Gamers Saving Lives- Biochemists And Computer Scientists Collaborate To Create Protein-folding Computer Game

Computer scientists designed a computer game based on the principles of biochemistry. It allows amateurs to compete against and collaborate with specialists to design protein structures. Introductory levels teach the general governing concepts that users must understand before moving on to design complicated, potentially useful molecules.
What if instead of waging war or dropping blocks, gamers set their sights on something like a new HIV vaccine? Sounds strange, but biochemistry might be the new must-play video game.

It looks and sounds like a computer game, but Foldit is much more than just a computer game -- it's crucial biochemistry research.

Biochemist David Baker wants to discover the unique folding of proteins to better understand how they make our bodies work. A friend suggested turning this scientific puzzle into a game. That's where computer scientist Zoran Popovic and his team come in.

"You no longer need to get a degree in biochemistry to actually start doing this stuff," says Zoran Popovic, Ph.D., an associate professor in the department of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington in Seattle.

The game's introductory levels "trick" you into learning all the concepts you need to know. Then all you do is play -- alone or in teams.

"I know that some of our users have kind of described it as Tetris on steroids or something," Dr. Popovic says. The goal is to get the highest score by folding the proteins based on the same criteria they use in the lab. Each protein is a puzzle -- the more people play, the better chance a correct "fold" will be discovered for each protein. Eventually the puzzles could be used to help make vaccines and even cure genetic diseases.

"You can get into work and say I stayed up all night -- [but] I wasn't playing Halo," says David Baker, Ph.D., a biochemist at the University of Washington in Seattle. "I was designing an HIV vaccine."

ABOUT COMPUTER MODELING: Computer modeling is used to represent the structure and appearance of both static objects, such as building architecture, and dynamic situations, such as a football game. With Foldit, game players have the opportunity to use a computer model to test the benefits of changing the structure of a protein. Foldit and other computer models can provide cutaway views that let users examine aspects of an object that are invisible even to the most powerful microscopes, as well as visualization tools that can provide many different perspectives. Computer models enable users to run companies and civilizations, fight battles, and play football games.

COMPLICATED MOLECULES: Polymers are large molecules made up of long repeating chemical units joined together in a chain, like beads on a string. Biological polymers are among the largest and most diverse molecules in the natural world, often containing billions of atoms. Human DNA is a polymer that can be thought of as billions of beads on a string. Proteins are polymers made up of 20 different amino acids, and the solid plastics used in a broad range of consumer products are polymers made of various types of "monomers" or smaller molecules. When monomers link together to form a polymer, this process is called polymerization, but they don't always link together in straight chains of regularly repeating monomers. Secondary molecules called catalysts can coax monomers to link together in certain configurations, and also speed up reaction times. This is how most synthetic polymers are created.
source(http://www.sciencedaily.com)

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Geoengineering of Earth

Its not safe but We’re already geoengineering Earth on a massive scale.

From diverting a third of Earth’s available fresh water to planting and grazing two-fifths of its land surface, humankind has fiddled with the knobs of the Holocene, that 10,000-year period of climate stability that birthed civilization.

The consequences of our interventions into Earth’s geophysical processes are yet to be determined, but scientists say they’re so fundamental that the Holocene no longer exists. We now live in the Anthropocene, a geological age of mankind’s making.

“Homo sapiens has emerged as a force of nature rivaling climatic and geologic forces,” wrote Earth scientists Erle Ellis and Navin Ramankutty in a 2008 Frontiers in Ecology paper, which featured their redrawn map of the human-influenced world. “Human forces may now outweigh these across most of Earth’s land surface today.”
Draining the Rivers

Of all the fresh water accessible in lakes, rivers and aquifers — what scientists call “blue water” — humankind uses about one-third every year. A fourth of Earth’s river basins run dry before they reach the sea.

At local scales, this changes weather patterns. The Three Gorges Dam on China’s Yangtze River for example, seems to be causing temperatures in its valley to drop, which in turn reduces rainfall. The draining of Kazakhstan’s once-vast Aral Sea has made regional temperatures hotter in summer and colder in winter, and rain now rarely falls.

Whether regional changes in turn have global consequences remains to be seen.While humans have unintentionally been altering Earth’s climate for centuries, some scientists have begun to study how to intentionally hack the globe to cool the overheated planet.
Eli Kintisch’s new book, Hack the Planet provides a thorough and nuanced portrait of the development of geoengineering. Through long acquaintance with the field’s biggest names, Kintisch, a staff writer for Science, paints a deep sociological portrait of a radical new scientific discipline bursting messily into the world.

He reminds us that even though the techniques may be wild and global, many of the people dreaming them up are regular scientists trying to deal rationally with a carbon problem that they don’t see society solving. Faced with a warming world, they are torn between watching nature die or trying to surgically kill it themselves.

The geo-engineering options being discussed are:
The main geoengineering techniques fall into two basic categories: One, the ways to block sunlight at different points in the atmosphere and earth system to lower the temperature rapidly in that way, and the other is enhancing the planet’s ability to take up carbon dioxide through a variety of techniques. So, sun-blocking and carbon-sucking are the two main ways.

