Gizmorama
November 8, 2010
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This charging mat is a great solution, and I love it. - Lynnette K, Boston
http://pd.gophercentral.com/u/1085/c/186/a/474
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Good Morning,
Scientists have made a discovery in a subject that has not
been updated in decades. A new type of Moon rock has been
found; said to be ancient. Check out the middle article for
all the details on this exciting development.
Until Next Time,
Erin
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Chemists: Plant drugs can be 'engineered'
BOSTON - U.S. researchers say more medicinal compounds can
come from plants by genetically engineering them to produce
unnatural variants of their usual products. Massachusetts
Institute of Technology chemists led by associate professor
Sarah O'Connor added bacterial genes to the periwinkle
plant, enabling it to attach halogens such as chlorine or
bromine to a class of compounds called alkaloids that the
plant normally produces, a university release said. Many
alkaloids have pharmaceutical properties, and halogens are
often added to antibiotics and other drugs to make medicines
more effective or last longer in the body. "We're trying to
use plant biosynthetic mechanisms to easily make a whole
range of different iterations of natural products," O'Conner
said. "If you tweak the structure of natural products, very
often you get different or improved biological and pharma-
cological activity." The team's primary target, an alkaloid
called vinblastine, is commonly used to treat cancers such
as Hodgkin's lymphoma. O'Connor says she sees vinblastine
and other drugs made by plants as templates that can modified
in a variety of ways to enhance their effectiveness.
Exoplanets' color could mean a lot
WASHINGTON - When searching for Earth-like planets around
distant stars, color should be considered when trying to
identify their composition, U.S. researchers say. Just like
the planets in our solar system reveal facts about themselves
by their colors -- Mars is red because its surface if largely
iron oxide, Venus is brilliant white because of its world-
wide cloud cover and Earth is blue because of how our atmos-
phere scatters sunlight -- astronomers can eventually harness
color to learn more about exoplanets, a NASA release says.
Someday, one researcher says, when we have the technology to
gather light from individual exoplanets, astronomers could
use color information to identify Earth-like worlds. "Event-
ually, as telescopes get bigger, there will be the light-
gathering power to look at the colors of planets around other
stars," NASA astronomer Lucy McFadden says. "Their colors
will tell us which ones to study in more detail." McFadden
and UCLA graduate student Carolyn Crow collaborated on a
project to determine what our home looks like to alien
astronomers and eventually use that insight to figure out
how to spot Earth-like worlds around other stars. On a spec-
ial color diagram they created, the planets cluster into
groups based on similarities in the wavelengths of sunlight
that their surfaces and atmospheres reflect. The gas giants
Jupiter and Saturn huddle in one corner, Uranus and Neptune
in a different one. The rocky inner planets Mars, Venus and
Mercury cluster off in their own corner of "color space."
But Earth stands alone in the diagram because of the way our
atmosphere scatters sunlight and does not absorb a lot of
infrared light, Crow says. "It is Earth's atmosphere that
dominates the colors of Earth," Crow says. If an exoplanet
showed a similar color fingerprint to Earth's, it would not
necessarily mean that the planet has blue skies and vast
oceans like our planet. But it would tell us to look at that
planet more closely, McFadden and Crow say.
New type of moon rock identified
PROVIDENCE, R.I. - U.S. scientists say a new type of rock on
the moon, the first new variety identified in decades, is
probably ancient material born deep inside the moon. Located
on the far side of the moon and undetected until a space
probe measured its odd mineralogy, the rocks are located in
a few isolated deposits, ScienceNews.org reported Wednesday.
"These are very unusual areas," Carle Pieters, a planetary
geologist at Brown University, told a meeting of the Geo-
logical Society of America Tuesday. Pieters calls the new
rock type OOS because it is rich in the minerals orthopy-
roxene, olivine and spinel. The spinel, a gemstone prized on
Earth, is particularly intriguing, scientists say, as it
occurs only in the smallest trace amounts in every other part
of the moon. How the OOS material got where it is remains
something of a mystery. Most scientists think the moon formed
when a Mars-sized object hit the infant Earth 4.5 billion
years ago, knocking a large amount of material into Earth
orbit where it cooled and solidified to form the moon. The
newly identified, spinel-rich areas could be from those early
days, Pieters says, part of the moon that cooled early on
deep in the crust and later came to the surface through some
kind of geologic action.
Climate change could reverse Atlantic flow
BARCELONA, Spain - Global warming could reverse the flow of
deep waters in the Atlantic Ocean, just as climate change
did 20,000 years ago, Spanish researchers say. Universitat
Autonoma de Barcelona scientists say such a reversal is
expected in the course of climate warming over the next 100
years, ScienceDaily.com reported Thursday. Atlantic Ocean
circulation is an important part of the climate system as
warm currents like the Gulf Stream transport energy from
the tropics to the subpolar North Atlantic and influence
regional weather and climate patterns, the researchers say.
Their study shows ocean circulation was very different in the
past, including a period 20,000 years ago when the Atlantic
flows reversed, moving towards the South Polar Ocean.
Although far back in time, the phenomenon is relevant for
our climate today and in the near future, researchers say,
and their data can benefit the climate-modeling community
by improving their capacity to reliably predict future ocean
and climate changes.
Scientist: Much of human genome 'junk'
PALO ALTO, Calif. - Most human DNA in our genome has no ap-
parent function and could be just leftover evolutionary junk,
a U.S. researcher says. Arend Sidow of Stanford University
says a new study comparing the human genetic blueprints to
those of other mammals suggests very little of the human
genome is really necessary, ScienceNews.org reported Thurs-
day. About 7 percent of the human genome is similar to the
DNA of other mammals, Sidow says, and because it is similar,
or "conserved," geneticists assume this DNA is the most im-
portant. Sidow says these parts of the genome make up only
225 million of the 3 billion chemical letters of DNA found
in the complete human genome. Most scientists believe that
if certain pieces of DNA are retained throughout evolution,
they must be important. Things that aren't conserved by evo-
lution are less likely to be required for basic functions.
"I think the rule is that important stuff stays," Sidow says.
Only about 6 percent of the total genome is found in DNA
regions that may play a role in regulating how proteins are
made, he says.
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