Sat, 04/09/2010 - 07:18 by Prince damin
Arlington, Va. -- The start of life on Earth presents a paradox, scientists say: How did amino acids arise before there were biological catalysts needed to build them?
It's a chicken-and-the-egg puzzle: How could the basic biochemicals like amino acids and nucleotides have come about when there were no catalysts, like proteins or ribosomes, around to create them?
Now scientists propose that a third type of catalyst could have jumpstarted metabolism and life itself, deep in hydrothermal ocean vents, an article in The Biological Bulletin says.
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Sat, 04/09/2010 - 07:17 by Prince damin
Paris -- Scientists say a European satellite has been tracking an iceberg, the largest in the Northern Hemisphere, that cracked from the Greenland ice sheet Aug. 4.
The European Space Agency's Envisat satellite has observed the huge mass of ice, 19 miles long by 9 miles wide, since it calved from the Petermann glacier in northern Greenland, an agency release said Friday.
The satellite's latest images show the iceberg has moved about 17 miles from the glacier and is entering Nares Straight -- a stretch of water leading to the Arctic Ocean.
The iceberg has hit a small island, which may delay its progression for a while and could also cause it to break up.
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Sat, 04/09/2010 - 06:54 by Prince damin
Athens, Greece -- A type of bacteria that can present a toxic threat exists in the waters of a lake in northern Greece, scientists say.
The bacteria, which can form a dangerous algal bloom on the surface of the water, has existed in Lake Kastoria for two decades, but recent DNA tests confirmed the bacteria, called microcystis, produces toxins that could a pose a risk to public health, Kathimerini newspaper reported.
Experts from the Biology Department at Thessaloniki's Aristotle University say they could not determine whether the concentration of the bacteria in the water is currently at a potentially dangerous level.
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Sat, 04/09/2010 - 06:44 by Prince damin
Washington -- NASA has started development of Solar Probe Plus, a mission to study the sun more closely than ever before, with a target launch date of 2018, the agency says.
The spacecraft will plunge directly into the sun's atmosphere at approximately 4 million miles from the sun's surface, into a region that no other probe has ever encountered, an agency release said.
The mission will carry five separate science investigations hoping to discover more about our sun than any previous mission, NASA said.
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Fri, 03/09/2010 - 10:27 by Prince damin
Los Angeles -- Scientists studying rocks in Nevada say they've found evidence that Earth's magnetic field can reverse or "flip-flop" more rapidly than previously believed.
"Geomagnetic field reversals" of the Earth's magnetism occur every couple hundred thousand years and normally take about 4,000 years but the Nevada finding suggest at least one particular reversal of the globe's magnetic poles happened much faster, ScienceNews.org reported.
The discovery bolsters the theory, first proposed after a similar examination of rocks in Oregon in 1995, that reversals really can happen quickly, over the course of years or centuries instead of millennia, researchers say.
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Fri, 03/09/2010 - 10:09 by Prince damin
Santa Barbara, Calif. -- Scientists in California say they were successful in predicting the spread of oil from the Gulf of Mexico spill and when and where it would wash ashore.
Researchers at the University of California, Santa Barbara, used computer models to describe how slicks of oil tend to be stretched into filaments by motion at the sea surface, a university release said.
To produce predictions of oil movement after the Deepwater Horizon explosion, Igor Mezic, a professor of mechanical engineering at UCSB who studies fluid dynamics, utilized forecasts of sea surface conditions from a U.S. Navy model.
"We predicted where the oil was going to go," Mezic said. "We were able to do three-day predictions pretty accurately."
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Fri, 03/09/2010 - 09:56 by Prince damin
Houston -- An ancient herbal remedy whose active ingredient is the main constituent of a modern diabetes drug may help combat cancer, two U.S. studies show.
The studies, published in the journal Cancer Prevention Research, support previous research that found diabetes patients receiving the drug metformin are less prone to developing cancer.
Metformin helps stabilize blood sugar by decreasing the liver's glucose output and increasing the sugar's use by muscle tissue.
Scott Lippman, an oncologist at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, estimates more than 40 million metformin prescriptions have been filled in the United States.
"It's been around for a while," he says.
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Fri, 03/09/2010 - 09:54 by Prince damin
Evanston, Ill. -- U.S. researchers say they've discovered a class of nanostructures that could be used for gas storage and food or medical technologies -- oh, and they're edible.
Northwestern University scientists say the porous crystals are the first known all-natural metal-organic frameworks that are simple to make. Most MOFs are made from petroleum-based ingredients, but you can pop the Northwestern MOFs into your mouth and eat them -- and the researchers have, the university says.
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Wed, 01/09/2010 - 10:42 by Prince damin
Columbia, Mo. -- "Free as a bird" may not be as free as it sounds, researchers say, as a study suggest what's on the ground greatly affects where birds fly.
Scientists at the University of Missouri says the findings could be useful to foresters and urban planners alike to improve bird habitats that would perpetuate strong, diverse bird populations, a university release said Tuesday.
Dylan Kesler, assistant professor in fisheries and wildlife at the university's School of Natural Resources, found that non-migrating resident birds tend to travel over forest "corridors," areas protected by trees and used by wildlife to travel.
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Wed, 01/09/2010 - 10:41 by Prince damin
College Park, Md. -- After two decades of planning and construction, the world's largest neutrino observatory, beneath arctic ice, will open in December, scientists say.
Dubbed IceCube, it holds 5,160 optical sensors in a cube whose sides measure more than 1,000 yards, making it an order of magnitude larger than other neutrino detectors, an American Institute of Physics release said Tuesday.
The Superkamiokande detector in the Japanese Alps, for example, is only 44 yards on a side.
The goal of the world's neutrino observatories is simple: find the source of cosmic rays.
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Wed, 01/09/2010 - 10:31 by Prince damin
Boulder, Colo. -- Colorado students took part in an unusual decommissioning of a satellite, bringing the craft into Earth re-entry to burn up in the atmosphere, scientists say.
University of Colorado at Boulder undergraduates, who have been helping to control five NASA satellites from campus, guided the Ice, Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite, or ICESat, out of orbit into Earth's atmosphere Monday, a university release said.
After seven years of gathering valuable data on the polar regions and helping scientists develop a better understanding of ice sheets and sea ice dynamics, the science package on the satellite failed, leading to the decommissioning.
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Wed, 01/09/2010 - 10:22 by Prince damin
London -- U.K. scientists have developed a method to monitor rare and endangered species over large landscapes -- and it's as easy as clicking a camera shutter, they say.
Researchers from the Wildlife Conservation Society and Zoological Society of London collect images from remote "camera traps" that automatically photograph anything that walks, crawls or flies by for a "Wildlife Picture Index" containing thousands of images of dozens of species, a Society release said Tuesday.
These virtual photo albums are then run through a statistical analysis to produce data for diversity and distribution of a broad range of wildlife.
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