Science Headlines for December 11, 2008

Brand-name Drugs Do Not Appear Superior To Generic Drugs For Treating Cardiovascular Diseases

Contrary to the perception of some patients and physicians, there is no evidence that brand-name drugs are clinically superior to their generic counterparts, according to a new article, which examined studies comparing the effectiveness of generic vs. brand-name drugs for treating cardiovascular diseases.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 12 Dec 2008 | 1:00 am

Maintaining Brain's Wiring In Aging And Disease

Researchers have discovered that the brain's circuitry survives longer than previously thought in diseases of aging such as Alzheimer's disease.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 12 Dec 2008 | 1:00 am

Genetic Patterning In Fruit Fly Development Identified

No matter the species, from flies to humans, we all start the same: a single-cell fertilized egg that embarks on an incredible journey. The specifics of this journey are being uncovered by one biologist who is researching how from one cell a jumble of many are able to organize and communicate, allowing life to spring forth.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 12 Dec 2008 | 1:00 am

Methane, Potent Greenhouse Gas, Flowing Into The Atmosphere From Tundra Much Faster Than Expected

Much more methane gas is being emitted into the atmosphere from the tundra in northeast Greenland than previous studies have shown. New figures reveal that large amounts of greenhouse gases are being emitted into the atmosphere, not just during the warm summer months, but also during the colder autumn months.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 12 Dec 2008 | 1:00 am

Key Event That Breaks Continents Apart Discovered

Researchers have captured for the first time a geological event considered key in shaping the Earth's landscape. The first "dyking event" ever recorded within the planet's continental crust.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 12 Dec 2008 | 1:00 am

High School Sports: Football Leads Sports Associated With Rare Injuries

Rare injuries accounted for 3.5 percent of high school athletes' injuries 2005 through 2007, according to the first study to examine rare injuries and conditions of US high school athletes. Rare injuries include eye injuries, dental injuries, neck and cervical injuries and dehydration and heat illness, which may result in high morbidity, costly surgeries and treatments or life-altering consequences.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 12 Dec 2008 | 1:00 am

Sugar Can Be Addictive: Animal Studies Show Sugar Dependence

Scientists have demonstrated that sugar can be an addictive substance, wielding its power over the brains of lab animals in a manner similar to many drugs of abuse. Researchers found profound behavioral changes in rats that, through experimental conditions, have been trained to become dependent on high doses of sugar. Lab animals that were denied sugar for a prolonged period after learning to binge worked harder to get it when it was reintroduced to them. They consumed more sugar than they ever had before, suggesting craving and relapse behavior.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 11 Dec 2008 | 10:00 pm

Model Unravels Rules That Govern How Genes Are Switched On And Off

For years, scientists have struggled to decipher the genetic instruction book that details where and when the 20,000 genes in a human cell will be turned on or off. Different genes operate in each cell type at different times, and this careful orchestration is what ultimately distinguishes a brain cell from a liver or skin cell. Scientists have developed a model of gene expression in yeast that predicts with a high degree of accuracy whether a gene will be switched on or off. Genes operate in each cell type at different times, and this careful orchestration is what ultimately distinguishes a brain cell from a liver or skin cell.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 11 Dec 2008 | 10:00 pm

Breast Cancer Treatment Offers Better Outcome To Women With Implants

Women with early-stage breast cancer who have undergone breast augmentation may be treated successfully with a partial-breast radiation treatment called brachytherapy, according to a new study.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 11 Dec 2008 | 10:00 pm

Vaccine And Drug Research Aimed At Ticks And Mosquitoes To Prevent Disease Transmission

Most successful vaccines and drugs rely on protecting humans or animals by blocking certain bacteria from growing in their systems. But a new theory actually hopes to take stopping infectious diseases such as West Nile virus and Malaria to the next level by disabling insects from transmitting these viruses.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 11 Dec 2008 | 10:00 pm

How Crazy Ideas Could Power the Future (LiveScience.com)

LiveScience.com - Editor's Note: Each Wednesday LiveScience examines the viability of emerging energy technologies - the power of the future.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 11 Dec 2008 | 1:11 pm

Fertility drugs may increase risk of womb cancer

Women who take fertility drugs to boost ovulation may have an increased risk of developing womb cancer in later life, a study has found.

