June 22, 2011

Good Morning,

A new research study examines the human eye's capability to detect Earth's magnetic field. This bizarre sensory study gives us insight to a whole new human trait. Check out the third article for all of the details.

Until Next Time,
Erin

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Study: Galaxies are 'awake' or 'asleep'

NEW HAVEN, Conn. - U.S. astronomers say they've discovered that galaxies in the universe display one of two distinct behaviors: they are either "awake" or "asleep." "Awake" galaxies are actively forming stars while galaxies that are "asleep" are not forming any new stars at all, researchers at Yale University said. Astronomers have known that galaxies in the nearby universe seem to fall into one of these two states, but a new survey of the distant universe shows that even very young galaxies as far away as 12 billion light years are either awake or asleep as well, a Yale release said Tuesday. That means galaxies have behaved this way for more than 85 percent of the history of the universe, researchers said. "The fact that we see such young galaxies in the distant universe that have already shut off is remarkable," lead study author Kate Whitaker said. "We don't see many galaxies in the in-between state," Pieter van Dokkum, a Yale astronomer and co-author of the paper, said. "This discovery shows how quickly galaxies go from one state to the other, from actively forming stars to shutting off." "Next, we hope to determine whether galaxies go back and forth between waking and sleeping or whether they fall asleep and never wake up again," van Dokkum said. "We're also interested in how long it takes galaxies to fall asleep, and whether we can catch one in the act of dozing off."


Computer model of cancer growth described

TEL AVIV, Israel - A computer model that predicts genes essential for cancer cell growth could provide an important step toward better cancer treatments, Israeli researchers say. Rapid, uncontrolled growth is the hallmark of the disease, but to maintain their abnormal growth, cancer cells must modify and shut off certain metabolic genes, an article in the journal Molecular Systems Biology reported Tuesday.Tomer Shlomi, Eytan Ruppin and colleagues have developed a computer simulation of cancer metabolism to predict which genes are essential for cancer cell growth. By understanding cancer metabolism, researchers say, they hope to identify drugs and therapies that specifically target and disrupt the growth of cancer cells. When specific metabolic genes are known to be turned off within a particular cancer, the researchers say they can predict treatments that selectively target that cancer without disrupting the metabolism of healthy tissues, leading to the possibility of new cancer therapies with lesser side effects.


Can humans sense Earth's magnetism?

WORCESTER, Mass. - A protein in the human eye may have the ability to sense Earth's magnetic field in the same way migrating animals do, U.S. researchers say. While migratory birds and sea turtles are known to have the ability to sense the planet's magnetic field as an aid to navigating the long-distance migratory voyages they undertake, humans are widely assumed not to have an innate magnetic sense. However, researchers at the University of Massachusetts Medical School have found that a protein expressed in the human retina can sense magnetic fields when implanted into Drosophila fruit flies, reopening an area of sensory biology in humans for further exploration, a UMMS release reported Tuesday. In many migratory animals, the light-sensitive chemical reactions involving the flavoprotein cryptochrome, or CRY, are thought to play an important role in the ability to sense the globe's magnetic field. To test whether the human cryptochrome 2 protein, hCRY2, has a similar magnetic sensory ability, researchers created a transgenic Drosophila model lacking its native cryptochrome protein but expressing hCRY2 instead. They showed that these transgenic flies were able to sense and respond to an electric-coil-generated magnetic field. These findings demonstrate that hCRY2 has the molecular capability to function in a magnetic sensing system, the researchers said. "Additional research on magneto sensitivity in humans at the behavioral level, with particular emphasis on the influence of magnetic field on visual function, rather than non-visual navigation, would be informative," researcher Steven Reppert wrote in an article published in the journal Nature Communications.


NASA: Moon mapped as never before

GREENBELT, Md. - NASA says data from its Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter have forever changed humans' view of the moon, showing the whole orb in unprecedented detail. The LRO's seven on-board instruments have delivered more than 192 terabytes of data, images and maps, the equivalent of nearly 41,000 typical DVDs, a NASA release said Tuesday. "This is a tremendous accomplishment," Douglas Cooke of the Exploration Systems Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters, Washington, said. "The exploration phase of the mission delivered a lot more than it originally promised, and that's been just the beginning for LRO." One LRO instrument, the Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter, has yielded more than 4 billion measurements to create the most precise and complete topographic maps to date of the moon's complex, heavily cratered landscape , NASA said. LOLA has taken more than 100 times more measurements than all previous lunar instruments of its kind combined, NASA said, opening up a world of possibilities for future exploration. "Before LRO, we actually knew the shape of Mars better than we knew the shape of the moon, our nearest neighbor," John Keller of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., said. "But because of LRO and LOLA, we now have detailed maps of both the near side and far side of the
moon."


Black hole growth, galaxy formation linked

HONOLULU - A fundamental link exists between early black hole growth and galaxy formation in the very early universe, an observational study by U.S. scientists indicates. Ezequiel Treister of University of Hawaii and colleagues used archival X-ray observations to measure black hole growth in galaxies at high redshift, that is, distant galaxies from about 1 billion years after the Big Bang, Nature reported. The study was published on Nature's Web site. The initial conditions of black hole seeding are erased quickly during the growth process, making direct observations of early formation of black holes difficult to obtain, scientists note. Also, much of the black hole growth is hidden by clouds of gas and dust that absorb most radiation. The new study not only pinpointed these mega-black holes, but also determined they were closely tied to the evolution of their parent galaxies, the researchers said. While scientists can't see a black hole itself, they can detect the material being pulled into it, Space.com reported. As the particles speed up, they emit massive amounts of energy. "It's actually natural to expect all of these [early] galaxies to have growing supermassive black holes," Treister told SPACE.com. "And yet people hadn't found them before." Supermassive black holes are huge objects that can have masses of up to millions or billions of times the mass of our sun. Smaller, stellar black holes form from the collapse of a single massive star, and can have masses of between 10 or 20 times the mass of the sun. Treister said he and his team searched for the first black holes indirectly. After using the Hubble Space Telescope to identify likely candidates, they studied their X-ray emission by using Chandra X-Ray Observatory.

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