With sun-blocking, what you are essentially doing is brightening the planet, increasing the earth’s albedo. That can change the amount of total radiation that the planet experiences. Scientists have proposed ways of intercepting solar radiation at every single point from the surface of the earth by whitening roofs or brightening the ocean’s surface itself with tiny bubbles, to brightening low-lying and high clouds, to one of the most radical and discussed geoengineering techniques: adding particles called aerosols to the stratosphere. That technique has many names, but I like to call it the Pinatubo option, because it was influenced by the rapid cooling that follows volcanic eruptions.

The Pinatubo option involves spraying some kind of particles (usually people talk about sulfur) into the upper atmosphere to form a kind of haze that blocks a small percentage of the sun’s rays before they can enter the lower atmosphere.

The carbon methods involve generally enhancing natural systems to take in more carbon, perhaps genetically modifying plants so they have more carbonaceous cells or growing large blooms of algae in the ocean by using some sort of key nutrient that can catalyze and fertilize their growth. The main way has been to use iron. You could also build machines to suck in the carbon dioxide.

Scientists had considered mimicking the cooling effect that volcanic aerosols have on the planet for decades before Crutzen’s paper. The scientist who first published on it was the Soviet scientist Budyko. But Crutzen came at a time where many scientists felt that the climate crisis was accelerating and he had the stature of a Nobel Prize. As an atmospheric chemist, he certainly had knowledge in this particular field.

And while he does have a reputation as a bit of a maverick, Crutzen’s paper was assiduously spelled out and he sent it to all of the top minds in the field before publishing it. That made it hard to argue with his essential conclusion, which is that we better at least study the method. It was difficult for anyone to disagree with. The furthest people could go was arguing that the paper shouldn’t be published. It was controversial and required intervention by the president of the National Academy of Science, Ralph Cicerone, an atmospheric chemist himself and friend of Crutzen.

Red and blue teams of geo-engineering:
Maybe a handful of people think we are at that stage or think it would be a good idea to “take control.” But the [blue team] scientists who are starting to spend more of their time studying geoengineering are generally engineering types, the kinds of scientists who like to think up new solutions and create new ideas and synthesize existing ones. The red team scientists have more of the temperament of skeptics. They are better at shooting holes in proposals and identifying problems. For any field, you usually have these two types.

The blue team includes most famously Edward Teller [nuclear scientist and former head of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory], who passed away in 2003, and his acolyte Lowell Wood. They are two of the blue team when it comes to the Pinatubo option. Then, when it comes to cloud-brightening, you have a British scientist named John Latham, who for most of his life has studied weather and came up with a way to brighten clouds. And when it comes to iron fertilization, which is growing algae blooms, there are a variety of scientists but most notably John Martin.

The red team includes scientists who have focused on the ways that these solutions could be deleterious, or on early technical problems with them. For the stratospheric aerosols, there is an expert on volcanoes, Alan Robock at Rutgers, who has focused on the problems with the Pinatubo option. For iron fertilization, there is an ecologist, Penny Chisholm at MIT, who is mostly focused on a variety of ecological and environmental issues related to growing these giant algae blooms.

At this point, a lot of scientists feel the cat is out of the bag. If anything, a desperate politician 30 years form now may suddenly decide, “I need to cool the planet.” And if we don’t study it, scientists won’t have any way to warn this leader of what the consequences will be. From that perspective there is a Pandora’s box that has been opened.

Geoengineering is a bad idea whose time has come. It is something that you have to study and hope to never use. [For the atomic scientists], the other side has nuclear weapons and they are pointed at you, so you have no choice but to develop a deterrent. In this case, the nuclear weapons are the unknown chance that the planet’s sensitivity to CO2 is very high and will respond to some of these worst-case tipping points.

Scientist feel they have no choice but to develop this response that viscerally is almost sickening to many scientists, especially someone like David Battisti, who thinks a lot about the internal dynamics of the climate system and understands how hard it is to understand how the parts fit together and then predict its behavior

Tail of climate change risk:
For the most part, scientists are trying to focus their efforts on geoengineering ideas that have some natural analogue. The Pinatubo option mimics volcanoes. Cloud-brightening happens as a result of salt particles and dust.

But, we don’t really know that much at all about any of these wild concepts. So, what scientists say is that the best way to make a decision is to compare not doing geoengineering and experiencing the worst-case scenarios of global warming with doing geoengineering and experiencing the tails or worst-case scenarios of geoengineering.

Often a mistake people make in talking about this, is that they consider that geoengineering schemes would work perfectly without weighing that there would be these unintended consequences.
it’s probably fair to say that there is no such thing as the perfect experiment that gives you the information you want and involves the least amount of risk. The best example is drug trials. People even die after a drug has been studied. In geoengineering, this gets down to how much information we will need to act in the future. We might be able with the Pinatubo option to understand more about the consequences on ozone. But we may not have thought to ask about other effects, like the impacts of diffuse light on various ecosystems. The larger you go [with experiments], the better the chance that you’re going to discover the unknown unknowns. But the larger you go, the greater the risk that the studies themselves will have a deleterious effect.

we don’t know how severe the climate crisis would have to be before countries would consider unilateral geoengineering. Would there be food conflicts? Would there be problems with immigration? What other factors would be happening? Would it be a developing country with nuclear weapons or a coalition of nations?

This gets to the reason that scientists are meeting now in Asilomar. The worst- case scenario is, with any new risk, you don’t want its existence or its use in the future to cause conflict in and of itself. One way to do that is to set up international norms and agreements that countries cooperate, and the technology itself won’t become a flashpoint for conflict like what happened with nuclear weapons after WWII.

