Science Updates

[AiA in Atlanta]

Anyone remember the old movie 'Day of the Dolphin?'



Researchers Find That Dolphins Call Each Other By 'Name'


Science continues to show that what we think makes us human, may not be so unique: New research finds that bottlenose dolphins call the "names of loved ones when they become separated," Discovery News reports.

You might be thinking this sounds familiar. Indeed in 2011, researchers found that sperm whales may give each names and way back in 2006, researchers found dolphins named themselves with unique whistles. (Earlier this month, we told you about birds who have awareness of a mate's feeling.)

What this study published in the latest edition of the Proceedings of the Royal Society B found is that dolphins use these names. They are the first animals — other than humans — known to do so.

Discovery explains:

"'Animals produced copies when they were separated from a close associate and this supports our belief that dolphins copy another animal's signature whistle when they want to reunite with that specific individual,' lead author Stephanie King of the University of St. Andrews Sea Mammal Research Unit told Discovery News.
"King and her colleagues collected acoustic data from wild bottlenose dolphins around Sarasota Bay, Fla., from 1984 to 2009. The researchers also intensely studied four captive adult male dolphins housed at The Seas Aquarium, also in Florida."
Wired reports that researchers analyzed recordings made by the Sarasota Dolphin Research Program, which captured pairs of dolphins and held them in separate nets.

"During the captures, the dolphins can't see each other, but can hear each other and continue to communicate," Wired writes. "In their analysis, King and Janik showed that some of the communications are copies of captured compatriots' signature whistles — and, crucially, that the dolphins most likely to make these were mothers and calves or closely allied males."

[mellie]

Scientists create 'superbrain' link two rats' brains through electrodes

CREATING a "superbrain" of connected minds, scientists say they have enabled a rat to help a fellow rodent while the animals were a continent apart but connected through brain electrodes.

With electrodes imbedded in its cortex, a rat in a research institute in Natal, Brazil sent signals via the internet to a counterpart at a university lab in Durham, North Carolina, helping the second animal to get a reward.

The exploit opens up the prospect of linking brains among animals to create an "organic computer", said Brazilian neurobiologist Miguel Nicolelis.

http://www.news.com.au/technology/scien ... 6588063069

http://www.science20.com/news_articles/ ... ats-105093

[AiA in Atlanta]

[Super Nova]

My favourite.

Is Hell Endothermic or Exothermic?

Dr. Schlambaugh, a senior lecturer at the Chemical Engineering Department,University of Oklahoma, is known for posing questions on final exams like: "Why do airplanes fly?"

"Is Hell exothermic or endothermic? Support your answer with proof."

Most students wrote proofs of their beliefs using Boyle's Law or similar. One student, however, wrote the following:

First, we must postulate that if souls exist, they must have some mass. If they do, then a mole of souls also must have a mass. So, at what rate are souls moving into hell and at what rate are souls leaving? I think we can safely assume that once a soul gets to Hell, it does not leave. Therefore, no souls are leaving.

As for souls entering Hell, let's look at the different religions that exist in the world today. Some religions say that if you are not a member of their religion, you will go to Hell. Since there are more than one of these religions, and people do not belong to more than one religion, we can project that all people and all souls go to Hell. With the birth and death rates what they are, we can expect the number of souls in Hell to increase exponentially. Now, we look at the rate of change in the volume of Hell. Boyle's Law states that in order for the temperature and pressure in Hell to stay the same, the ratio of the mass of the souls and volume needs to stay constant.

[Answer 1] So, if Hell is expanding at a slower rate than the rate at which souls enter Hell, then the temperature in Hell will increase until all Hell breaks loose.

[Answer 2] Of course, if Hell is expanding at a rate faster than the increase in souls in Hell, then the temperature and pressure will drop until Hell freezes over.

So which is it? If we accept the postulate (given to me by Teresa Banyan during freshman year) that "it'll be a cold day in Hell before I sleep with you", and taking into account that I still have not succeeded in having sexual relations with her, then [Answer 2] cannot be correct;

...... thus, Hell is exothermic.

The student got the only A.

[Super Nova]

1-March-2013

Science experiments by the NASA Mars rover Curiosity have been put on hold as engineers troubleshoot a problem with its computer.

NASA says the car-size rover is in "safe mode." In this state, Curiosity suspends science activities but is still in contact with Earth.

Engineers discovered a problem with Curiosity's flash memory earlier this week and switched to its backup computer.

Curiosity landed last summer in Gale Crater near the Martian equator to examine whether environmental conditions were favorable for microbes.

It recently drilled into a rock and transferred a pinch of powder to its onboard laboratories to study the chemical makeup. It won't be able to finish the analysis until its systems are back to normal.

[AiA in Atlanta]

good news

Baby Born With HIV Apparently Cured, Say Scientists

WASHINGTON -- A baby born with the virus that causes AIDS appears to have been cured, scientists announced Sunday, describing the case of a child from Mississippi who's now 2 1/2 and has been off medication for about a year with no signs of infection.

