebook

32. Pandora and Last.fm

33. Musicovery

34. Spotify

35. Supercook

36. Yelp

37. Visuwords

38. CouchSurfing

39. BabyNameWizard.com's NameVoyager

40. Mint

41. TripIt

42. Aardvark

43. drop.io

44. Issuu

45. Photosynth

46. OMGPOP

47. WorldWideTelescope

48. Fonolo

49. Get High Now

50. Know Your Meme (ANI)

A safer stem cell: on guard against cancer

Before stem cell therapies become mainstream, several hurdles must be overcome. One challenge is developing air-tight approaches to assure that stem cell transplantation does not give rise to tumors. Another is finding safe ways to induce pluripotency in adult stem cells, which can then be used for transplantation. In Bedside to Bench, Evan Snyder and Rahul Jandial discuss the risks of tumorigenesis in stem cell therapies, and, in Bench to Bedside, Laura Clarke and Derek van der Kooy examine new ways to induce pluripotency.

One month after the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved the first clinical trial of human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) (for spinal cord injury), a study appeared¹ reporting tumors in the brain and spinal cord of a child who had received intracranial and intrathecal injections of what were purported to be neural stem cells (NSCs). The child had traveled to Moscow to receive an 'experimental therapy' for ataxia telangiectasia, a rare, incurable neurodegenerative condition.

REFERENCE: http://www.nature.com/nm/journal/v15/n9/full/nm0909-999.html

"Mummy's Curse" Legend Won't Die

Movie mummies are known for two things: fabulous riches and a nasty curse that brings treasure hunters to a bad end. But Hollywood didn't invent the curse concept.

Enlarge

Mummy of King Tutankhamun

Photograph by Kenneth Garrett

The "mummy's curse" first enjoyed a worldwide vogue after the 1922 discovery of King Tutankhamun's tomb in the Valley of the Kings near Luxor, Egypt.

When Howard Carter opened a small hole to peer inside the tomb at treasures hidden for 3,000 years, he also unleashed a global passion for ancient Egypt.

Tut's glittering treasures made great headlines—and so did sensationalistic accounts of the subsequent death of expedition sponsor Lord Carnarvon.

In reality, Carnarvon died of blood poisoning and only six of the 26 people present when the tomb was opened died within a decade. Carter, surely any curse's prime target, lived until 1939.

But while the pharaoh's curse may lack bite, it hasn't lost the ability to fascinate audiences—which may be how it originated in the first place.

Birth of the Curse

The late Egyptologist Dominic Montserrat conducted a comprehensive search and concluded that the concept began with a strange "striptease" in 19th-century London.

"My work shows quite clearly that the mummy's curse concept predates Carnarvon's Tutankhamen discovery and his death by a hundred years," Montserrat told theIndependent (U.K.) in an interview some years before his own death.

Montserrat believed that a lively stage show in which real Egyptian mummies were unwrapped inspired first one writer, and subsequently several others, to pen tales of mummy revenge.

The thread was even picked up by Little Women author Louisa May Alcott in her nearly unknown volume Lost in a Pyramid; or, The Mummy's Curse.

"My research has not only confirmed that there is, of course, no ancient Egyptian origin of the mummy's curse concept, but, more importantly, it also reveals that it didn't originate in the 1923 press publicity about the discovery of Tutankhamen's tomb either," Montserrat stressed to the Independent.

But Salima Ikram, an Egyptologist at the American University in Cairo and a National Geographic Society grantee, believes the curse concept did exist in ancient Egypt as part of a primitive security system.

She notes that some mastaba (early non-pyramid tomb) walls in Giza and Saqqara were actually inscribed with "curses" meant to terrify those who would desecrate or rob the royal resting place.

Enlarge

King Tutankhamun's coffin

Photograph by Kenneth Garrett

"They tend to threaten desecrators with divine retribution by the council of the gods," Ikram said. "Or a death by crocodiles, or lions, or scorpions, or snakes."

Tomb Toxin Threat?

In recent years some have suggested that the pharaoh's curse was biological in nature.

Could sealed tombs house pathogens that can be dangerous or even deadly to those who open them after thousands of years—especially people like Lord Carnarvon with weakened immune systems?

The mausoleums house not only the dead bodies of humans and animals but foods to provision them for the afterlife.

Lab studies have shown some ancient mummies carried mold, including Aspergillus niger and Aspergillus flavus, which can cause congestion or bleeding in the lungs. Lung-assaulting bacteria such as Pseudomonas and Staphylococcus may also grow on tomb walls.

These substances may make tombs sound dangerous, but scientists seem to agree that they are not.

F. DeWolfe Miller, professor of epidemiology at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, concurs with Howard Carter's original opinion: Given the local conditions, Lord Carnarvon was probably safer inside Tut's tomb than outside.

"Upper Egypt in the 1920s was hardly what you'd call sanitary," Miller said. "The idea that an underground tomb, after 3,000 years, would have some kind of bizarre microorganism in it that's going to kill somebody six weeks later and make it look exactly like [blood poisoning] is very hard to believe."

In fact, Miller said, he knows of no archaeologist—or a single tourist, for that matter—who has experienced any afflictions caused by tomb toxins.

But like the movie mummies who invoke the malediction, the legend of the mummy's curse seems destined never to die.

REFERENCE: http://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/ancient/mummy-curse.html