But the challenge for setting up rules for geoengineering is that scientists very rightly fear that if rules are set up right now, we might restrict research that might tell us things we need to know about geoengineering.

You don’t want a free-for-all with everyone going out and trying geoengineering at a large scale out of fear or strategic reasons. But you have to do some studies to understand what those rules should be. And the scientists here in Asilomar are trying, at an early stage, to lay out voluntary guidelines to square that circle, and do some studies in the environment that could give us some early clues about the risk of geoengineering.

One problem with geoengineering research that scientist Ken Caldeira has pointed out to me is that there are a lot of private companies who are involved in this research, who are out to do research but also to create a business around selling carbon credits. Is this a field that should be dominated by private enterprises?

I titled the chapter on the history of climate and weather modification as a pursuit of levers. Because what I think geoengineering comes down to is looking for levers, making small changes that have big effects in the climate system. And that’s usually the goal of a company, they look for ways to profit off a small investment and yield big returns.

We’re looking for good investments for our geoengineering buck, so it doesn’t surprise that you’d have [private companies] Climos and Planktos interested in the very lucrative leverage involved in iron fertilization. And Nathan Myhrvold, inventor and close confidante of Bill Gates, interested in the stratospheric aerosols.
geoengieering is a dangerous concept that has to be studied and should be kept as an absolute worst-case scenario, but that requires vigorous and public debate. It probably requires a more scientifically literate society than we have.

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Proof in Humans of RNA Interference Using Targeted Nanoparticles

A California Institute of Technology (Caltech)-led team of researchers and clinicians has published the first proof that a targeted nanoparticle -- used as an experimental therapeutic and injected directly into a patient's bloodstream -- can traffic into tumors, deliver double-stranded small interfering RNAs (siRNAs), and turn off an important cancer gene using a mechanism known as RNA interference (RNAi).
Moreover, the team provided the first demonstration that this new type of therapy, infused into the bloodstream, can make its way to human tumors in a dose-dependent fashion -- i.e., a higher number of nanoparticles sent into the body leads to a higher number of nanoparticles in the tumor cells.

These results, published in the March 21 advance online edition of the journal Nature, demonstrate the feasibility of using both nanoparticles and RNAi-based therapeutics in patients, and open the door for future "game-changing" therapeutics that attack cancer and other diseases at the genetic level, says Mark Davis, the Warren and Katharine Schlinger Professor of Chemical Engineering at Caltech, and the research team's leader.

The discovery of RNA interference, the mechanism by which double strands of RNA silence genes, won researchers Andrew Fire and Craig Mello the 2006 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. The scientists first reported finding this novel mechanism in worms in a 1998 Nature paper. Since then, the potential for this type of gene inhibition to lead to new therapies for diseases like cancer has been highly touted.

"RNAi is a new way to stop the production of proteins," says Davis. What makes it such a potentially powerful tool, he adds, is the fact that its target is not a protein. The vulnerable areas of a protein may be hidden within its three-dimensional folds, making it difficult for many therapeutics to reach them. In contrast, RNA interference targets the messenger RNA (mRNA) that encodes the information needed to make a protein in the first place.

"In principle," says Davis, "that means every protein now is druggable because its inhibition is accomplished by destroying the mRNA. And we can go after mRNAs in a very designed way given all the genomic data that are and will become available."

Still, there have been numerous potential roadblocks to the application of RNAi technology as therapy in humans. One of the most problematic has been finding a way to ferry the therapeutics, which are made up of fragile siRNAs, into tumor cells after direct injection into the bloodstream. Davis, however, had a solution. Even before the discovery of RNAi, he and his team had begun working on ways to deliver nucleic acids into cells via systemic administration. They eventually created a four-component system -- featuring a unique polymer -- that can self-assemble into a targeted, siRNA-containing nanoparticle. The siRNA delivery system is under clinical development by Calando Pharmaceuticals, Inc., a Pasadena-based nanobiotech company.

"These nanoparticles are able to take the siRNAs to the targeted site within the body," says Davis. Once they reach their target -- in this case, the cancer cells within tumors -- the nanoparticles enter the cells and release the siRNAs.

The scientific results described in the Nature paper are from a Phase I clinical trial of these nanoparticles that began treating patients in May 2008. Phase I trials are, by definition, safety trials; the idea is to see if and at what level the drug or other therapy turns harmful or toxic. These trials can also provide an in-human scientific proof of concept -- which is exactly what is being reported in the Nature paper.

Using a new technique developed at Caltech, the team was able to detect and image nanoparticles inside cells biopsied from the tumors of several of the trial's participants. In addition, Davis and his colleagues were able to show that the higher the nanoparticle dose administered to the patient, the higher the number of particles found inside the tumor cells -- the first example of this kind of dose-dependent response using targeted nanoparticles.

Even better, Davis says, the evidence showed the siRNAs had done their job. In the tumor cells analyzed by the researchers, the mRNA encoding the cell-growth protein ribonucleotide reductase had been degraded. This degradation, in turn, led to a loss of the protein.

More to the point, the mRNA fragments found were exactly the length and sequence they should be if they'd been cleaved in the spot targeted by the siRNA, notes Davis. "It's the first time anyone has found an RNA fragment from a patient's cells showing the mRNA was cut at exactly the right base via the RNAi mechanism," he says. "It proves that the RNAi mechanism can happen using siRNA in a human."

