Gizmorama
August 25, 2010
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Water glows RED when water is HOT, glows BLUE when water is COLD.
http://pd.gophercentral.com/u/1090/c/186/a/474
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Good Morning,
A company is looking for approval on a genetically altered
salmon that can grow to eight pounds in half the normal time
expected. Read all about this groundbreaking advancement and
how it could be the first step in ending food shortages
around the world.
Until Next Time,
Erin
Questions? Comments? Email me at: mailto:gizmo@gophercentral.com
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FDA considering genetically altered salmon
WASHINGTON - A genetically engineered salmon that reaches
market weight in half the usual time could help solve world-
wide food shortages, a Massachusetts company says. AquaBounty
Technologies Inc., of Waltham, is seeking Food and Drug
Administration approval for a salmon that can grow to 8
pounds in 18 months rather than the usual 36 months, the
Chicago Tribune said Monday. If approved, it would be the
nation's first commercial genetically modified food animal.
"This is the threshold case. If it's approved, there will be
others," said Eric Hallerman, head of the fisheries and
wildlife sciences department at Virginia Tech University.
"If it's not, it'll have a chilling effect for years." The
FDA has completed reviews on key elements of AquaBounty's
application and could make a recommendation about the sal-
mon's fitness as a human food within a few weeks, the report
said. Modification of food products such as corn and wheat
are commonplace, but the idea of a genetically modified fish
is raising some concerns. "The thought of genetic engineering
sort of excites the idea that there might be a kind of
boundary-crossing going on that might be yucky," said Paul
Thompson, an agricultural ethicist at Michigan State Univer-
sity. Some critics of the modified salmon are in the fish-
farming industry, the report said. "No! It is not even up for
discussion," said Jorgen Christiansen, director of communi-
cations for Oslo-based Marine Harvest, one of the world's
largest salmon producers. In an e-mail, Christiansen said
consumers would be reluctant to buy genetically modified
fish "regardless of good food quality and food safety." Aqua-
Bounty said it developed the fish by inserting part of a gene
from an eel-like creature called the ocean pout into the
growth gene of a Chinook salmon, then injecting the blended
genetic material into the fertilized eggs of a North Atlantic
salmon.
Solar system said older by 2 million years
TEMPE, Ariz. - Study of a meteorite found in the Saharan
Desert suggests the solar system may be almost 2 million
years older than previously thought, researchers say. A
study found the meteorite contained pieces of calcium- and
aluminum-rich substances, some of the oldest material ever
found in primordial rocks and believed to be among the first
solids that condensed from gas at the beginning of the solar
system's formation, ScienceNews.org reported Monday. The age
of the material suggests the solar system formed 4,500 mil-
lion years ago, as much as 1.9 million years earlier than
other estimates. "All the interesting things we want to
understand about the chemistry of our solar system happened
within the first five to 10 million years," study coauthor
Meenakshi Wadhwa, a cosmochemist from Arizona State Univer-
sity, says. "When you push it back by 2 million years, that's
a substantial proportion of that 5 to 10 million years." The
3-pound softball-sized meteorite was found in Morocco in
2004. "It's like crime-scene investigation four and a half
billion years after the scene is vacated," astrophysicist
Alan Boss of the Carnegie Institution for Science in Wash-
ington, D.C. says. "We're coming toward more of a cohesive
picture of how things happened." The results were published
online Aug. 22 in Nature Geoscience.
Scientist: World's helium being squandered
WASHINGTON - The world is running out of helium, a resource
that cannot be renewed, and supplies could run out in 25 to
30 years, a U.S. researcher says. Nobel-prize winning physi-
cist Robert Richardson warns that the inert gas is being sold
off far to cheaply -- so cheaply there is no incentive to
recycle it -- and world supplies of the gas, a vital compon-
ent of medical MRI scanners, spacecraft and rockets, could
be gone in just decades, Britain's The Telegraph reported
Monday. Around 80 per cent of the world's reserves are in the
U.S. Southwest at the the U.S. National Helium Reserve, lo-
cated in Amarillo, Texas, but a recently passed law has ruled
the reserve must be sold off by 2015 regardless of market
price, Britain's Independent said. "As a result of that act,
helium is far too cheap and is not treated as a precious re-
source," Richardson says. "It's being squandered." Helium is
created by the radioactive decay of terrestrial rock and most
of the world's reserves have been collected as a byproduct
from the extraction of natural gas. Liquid helium is critical
for cooling infrared detectors and nuclear reactors. The
space industry uses it in sensitive satellite equipment and
spacecraft, and NASA uses helium in huge quantities to purge
the potentially explosive fuel from its rockets. Despite the
critical role that the gas has in modern technology, it is
being depleted as an unprecedented rate and reserves could
dwindle to virtually nothing within a generation, Richardson
says. "The Earth is 4.7 billion years old and it has taken
that long to accumulate our helium reserves, which we will
dissipate in about 100 years," he says. "One generation does
not have the right to determine availability for ever."
Insect found to have true bifocal vision
CINCINNATI - U.S. researchers say they've discovered an in-
sect with bifocal vision, the first evidence of true bifocal
lenses in the animal kingdom. University of Cincinnati re-
searchers say two of the 14 eyes of the larvae of the sun-
burst diving beetle are equipped with bifocal lenses and two
separate retinas to focus the images, a university release
said Monday. By using two retinas and two distinct focal
planes that are substantially separated, the larvae can more
efficiently use these bifocals -- comparable to the glasses
humans wear to switch their vision from up-close to distance
-- the better to see and catch their favorite food, mosquito
larvae. Sunburst diving beetle larvae typically live in
creeks and streams in Arizona and the western United States.
The larvae lose their intricate bifocal lenses when they be-
come a beetle, the researchers say. "We're hoping this dis-
covery could hold implications for humans, pending possible
future research in biomedical engineering," Elke K. -
Buschbeck, a UC associate professor of biology, said. "The
discovery could also have uses for any imaging technology,"
Annette Stowasser, a UC biology doctoral student and first
author on the paper, said. The study is being published in
the life-science journal Current
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