There's no guarantee the child will remain healthy, although sophisticated testing uncovered just traces of the virus' genetic material still lingering. If so, it would mark only the world's second reported cure.

Specialists say Sunday's announcement, at a major AIDS meeting in Atlanta, offers promising clues for efforts to eliminate HIV infection in children, especially in AIDS-plagued African countries where too many babies are born with the virus.

"You could call this about as close to a cure, if not a cure, that we've seen," Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institutes of Health, who is familiar with the findings, told The Associated Press.

A doctor gave this baby faster and stronger treatment than is usual, starting a three-drug infusion within 30 hours of birth. That was before tests confirmed the infant was infected and not just at risk from a mother whose HIV wasn't diagnosed until she was in labor.

"I just felt like this baby was at higher-than-normal risk, and deserved our best shot," Dr. Hannah Gay, a pediatric HIV specialist at the University of Mississippi, said in an interview.

That fast action apparently knocked out HIV in the baby's blood before it could form hideouts in the body. Those so-called reservoirs of dormant cells usually rapidly reinfect anyone who stops medication, said Dr. Deborah Persaud of Johns Hopkins Children's Center. She led the investigation that deemed the child "functionally cured," meaning in long-term remission even if all traces of the virus haven't been completely eradicated.

Next, Persaud's team is planning a study to try to prove that, with more aggressive treatment of other high-risk babies. "Maybe we'll be able to block this reservoir seeding," Persaud said.

No one should stop anti-AIDS drugs as a result of this case, Fauci cautioned.


But "it opens up a lot of doors" to research if other children can be helped, he said. "It makes perfect sense what happened."

Better than treatment is to prevent babies from being born with HIV in the first place.

About 300,000 children were born with HIV in 2011, mostly in poor countries where only about 60 percent of infected pregnant women get treatment that can keep them from passing the virus to their babies. In the U.S., such births are very rare because HIV testing and treatment long have been part of prenatal care.

"We can't promise to cure babies who are infected. We can promise to prevent the vast majority of transmissions if the moms are tested during every pregnancy," Gay stressed.

The only other person considered cured of the AIDS virus underwent a very different and risky kind of treatment – a bone marrow transplant from a special donor, one of the rare people who is naturally resistant to HIV. Timothy Ray Brown of San Francisco has not needed HIV medications in the five years since that transplant.

The Mississippi case shows "there may be different cures for different populations of HIV-infected people," said Dr. Rowena Johnston of amFAR, the Foundation for AIDS Research. That group funded Persaud's team to explore possible cases of pediatric cures.

It also suggests that scientists should look back at other children who've been treated since shortly after birth, including some reports of possible cures in the late 1990s that were dismissed at the time, said Dr. Steven Deeks of the University of California, San Francisco, who also has seen the findings.

"This will likely inspire the field, make people more optimistic that this is possible," he said.

In the Mississippi case, the mother had had no prenatal care when she came to a rural emergency room in advanced labor. A rapid test detected HIV. In such cases, doctors typically give the newborn low-dose medication in hopes of preventing HIV from taking root. But the small hospital didn't have the proper liquid kind, and sent the infant to Gay's medical center. She gave the baby higher treatment-level doses.

The child responded well through age 18 months, when the family temporarily quit returning and stopped treatment, researchers said. When they returned several months later, remarkably, Gay's standard tests detected no virus in the child's blood.

Ten months after treatment stopped, a battery of super-sensitive tests at half a dozen laboratories found no sign of the virus' return. There were only some remnants of genetic material that don't appear able to replicate, Persaud said.

In Mississippi, Gay gives the child a check-up every few months: "I just check for the virus and keep praying that it stays gone."

The mother's HIV is being controlled with medication and she is "quite excited for her child," Gay added.

[Super Nova]

Now this will make who ever comes up with this type of drug more money than any other drug ever invented. I expect we would need to take it daily and you would be hooked for life, as a consumer.

Pill to live to 150
Drugs that could help people to live to 150 by slowing the ageing process are being developed by scientists.

The skin of red grapes contains resveratrol, which appears to have an anti-ageing effect, and if delivered in concentrated form could help us live longer.
By Stephen Adams, Medical Correspondent
6:19PM GMT 10 Mar 2013

The drugs are synthetic versions of resveratrol, found in red wine, an organic chemical believed to have an anti-ageing effect, by boosting activity of a protein called SIRT1.

GSK, the pharmaceutical firm, is testing them on people with particular medical conditions, namely Type II diabetes and psoriasis, a serious skin condition.

David Sinclair, professor of genetics at Harvard University, said ageing might not actually be an "irreversible affliction".

He said: “Now we are looking at whether there are benefits for those who are already healthy.

"Things there are also looking promising. We're finding that ageing isn't the irreversible affliction that we thought it was.

"Some of us could live to 150, but we won't get there without more research."

He explained that increasing SIRT1 activity improved how well our cells operated, making them less sluggish. In previous experiments, mice, bees and flies given the SIRT1-boosting compounds lived longer.

Writing in the journal Science, Prof Sinclair claimed to have performed experiments which showed these resveratrol-based compounds were having a direct effect on health. Some scientists have argued that the effect was not real, but experimental artifice.