"There are many cancer targets that can be efficiently blocked in the laboratory using siRNA, but blocking them in the clinic has been elusive," says Antoni Ribas, associate professor of medicine and surgery at UCLA's Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center. "This is because many of these targets are not amenable to be blocked by traditionally designed anti-cancer drugs. This research provides the first evidence that what works in the lab could help patients in the future by the specific delivery of siRNA using targeted nanoparticles. We can start thinking about targeting the untargetable."

"Although these data are very early and more research is needed, this is a promising study of a novel cancer agent, and we are proud of our contribution to the initial clinical development of siRNA for the treatment of cancer," says Anthony Tolcher, director of clinical research at South Texas Accelerated Research Therapeutics (START).

"Promising data from the clinical trials validates our years of research at City of Hope into ribonucleotide reductase as a target for novel gene-based therapies for cancer," adds coauthor Yun Yen, associate director for translational research at City of Hope. "We are seeing for the first time the utility of siRNA as a cancer therapy and how nanotechnology can target cancer cells specifically."

The Phase I trial -- sponsored by Calando Pharmaceuticals -- is proceeding at START and UCLA's Jonsson Comprehensive Cancer Center, and the clinical results of the trial will be presented at a later time. "At the very least, we've proven that the RNAi mechanism can be used in humans for therapy and that the targeted delivery of siRNA allows for systemic administration," Davis says. "It is a very exciting time."

In addition to Davis, Ribas, Tolcher, and Yen, the coauthors on the Nature paper are Caltech graduate students Jonathan Zuckerman (an MD/PhD student doing his MD work at UCLA) and Chung Hang Choi; former Caltech graduate student Christopher Alabi, now a postdoctoral scholar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; David Seligson, director of the UCLA Tissue Array Core Facility at the David Geffen School of Medicine; and Jeremy Heidel, who is currently a consultant for Calando Pharmaceuticals.

The work described in the paper was supported in part by the National Cancer Institute and the Daljit S. and Elaine Sarkaria Biomarker Laboratories. Caltech, Davis, and Heidel have a financial interest in Calando Pharmaceuticals.

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Cup Plant Is Potential New Biomass/carbon Storage Crop

South Dakota State University research is exploring a native perennial called cup plant as a potential new biomass crop that could also store carbon in its extensive root system and add biodiversity to biomass plantings.
Researchers are exploring whether cup plant could be grown in low, moist prairies generally unfit for cropland. It would be grown and processed along with native grasses grown for biomass.

"We anticipate down the road there's going to be a need and maybe even a market for plants that can store carbon under ground and be part of a biomass production system," SDSU professor Arvid Boe said.

Boe, a plant breeder, is the lead investigator on a grant of $324,336 from the U.S. Department of Energy channeled through the SDSU-based North Central Sun Grant Center. Project goals include studying genetic variation and developing molecular markers in cup plant populations from the eastern Great Plains; developing new cultivars that can be grown in combination with other biomass crops; determining best practices such as seeding rate, row spacing, harvest timing and nutrient management so that producers will know how to grow the plant; determining life histories of insect pests; and determining biochemical composition.

Boe said cup plant, or Silphium perfoliatum, is a member of the sunflower family found in moist low ground in the eastern Great Plains, where it can grow more than 7 feet tall. It has large seeds and good seedling vigor, and it yields a lot of biomass.

"It's conspicuous in the prairie as a very productive forb in a tallgrass prairie where you have your major grasses such as big bluestem, switchgrass and prairie cordgrass," Boe said. "We haven't come up with too many things to grow with our grasses to add biodiversity to these biofuel mixtures that we're anticipating growing down the road. It's very compatible with such things as switchgrass and prairie cordgrass and big bluestem."

Boe said scientists don't envision planting entire fields of cup plant. Instead they view it as one in a mix of biomass species that would be seeded in zones best suited for them, just as in the original tallgrass prairie. Boe and his colleagues -- borrowing a term used years ago by conservationist Erling Jacobson of the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Soil Conservation Service -- speak of "sculpting the landscape" with native grasses best suited to different locations in the prairie.

"We don't necessarily have a mix at any particular area, but we have various species wherever they're best adapted on the landscape. It doesn't make any sense for us to have mix switchgrass, big bluestem and prairie cordgrass together and plant it over a whole field. After five years, the species that are best adapted are going to take over anyway in their particular niche," Boe said.

"We're going to go in and we're going to plant essentially monocultures of these various species where they were in the original tallgrass prairie. There were monocultural stands in the tallgrass prairie, but they were zonal."

Cup plant is probably best suited to the same kind of terrain that switchgrass likes, Boe said, just above the prairie cordgrass zone, and possibly all the way up to the edge of the big bluestem zone.

"It fits the low prairie or moist prairie-type environment that we're shooting for and might even work out pretty well with prairie cordgrass," Boe said. "So we add diversity to that low prairie environment that is marginal land not suitable for cropland and also not a good environment for switchgrass to grow. We're not taking cropland out of production to put cup plant in there. We think it will grow in areas where crops wouldn't survive or couldn't even be planted on a regular basis."

Cup plant is likely to increase biodiversity in a plant community because it attracts a variety of insects and even birds. Goldfinches drink out of the leaves, and the stems provide perch areas for grassland birds.