Scientists examined the medical records of 15,000 women who gave birth 30 years ago and found that those who had taken fertility-enhancing drugs were significantly more likely to be diagnosed with womb cancer than those who did not have the treatment.

Of 567 women who were given any type of drug to boost ovulation, five developed womb cancer, about three times as many as would be expected in the general population.

The 362 women who took a fertility drug called clomiphene had a four-fold increased risk of developing womb cancer. The drug prompts the body to make more eggs by inhibiting the activity of the sex hormone oestrogen.

The team, led by Dr Ronit Calderon-Margalit at Hadassah-Hebrew University in Jerusalem, also found that fertility drugs were associated with smaller but significant increases in the risk of breast cancer, malignant skin cancer and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.

The study appears in the American Journal of Epidemiology.

Jodie Moffat at Cancer Research UK said the study was too small to draw any firm conclusions about the drug. "This study didn't include a detailed history of fertility drug use, and the number of women who developed uterine cancer was very small," she told New Scientist magazine.

Calderon-Margalit said the findings made sense, adding that the breast cancer drug tamoxifen, which works in a similar way to clomiphene, also increases the risk of womb cancer.

A spokesman for the pharmaceutical company Sanofi-Aventis, which markets clomiphene, said: "This safety concern had already been debated by experts and so far no formal conclusion has been established."

He added that the company was "committed to evaluating any new evidence and discussing with experts and healthcare authorities the appropriate information measures".

Clomiphene is considered a first step in fertility treatment for couples who have trouble conceiving when there is no obvious medical problem. If this fails, women may receive hormone injections that trigger the ovaries to produce lots of eggs at once.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Source: Science | guardian.co.uk | 11 Dec 2008 | 12:51 pm

Drought-Resistant Rice Genes Make Sturdy Crop

By zeroing in on genes, scientists create rice crops that thrive even in drought.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 11 Dec 2008 | 12:39 pm

World needs 'climate revolution'

As ministers begin climate change talks, UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon calls for "new global solidarity" on the issue.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 11 Dec 2008 | 12:33 pm

Bizarre New Robot Jumps and Rolls (LiveScience.com)

LiveScience.com - A robot that can jump like a grasshopper and roll like a ball might be the next best thing for space exploration. The "Jollbot" is the first robot with the ability to leap over obstacles and roll over smoother terrain, said engineer Rhodri Armour and colleagues from the University of Bath's Center for Biomimetic & Natural Technologies in England. ...
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 11 Dec 2008 | 11:42 am

Energy secretary pick argues for new fuel sources (AP)

AP - Steven Chu, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist who is President-elect Barack Obama's choice for energy secretary, has been a vocal advocate for more research into alternative energy, arguing that a shift away from fossil fuels is essential to combat global warming.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 11 Dec 2008 | 10:43 am

UN's Ban: invest in fighting climate change (AP)

AP - U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has warned the world against backsliding in the fight against climate change as it tackles the global financial crisis.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 11 Dec 2008 | 10:23 am

Dying to support animal rights? Try a PETA coffin (AP)

AP - For animal rights activists, sticking up for furry or feathered critters is a way of life. Now it can be a way of death, too.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 11 Dec 2008 | 10:13 am

Calif. set to adopt sweeping global warming plan (AP)

AP - California's utilities, refineries and large factories must transform their operations to cut greenhouse gas emissions as part of a new climate plan before state regulators.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 11 Dec 2008 | 8:52 am

Violent storms damage dozens of homes across South (AP)

AP - A night of unseasonably warm weather generated torrential rains and tornadoes that damaged two schools and dozens of homes in the South, where snow began to fall in some areas Wednesday after temperatures dropped.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 11 Dec 2008 | 5:57 am

Obesity is a Family Affair (HealthDay)

HealthDay - WEDNESDAY, Dec. 10 (HealthDay News) -- Although genetics likely play a role in whether or not someone becomes overweight or obese, a family's lifestyle also has a major impact on the chances of a teenager winding up overweight, a new study shows.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 11 Dec 2008 | 4:48 am

Shuttle makes pit stop in Texas on way to Florida (AP)

AP - The space shuttle Endeavour is making a pit stop in Texas on its way home to Cape Canaveral, Fla.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 11 Dec 2008 | 1:46 am

Food intolerance may cause diabetes

A common type of diabetes that affects young people may be caused by an adverse reaction to food, scientists have found.

