Gizmorama
August 23, 2010
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OH Yeah...Well, Take THAT Martha Stewart
http://pd.gophercentral.com/u/2047/c/186/a/474
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Good Morning,
Researchers drill into the ocean floor very near the Great
Barrier Reef to uncover an older, more fossilized reef that
once flourished long ago. Check out the third article for
more details on this major discovery.
Sorry for the late mailing, tomorrow's issue will still
be sent out tomorrow.
Until Next Time,
Erin
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Senate 'space jobs' bill announced
WASHINGTON - A U.S. senator has introduced legislation he
says would give tax incentives to private companies and in-
vestors developing commercial spacecraft. Sen. Bill Nelson,
D-Fla., says his measure, called the Commercial Space Jobs
and Investment Act, would also create up to five regional
business enterprise zones in the United States to attract
commercial space ventures and create jobs in regions ex-
pected to experience high unemployment when the space shut-
tle is retired next year, SPACE.com reported Thursday.
"President Kennedy was right when he predicted that space
exploration would create a great number of new companies
and strengthen our economy," Nelson, whose state is home
to NASA's Kennedy Space Center, said. "What we're doing
now is everything we can to ensure KSC's continued impor-
tance to our nation's space exploration effort." NASA and
the U.S. Commerce Department have outlined plans for
spending $40 million to spur job growth in Florida and other
states affected by the end of the space shuttle program.
After NASA's final shuttle missions are complete, the space
agency will have to depend on Russian, Japanese and European
space agencies to ferry crews and supplies to the Internati-
onal Space Station until U.S. commercial spacecraft or new
NASA space vehicles are ready, SPACE.com reported.
Martian 'mud' volcanoes eyed for life
WASHINGTON - Researchers say if life existed on Mars, the
best place to look today is a region rich in what they say
were mud volcanoes spewing sediment from underground. An area
of the planet's northern plains called Acidalia Planita con-
tains thousands of the circular mounds, formed from ancient
sediment that might contain evidence of possible past or pre-
sent life, Astrobiology magazine reports. "If there was life
on Mars, it probably developed in a fluid-rich environment,"
Dorothy Oehler of the Astromaterials Research and Exploration
Science Directorate at NASA's Johnson Space Center said. "Mud
volcanoes themselves are an indicator of a fluid-rich subsur-
face, and they bring up material from relatively deep parts
of the subsurface that we might not have a chance to see
otherwise," she said. She and her colleagues estimate there
may be as many as 40,000 mud volcanoes in the Acidalia
region. Scientists first observed the mounds in Acidalia
using imagery obtained from the Viking mission in the late
1970s. U.S. researcher Kenneth Tanaka was one of the first
to suggest they were mud volcanoes. "I also thought that
these features, which also occur elsewhere in the northern
plains of Mars, were good places to search for signs of
life," Tanaka, a scientist at the Astrogeology Science Center
of the U.S. Geological Survey, said.
Great Barrier Reef had predecessor
BRISBANE, Australia - Scientists studying Australia's Great
Barrier Reef say they've discovered a less spectacular but
more ancient fossilized reef just a half mile away. Its exis-
tence was first suspected in 2007 when seismic and sonar
measurements revealed odd ridges and lagoons on the seabed,
NewScientist.com reported Thursday. The ancient reef was
confirmed when researchers drilled into the ocean floor at
three sites and extracted sediment cores revealing a fossil-
ized coral reef extending more than 300 feet into the sea
floor. Preliminary dating indicates the fossilized coral is
up to 169,000 years old. "This is the great-grandmother of
the Great Barrier Reef," John Pandolfi of the University of
Queensland, who was not involved in the study, said. It is
"a very important discovery" and should provide new insights
into the genesis of the Great Barrier Reef, he said. It was
long thought the Great Barrier Reef sits atop an older dead
reef, but 350 feet beneath the live reef, the researchers
hit rock. Corals require light to live, and Pandolfi thinks
when rising sea levels at the end of the last ice age threat-
ened to put the lights out on the ancient reef, some coral
larvae traveled to shallower waters and seeded the modern
one.
Modified yeast can make more ethanol
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. - A genetically modified strain of yeast with
a higher tolerance for alcohol could lead to more efficient
and economical biofuel production, researchers say. A Univer-
sity of Illinois professor of microbial genomics says the
modified yeast could improve microbial fermentation of bio-
mass crops, a process that yields the alcohol-based fuels
ethanol and iso-butanol as it converts sugars from biomass
into biofuels, a university release said Thursday. "At a
certain concentration, the biofuels that are being created
become toxic to the yeast used in making them. Our goal was
to find a gene or genes that reduce this toxic effect," said
Yong-Su Jin, an assistant professor in the university's
Department of Food Science said. Jin worked with Saccharo-
myces cerevisiae, the microbe most often used in making
ethanol, to identify four genes that improve tolerance to
ethanol and iso-butanol. "We expect these genes will serve
as key components of a genetic toolbox for breeding yeast
with high ethanol tolerance for efficient ethanol fermenta-
tion," he said. "Identification of these genes should enable
us to produce transportation fuels from biomass more econom-
ically and efficiently. It's a first step in understanding
the cellular reaction that currently limits the production
process."
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