SDSU professor Paul Johnson, an entomologist, adds that SDSU is also interested in a species of moth called Eucosma giganteana, first described by a scientist in 1881, that seems to have cup plant as its only host plant.

"In South Dakota, the giant eucosma has recently become more than just another interesting prairie insect because of interest in using cup plant as a biomass crop," Johnson said.

Larvae feed in the rapidly growing terminal structures, especially buds, where the damage can be extensive, often leading to complete loss of floral production. The end result can be significant loss of biomass through stunting and loss of vigor in the plants.

"Turning cup plant into a commodity thus converts the giant eucosma into a pest of significant concern," Johnson said.

"It's another case of a native prairie plant becoming a crop and the conversion of a previously neglected native plant predator to a pest."

Johnson is studying the life history of the giant eucosma as part of the SDSU project.

Perennial grasses will always be the base for biomass production, but cup plant is a complementary species, scientists say. Increasing number of species in the mix reduces probability of plant disease and insect pests attacking one species and causing large losses in yield.

Besides Boe and Johnson, other investigators in the project including forage researcher Vance Owens, plant scientist Catherine Carter and biochemist Duane Matthees, all of SDSU; Alex Kahler of Brookings, S.D.-based Biogenetic Services; and professor Ken Albrecht of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, an agronomist. University of Wisconsin research has already looked at cup plant as a perennial silage crop, but exploring it as a biomass crop is new.

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Men and Women Respond Differently to Stress

Age and gender play a major role in how people respond to stress, according to a new study on 20-to-64-year-olds. Published in the journal Psychophysiology, the investigation was led by scientists from the Université de Montréal and the Montreal Heart Institute in collaboration with colleagues from the Université du Québec à Montréal and McGill University.
"Our findings suggest that women who are more defensive are at increased cardiovascular risk, whereas low defensiveness appears to damage the health of older men," says Bianca D'Antono, a professor at the Université de Montréal Department of Psychiatry and a Montreal Heart Institute researcher.

Defensiveness is a trait characterized by avoidance, denial or repression of information perceived as threatening. In women, a strong defensive reaction to judgment from others or a threat to self-esteem will result in high blood pressure and heart rate. Contrarily, older men with low defensive reactions have a higher cardiovascular rates.

The study was conducted on 81 healthy working men and 118 women. According to Dr. Jean-Claude Tardif a Université de Montréal professor and Montreal Heart Institute researcher, the physiological response to stress in women and older men is linked to this desire of maintaining self-esteem and securing social bonds.

"The sense of belonging is a basic human need," says D'Antono. "Our findings suggest that socialization is innate and that belonging to a group contributed to the survival of our ancestors. Today, it is possible that most people view social exclusion as a threat to their existence. A strong defensive reaction is useful to maintain one's self-esteem faced with this potential threat."

As part of the experiment, participants completed four tasks of varying stress levels. The first task involved reading a neutral text on Antarctica's geography before a person of the same sex. The second and third tasks involved role-playing in which participants followed a script where they were sometimes agreeable and sometimes aggressive. The final task involved a non-scripted debate on abortion.

Heart rate and blood pressure were measured during each of these tasks as was the level of cortisol in saliva. Results showed that women and older men had elevated cardiovascular, autonomic and endocrine responses to stress -- all potentially damaging to their health. The research team cautions, however, that more studies are needed to evaluate the long-term effects of defensiveness and its association to stress response patterns in disease development.

This study was supported by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the Fonds de la recherche en santé du Québec.

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Supermassive Black Holes: Hinting at the Nature of Dark Matter?

About 23 percent of the universe is made up of mysterious 'dark matter' -- invisible material only detected through its gravitational influence on its surroundings. Now two astronomers based at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) have found a hint of the way it behaves near black holes.
Their results appear in a letter in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

In the early universe, clumps of dark matter are thought to have attracted gas, which then coalesced into stars that eventually assembled the galaxies we see today. In their efforts to understand galaxy formation and evolution, astronomers have spent a good deal of time attempting to simulate the build up of dark matter in these objects.

The UNAM astronomers, Dr. Xavier Hernandez and Dr. William Lee, calculated the way in which the black holes found at the centre of galaxies absorb dark matter. These black holes have anything between millions and billions of times the mass of the Sun and draw in material at a high rate.

The researchers modelled the way in which the dark matter is absorbed by black holes and found that the rate at which this happens is very sensitive to the amount of dark matter found in the black holes' vicinity. If this concentration were larger than a critical density of 7 Suns of matter spread over each cubic light year of space, the black hole mass would increase so rapidly, hence engulfing such large amounts of dark matter, that soon the entire galaxy would be altered beyond recognition.

Dr. Hernandez explains, "Over the billions of years since galaxies formed, such runaway absorption of dark matter in black holes would have altered the population of galaxies away from what we actually observe."

Their work therefore suggests that the density of dark matter in the centres of galaxies tends to a constant value. By comparing their observations to what current models of the evolution of the universe predict, Hernandez and Lee conclude that it is probably necessary to change some of the assumptions that underpin these models -- dark matter may not behave in the way scientists thought it did.

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New Fiber Nanogenerators Leading to Electric Clothing

In research that gives literal meaning to the term "power suit," University of California, Berkeley, engineers have created energy-scavenging nanofibers that could one day be woven into clothing and textiles.Nano suit technology is an ongoing development that has seen rapid advancement in recent years and appears to probably be closer to realization than the public knows, in my opinion.