Suspicion has fallen on diet as a trigger for type 1 diabetes, which is usually diagnosed in childhood, following the surprise discovery that the condition is genetically similar to coeliac disease, a gut disorder caused by intolerance to gluten, a protein found in wheat.

Genetic tests on nearly 20,000 people revealed that those with type 1 diabetes and coeliac disease shared seven unusual genetic regions that were not seen in healthy volunteers. The finding will prompt scientists to investigate whether gluten or other dietary factors may cause diabetes in young people who are genetically susceptible to the condition.

Early-onset diabetes occurs when the body's immune system mistakenly attacks cells in the pancreas that produce insulin, which is needed to control blood sugar levels. Around 250,000 in Britain are diagnosed with the condition, which can lead to blindness, limb amputations, kidney failure and heart disease.

Coeliac disease affects about 1% of the population and is also caused by a malfunction in the immune system, but because it attacks gut cells that can grow back, the disease is treatable.

"What we need to look at now is if there is a dietary trigger for type 1 diabetes," said David van Heel, a geneticist at Barts and the London School of Medicine and Dentistry, who co-authored the study in the New England Journal of Medicine.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Source: Science | guardian.co.uk | 11 Dec 2008 | 12:15 am

Tim Dowling: The bright side

Retail Sales Still Falling. House Prices Still Falling. Pound Still Falling. UK Manufacturing Output Still Falling. Hey, Mr Headline Writer - tell us something we don't know. There's a recession on. We get it.

With so much of the media intent on reminding us that the global economic collapse is still there every morning, it's sometimes difficult to find the good news between the headlines, little signs that this bracing market correction is putting us back on track values-wise. Well, here's some: gloomy financial news is actually supplanting celebrity culture in the public imagination. According to Google, search terms related to the credit crunch featured more often in 2008 than terms connected with celebrities. And what was the most popular subject after the financial crisis? Politics. And after that? Cupcake recipes. The economy may be going downhill fast, but the rest of us, it seems, are heading in the right direction.

In other great news, the Hubble space telescope has finally tracked down a planet with an atmosphere rich in CO2, water vapour and methane, which means it could support, and may already contain, life. If things don't improve round here, Planet HD 189733b - remember that name - could form an essential part of our ultimate bail-out strategy. At the moment Nasa is saying it's too hot to sustain humans, but let's wait and see if they're still saying that when our own oceans reach a rolling boil.

No one's suggesting we shouldn't have a crack at weathering the storm first, but it's nice to know we have options. See you in the transporter room.

Recession-busting tip: Have a friend dress up as Father Christmas and drop by one evening next week in order to explain to your children how the credit crunch has forced him to trim his toy budget by 40%. What are they gonna do - argue with Santa?

What's going cheap right now: Toothbrushes, chalk, sweet mango chutney, grout.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Source: Science | guardian.co.uk | 11 Dec 2008 | 12:14 am

Nobel-Winning Physicist Rumored to Be Obama's Pick for Energy Secretary

Steven Chu Primer

Quick bio: Nobel Prize-winning physicist, current director of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Long-time laser researcher at Stanford and Bell Labs.
Official line: Lawrence Berkeley Official Bio
Video: Chu speaking earlier this year at the National Energy Forum
Video: Chu on his career in science
Reactions: Guardian (UK): "We're going to want to have a person like Chu at the helm, guiding the agency out of the wreckage of the Bush years."
Reactions: NYT's DotEarth: "He differs with former Vice President Al Gore on what’s necessary to transform the world from a fossil norm to abundant renewable energy options."
Reactions: Climate Progress: "Terrific choice"
AP story: Officials say Obama chooses energy, EPA posts

If the rumors are true, and I dearly hope they are, President-elect Barack Obama could not have made a better choice to head up the Department of Energy than Nobel Prize-winning physicist Steven Chu.