Despite the controversy, there have already been promising results in some trials with implications for cancer, cardiovascular disease and heart failure, Type II diabetes, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, fatty liver disease, cataracts, osteoporosis, muscle wasting, sleep disorders and inflammatory diseases such as psoriasis, arthritis and colitis.

Current trials look at how the compounds might help treat these age-related disease.

But Prof Sinclair believed that in time they would also be examined for their preventative effect. Just as statins are used today to prevent heart disease and strokes, so these compounds could be used to slow a wide-range of diseases.

Prof Sinclair is a consultant and inventor on patents licensed to Sirtris, the GSK company running the trials.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healt ... o-150.html

[Rorschach]

'God particle' found: physicists say they have discovered a Higgs boson
March 15, 2013 - 5:44AM
John Heilprin

The search is all but over for the so-called God particle that is a crucial building block of the universe.

Physicists said on Thursday they believe they have discovered the sub-atomic particle predicted nearly half a century ago, which will go a long way toward explaining what gives electrons and all matter in the universe size and shape.

The elusive particle, called a Higgs boson, was predicted in 1964 to help fill in our understanding of the creation of the universe, which many theorise occurred in a massive explosion known as the Big Bang.

The particle was named for Peter Higgs, one of the physicists who proposed its existence, but it later became popularly known as the God particle.

Last July, scientists at CERN, the Geneva-based European Organisation for Nuclear Research, announced finding a particle they described as Higgs-like, but they stopped short of saying conclusively that it was the same particle or some version of it.

Scientists have now finished going through the entire set of data year and announced the results in a statement and at a physics conference in the Italian Alps.

"To me it is clear that we are dealing with a Higgs boson, though we still have a long way to go to know what kind of Higgs boson it is," said Joe Incandela, a physicist who heads one of the two main teams at CERN that each involve about 3000 scientists.

Its existence helps confirm the theory that objects gain their size and shape when particles interact in an energy field with a key particle, the Higgs boson. The more they attract, the theory goes, the bigger their mass will be.

But, it remains an "open question", CERN said in a statement, whether this is the Higgs boson that was expected in the original formulation, or possibly the lightest of several predicted in some theories that go beyond that model.

But for now, it said, there can be little doubt that a Higgs boson does exist, in some form.

Whether or not it is a Higgs boson is demonstrated by how it interacts with other particles and its quantum properties, CERN said in the statement. The data "strongly indicates that it is a Higgs boson", it said.

The discovery would be a strong contender for the Nobel Prize, though it remains unclear whether that might go to Higgs and the others who first proposed the theory or to the thousands of scientists who found it, or to all of them.

AP

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/technology/sci-te ... z2NYudm5ED" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Super Nova]

An example hiow science challenges existing theories when the evidence does not stack up when new discoveries and information is presented.

Challenging existing theories on the origin of flight, the discovery extends much of what is known about avian ancestors and suggests that parts of some textbooks and museum exhibit explanations might need to be revised.

Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/national/educa ... z2OYgNMqxh

[Rorschach]

Men's sex chromosome is doomed: scientist
* by: By Liza Kappelle
* From: AAP
* April 02, 2013 7:42PM



THE poorly designed Y chromosome that makes men is degrading rapidly and will disappear, even if humans are still around.

Evolutionary geneticist Jenny Graves says while the process is likely to happen within the next five million years it could have begun in some isolated groups.

"As long as something came along in its stead, we would not even suspect without checking the chromosomes," she told AAP on Tuesday.

Professor Groves, who first made the prediction some years ago, was in Canberra to give a public lecture on the subject for the Australian Academy of Science.

There have been dissenting research papers, but her prediction hasn't changed.

"Its very bad news for all the men here," she told her audience.

Prof Graves has been studying sex-determining genes in Australian animals to shed light on human genetics.

"You would think that sex is so important it wouldn't change a lot. But it changes all over the place and the Y chromosome sort of self-destructs," she told AAP.

Y is always in the male and active mostly in the testes - making sperm.

That is a "very dangerous" place because there's a lot of cell division going, she says.

With every split there's a chance for a mutation or gene loss.

"The X chromosome is all alone in the male, but in the female it has a friend so it can swap bits and repair itself. If the Y gets a hit it's a downward spiral."

The X has about 1000 genes left, too many relating to sex and intelligence, she says.

The smaller Y started with about 1700 genes but only has 45 left, and that's mostly "junk".

"It is a lovely example of what I call dumb design," she told AAP.

"It is an evolutionary accident."

If humans don't become extinct, new sex-determining genes and chromosomes will evolve, maybe leading to the evolution of new hominid species.

This had happened in the Japanese spiny rat, which had survived the loss of its Y, she said.

Professor Graves is thinker-in-residence at Canberra University's Institute for Applied Ecology, a distinguished professor at the La Trobe Institute of Molecular Science, an ANU emeritus professor and University of Melbourne Professorial fellow.

Read more: http://www.news.com.au/technology/sci-t ... z2PLlJzwnr" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Watch this space.....