These nano-sized generators have "piezoelectric" properties that allow them to convert into electricity the energy created through mechanical stress, stretches and twists.

"This technology could eventually lead to wearable 'smart clothes' that can power hand-held electronics through ordinary body movements," said Liwei Lin, UC Berkeley professor of mechanical engineering and head of the international research team that developed the fiber nanogenerators.For soldiers,The suit's nanomachines will control the temperature of the soldier, which tops the list of its enhancements for underwater usage. The suit will be bulletproof, of course. It will be able to expand and contract to basically emulate everything from a sweater to a t-shirt.
The suit will detect muscle usage and expand, contract, harden, and soften to give the soldier additional strength.

The nanofibers are made from organic polyvinylidene fluoride, or PVDF, they are flexible and relatively easy and cheap to manufacture.

Although they are still working out the exact calculations, the researchers noted that more vigorous movements, such as the kind one would create while dancing the electric boogaloo, should theoretically generate more power. "And because the nanofibers are so small, we could weave them right into clothes with no perceptible change in comfort for the user," said Lin, who is also co-director of the Berkeley Sensor and Actuator Center at UC Berkeley.

The fiber nanogenerators are described in this month's issue of Nano Letters, a peer-reviewed journal published by the American Chemical Society.

The goal of harvesting energy from mechanical movements through wearable nanogenerators is not new. Other research teams have previously made nanogenerators out of inorganic semiconducting materials, such as zinc oxide or barium titanate. "Inorganic nanogenerators -- in contrast to the organic nanogenerators we created -- are more brittle and harder to grow in significant quantities," Lin said.

The tiny nanogenerators have diameters as small as 500 nanometers, or about 100 times thinner than a human hair and one-tenth the width of common cloth fibers. The researchers repeatedly tugged and tweaked the nanofibers, generating electrical outputs ranging from 5 to 30 millivolts and 0.5 to 3 nanoamps.

Furthermore, the researchers report no noticeable degradation after stretching and releasing the nanofibers for 100 minutes at a frequency of 0.5 hertz (cycles per second).

Lin's team at UC Berkeley pioneered the near-field electrospinning technique used to create and position the polymeric nanogenerators 50 micrometers apart in a grid pattern. The technology enables greater control of the placement of the nanofibers onto a surface, allowing researchers to properly align the fiber nanogenerators so that positive and negative poles are on opposite ends, similar to the poles on a battery.

Without this control, the researchers explained, the negative and positive poles might cancel each other out and reducing energy efficiency.

The researchers demonstrated energy conversion efficiencies as high as 21.8 percent, with an average of 12.5 percent.

"Surprisingly, the energy efficiency ratings of the nanofibers are much greater than the 0.5 to 4 percent achieved in typical power generators made from experimental piezoelectric PVDF thin films, and the 6.8 percent in nanogenerators made from zinc oxide fine wires," said the study's lead author, Chieh Chang, who conducted the experiments while he was a graduate student in mechanical engineering at UC Berkeley.

"We think the efficiency likely could be raised further," Lin said. "For our preliminary results, we see a trend that the smaller the fiber we have, the better the energy efficiency. We don't know what the limit is."

Other co-authors of the study are Yiin-Kuen Fuh, a UC Berkeley graduate student in mechanical engineering; Van H. Tran, a graduate student at the Technische Universität München (Technical University of Munich) in Germany; and Junbo Wang, a researcher at the Institute of Electronics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, China.

The National Science Foundation and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency helped support this research.

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Keyboard Pants

These interesting keyboard pants, designed by Erik De Nijs, "are the

perfect solution for Googling quick exits while running from the

fashion police." No word yet on pricing or availability.

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Airports Could Get Mind-Reading Scanners

WeCU Technologies is building a mind-reading scanner that can tell if a given traveler is a potential danger - without
the subject's knowledge. WeCU Technologies (pronounced "we see you") is
creating a system that would essentially turn the public spaces in
airports into vast screening grounds:.

"The system ... projects images onto airport screens, such as
symbols associated with a certain terrorist group or some other image
only a would-be terrorist would recognize, company CEO Ehud Givon said.

"The logic is that people can't help reacting, even if only subtly,
to familiar images that suddenly appear in unfamiliar places. If you
strolled through an airport and saw a picture of your mother, Givon
explained, you couldn't help but respond.

"The reaction could be a darting of the eyes, an increased
heartbeat, a nervous twitch or faster breathing, he said. The WeCU
system would use humans to do some of the observing but would rely
mostly on hidden cameras or covert biometric sensors that can detect a slight rise in body temperature and heart rate," as reported in Raw Story.

Science fiction writers have been playing with the idea of
mind-reading machines for a long time. For example, you may recall the Veridicator from H. Beam Piper's 1962 novel Little Fuzzy:

"There was a bright conical helmet on his head, and electrodes had
been clamped to various portions of his anatomy. On the wall behind him
was a circular screen which ought to have been a calm turquoise blue,
but which was flickering from dark blue through violet to mauve. That
was simple nervous tension and guilt and anger at the humiliation of
being subjected to veridicated interrogation. "

More recently, the Farscape science fiction series introduced the Aurora Chair,
which was designed to extract information more efficiently than
conventional interrogation methods. "The chair" is employed throughout
the Peacekeeper military is believed one of the most effective means of
gaining information from unwilling subjects. The chair can painfully
sort through its subject's memories, pushing farther and harder
depending on the setting. It is designed to sort through and uncover
the mind's "layers".

Hopefully, the TSA won't start sponsoring research into Aurora Chair technology...

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New Spider-Man Device Could Let Humans Walk on Walls

A new high-tech suction device could allow humans to walk on walls like
Spider-Man or create adhesive devices that could be turned on and off
with the flick of a switch.

The contraption, inspired by a beetle that can hold on to a leaf with a force 100 times its weight, uses the surface tension of waterA prototype of the Switchable Electronically-controlled Capillary Adhesion Device (SECAD) holds its own weight plus this lego guy against a Plexiglas substrate. Credit: Mike Vogel/Paul Steen, Cornell University
to make an adhesive bond, but it does so with a creative twist. It
could be used to create sticky shoes or gloves, researchers said today.

The device consists of a flat top plate riddled with tiny holes,
each just a few hundred microns (a millionth of a meter) wide. A bottom
plate holds water. In between is a porous layer. A 9-volt battery
powers an electric field that forces water to squeeze through the tiny
holes in the top layer.

The surface tension of the exposed droplets makes the device grip
another surface — much the way two pieces of wet glass stick together.
Turn the electricity off, and the bond breaks.

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Computer to read your mind

British scientists have developed a computer that can read human minds, a key breakthrough which they claim takes telepathy a step closer to reality.

According to them, the computer is able to decipher thought patterns and tell what people are thinking simply by scanning the brain — in fact, it can delve into memories and differentiate between different recollections.

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Salmon gives birth to Trout(A new hope for the endangerd specie)

Biology textbooks will never quite be the same again. Scientists have altered the reproductive organs of salmon so that they produce trout offspring.

A "germ" tissue from young trout was put into young salmon so that when the salmon became sexually mature they produced the sperm and eggs of trout. In a study published today in the journal Nature, the researchers report that they have successfully used the technique to breed healthy rainbow trout from salmon parents.

The scientists, led by Yutaka Takeuchi of the Tokyo University of Marine Science and Technology, said that the development could help many of the world's endangered species of fish. Dr Takeuchi said tissue transplants from one endangered species to a related but more common species that is easier to rear in captivity could help to boost the wild populations of threatened or commercially valuable fish.

"The seed production for a species with a large body size and longer generation time could be carried out in surrogate parents with a smaller body size and shorter generation time," Dr Takeuchi said.

The technique relies on transplants of "primordial germ cells", which are the specialised tissues of embryonic fish that eventually develop into the gonads, the sex organs of adults that produce the sperm and eggs. Dr Takeuchi and his colleagues took primordial germ cells from an embryonic North American rainbow trout and transplanted them into the embryos of the masu salmon, which is only found in east Asia. Although the two species are related – they both belong to a group known as the salmonids – they have been separated by at least eight million years of evolutionary history.

The findings have important commercial implications, because some of the rarest fish in the world, such as the bluefin tuna, are those that are being hunted to extinction.

Read the exciting paper related to this research here: http://www.nature.com/news/2007/070910/full/070910-11.html

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Yes you can transform yourself into another person by rewriting your DNA

Project Helix is the name of this technology.In this technology;the device is used to rewrite a person's DNA, effectively morphing them into a clone of the person from whom the replacement DNA was procured. The only way to detect a double is through a deliberate flaw built into the process, detectable by an ocular scan. It is unknown whether the process is reversible.

Since its creation, there have been three known and two possible subjects of Project Helix:

Confirmed Project Helix subjects:

* Jim Lennox - A CIA agent who, with his partner (and fiancée) Emma Wallace, infiltrated the organization of Helix inventor Dr. Enzo Markovic. Lennox was captured and used as the genetic source to transform Markovic into his double. Lennox was rescued by a CIA team led by Sydney Bristow and traveled with her to Poland to retrieve the schematics of the Helix device and destroy it. There they encountered Markovic, still Lennox's double. Lennox killed Markovic and Sydney destroyed the Helix equipment, but not before discovering that another duplicate had been created.

* Francie Calfo - Sydney's roommate and best friend. An agent named Allison Doren, lover of Julian Sark, was transformed into Francie's double and then killed Francie. Allison used Francie's identity to infiltrate and bug Sydney's apartment and continue Francie's relationship with Will Tippin. Will was at the time working as an analyst for the CIA and Allison hypnotically extracted intel from him as he slept. He and Sydney became suspicious of Allison, which led Allison to attempt to kill Will. Sydney exposed Allison as an impostor (by offering her coffee ice cream, which Francie hated) and Sydney and Allison engaged in a pitched battle, leaving both of them critically wounded and presumed dead. Both survived, and Allison was later killed by Will.

* Irina Derevko - Sydney's mother, former KGB agent and leader of an international criminal enterprise. She was doubled as part of a plot by her sister, Elena. An unnamed member of Elena's organization, The Covenant, volunteered to be doubled. The faux Irina was killed by Jack Bristow after Elena set it up to look like Irina had taken out a contract on Sydney's life.

Possible Project Helix subjects:
* Doctor Aldo Desantis - Researcher with Prophet Five. He was in a cryogenic case that was stolen by sometime APO ally Renée Rienne under the belief that her father, Luc Goursad, was inside. When Rienne opened the case and Desantis emerged, he initially attempted to impersonate her father but was swiftly uncovered as an impostor by Sydney. He was extracted by Gordon Dean. Desantis was later tortured by Jack Bristow in an attempt to locate Sydney (who was being held captive by Prophet Five on a ship in the North Atlantic) and then killed by Rienne.

* Anna Espinosa - Former KGB agent, former agent of K-Directorate, follower of Milo Rambaldi and later a freelancer. Anna was transformed into a duplicate of Sydney by Prophet Five in an effort to allow Anna to serve as the "Chosen One" spoken of in the prophecies of Rambaldi. While doubling Sydney, Anna murdered Rienne. Anna attempted to deceive Michael Vaughn into believing she was Sydney but was unsuccessful. She and Vaughn battled in an underground bunker in Germany and Anna was about to shoot him. Sydney, however, intervened and killed Anna, briefly assuming her identity to infiltrate Prophet Five.


It was with Anna's doubling that something of the mechanics of genetic doubling were shown. Initially a small sample of Sydney's DNA was collected (by cutting her in combat). Sydney was later locked in a train car and additional genetic material was collected by deluging her with an unknown chemical agent. The chemical was collected and Anna was submerged in it for an unknown length of time (in the episode "Double Agent" Jack Bristow states that the subject must be placed in an induced coma for "several days").

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Engineers Bring Self Charging Mobile Phones Closer to Reality

Imagine a self-powering cell phone that never needs to be charged because it converts sound waves produced by the user into the energy it needs to keep running. It's not as far-fetched as it may seem thanks to the recent work of Tahir Cagin, a professor in the Artie McFerrin Department of Chemical Engineering at Texas A&M University. Utilizing materials known in scientific circles as "piezoelectrics," Cagin, whose research focuses on nanotechnology, has made a significant discovery in the area of power harvesting – a field that aims to develop self-powered devices that do not require replaceable power supplies, such as batteries.

Specifically, Cagin and his partners from the University of Houston have found that a certain type of piezoelectric material can covert energy at a 100 percent increase when manufactured at a very small size – in this case, around 21 nanometers in thickness. What's more, when materials are constructed bigger or smaller than this specific size they show a significant decrease in their energy-converting capacity, he said. His findings, which are detailed in an article published this fall in "Physical Review B," the scientific journal of the American Physical Society, could have potentially profound effects for low-powered electronic devices such as cell phones, laptops, personal communicators and a host of other computer-related devices used by everyone from the average consumer to law enforcement officers and even soldiers in the battlefield.

Many of these high-tech devices contain components that are measured in nanometers – a microscopic unit of measurement representing one-billionth of a meter. Atoms and molecules are measured in nanometers, and a human hair is about 100,000 nanometers wide. Though Cagin's subject matter is small, its impact could be huge. His discovery stands to advance an area of study that has grown increasingly popular due to consumer demand for compact portable and wireless devices with extended lifespans. Battery life remains a major concern for popular mp3 players and cell phones that are required to perform an ever-expanding array of functions. But beyond mere consumer convenience, self-powering devices are of major interest to several federal agencies.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has investigated methods for soldiers in the field to generate power for their portable equipment through the energy harvested from simply walking. And sensors – such as those used to detect explosives – could greatly benefit from a self-powering technology that would reduce the need for the testing and replacing of batteries. "Even the disturbances in the form of sound waves such as pressure waves in gases, liquids and solids may be harvested for powering nano- and micro devices of the future if these materials are processed and manufactured appropriately for this purpose," Cagin said. Key to this technology, Cagin explained, are piezoelectrics.

Derived from the Greek word "piezein," which means "to press," piezoelectrics are materials (usually crystals or ceramics) that generate voltage when a form of mechanical stress is applied. Conversely, they demonstrate a change in their physical properties when an electric field is applied. Discovered by French scientists in the 1880s, piezoelectrics aren't a new concept. They were first used in sonar devices during World War I. Today they can be found in microphones and quartz watches. Cigarette lighters in automobiles also contain piezoelectrics. Pressing down the lighter button causes impact on a piezoelectric crystal that in turn produces enough voltage to create a spark and ignite the gas. On a grander scale, some night clubs in Europe feature dance floors built with piezoelectrics that absorb and convert the energy from footsteps in order to help power lights in the club. And it's been reported that a Hong Kong gym is using the technology to convert energy from exercisers to help power its lights and music.

While advances in those applications continue to progress, piezoelectric work at the nanoscale is a relatively new endeavor with different and complex aspects to consider, said Cagin. For example, imagine going from working with a material the size and shape of a telephone post to dealing with that same material the size of a hair, he said. When such a significant change in scale occurs, materials react differently. In this case, something the size of a hair is much more pliable and susceptible to change from its surrounding environment, Cagin noted. These types of changes have to be taken into consideration when conducting research at this scale, he said. "When materials are brought down to the nanoscale dimension, their properties for some performance characteristics dramatically change," said Cagin who is a past recipient of the prestigious Feynman Prize in Nanotechnology. "One such example is with piezoelectric materials.

We have demonstrated that when you go to a particular length scale – between 20 and 23 nanometers – you actually improve the energy-harvesting capacity by 100 percent. "We're studying basic laws of nature such as physics and we're trying to apply that in terms of developing better engineering materials, better performing engineering materials. We're looking at chemical constitutions and physical compositions. And then we're looking at how to manipulate these structures so that we can improve the performance of these materials."

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