At his current post as the director of the DOE's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Chu's goal has been nothing short of solving the world's energy problems. When I interviewed him four years ago for the Contra Costa Times when he took the job as director, he told me, "Wouldn't it be nice if we could solve this problem? I think we're poised to help in a major way."

Since then he has been hard at work chasing this ambitious goal, and making an impressive amount of progress. He was the driving force behind big energy projects at Berkeley Lab such as the solar energy initiative known as Helios, set to begin construction in 2010.

He also led the way in creating the Joint BioEnergy Institute which is working toward developing biofuels and the Energy Biosciences Institute.

Chu won the Nobel Prize for physics in 1997 for work he did at Bell Labs devising a way to cool, trap and manipulate individual atoms with laser light. After Bell Labs, he worked at Stanford University where he was a driving force behind a $150 million project called Bio-X designed to bring scientists from different fields together to solve problems. In 2004, he became the first Asian American to head a DOE lab.

The potential to make an impact by finding and developing a new source of sustainable energy for the world is what drew him to Berkeley Lab.

And now he is on the verge of being in a position to make a much bigger impact as Secretary of Energy. If he does indeed land the job, I have no doubt that it will be a very good thing for the country.

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 10 Dec 2008 | 11:37 pm

'The Day the Earth Stood Still' Remake Goes Green

In the remake, aliens reprimand humanity for treating the Earth poorly.
Source: Livescience.com | 10 Dec 2008 | 11:12 pm

U.S. aerospace urges Obama to keep its flame bright

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The chief trade group for arms makers and others in the U.S. aerospace industry said it was a job-creating bright spot in a bleak economy and urged President-elect Barack Obama to keep it that way.

Source: Reuters: Science News | 10 Dec 2008 | 11:10 pm

U.S. nanotechnology plans fall short: report

CHICAGO (Reuters) - The U.S. plan for the emerging field of nanotechnology lacks vision, fails to assess risk and leaves the industry vulnerable to public mistrust, the National Research Council said in a report released on Wednesday.

Source: Reuters: Science News | 10 Dec 2008 | 11:03 pm

Orchards of the Sun: Solar Power Springs Up

How much of the Sun's energy can be harvested? Is solar truly the most sustainable power source? Visit the Googleplex, home of Google.com, to find out.
Source: Livescience.com | 10 Dec 2008 | 10:33 pm

Toxin-Gobbling Bugs Could Clean Ocean Dead Zones

Bacteria that break down toxic compounds may have tricked scientists into underestimating the threat posed by spreading oceanic dead zones. But there's a silver lining: the bacteria might help bring them back to life.

In a 4,200-square-mile Atlantic ocean swath off the coast of Namibia, bacteria converted lethal sulphide into foul-smelling but otherwise harmless sulphur and sulphate.

"This is the first time that large-scale detoxification of sulphidic waters by chemolithotrophs has been observed in an ocean-open system," write European microbiologists and geochemists in a paper published Wednesday in Nature.

Sulphide is a major cause of the destruction found in eutrophic waters — where an excess of nutrients, usually from agricultural waste and human sewage, produces massive algal blooms whose decomposition releases sulphide and feeds oxygen-hungry bacteria. Chemically toxic and stripped of oxygen, the resulting waters soon become inhospitable to life. More than 400 dead zones have already been found among continental coastlines, often in prime commercial fishing habitat, and their size and frequency are increasing.

If sulphide-gobbling bacteria could be used to clean these dead zones, said biologist Robert Diaz of the Virginia Institute of Marine Sciences, who was not involved in the study. "It would be a great benefit."

But Diaz cautioned that controlling the bacteria could prove difficult, and cleansed waters would still be low in oxygen. Better to prevent ocean-strangling pollution in the first place, he said.

Marcel Kuypers, a study co-author and Max Planck Institute microbiologist, was also cautious of open-ocean bacterial remediation, though he said bacteria could be used to clean ponds in fish farms.

The implications of the findings, he said, are less immediately practical than foreboding.

Bacteria may detoxify sulphidic areas before our satellites notice them, but not before marine life is extinguished.

"We may have underestimated the damage caused to ocean ecosystems by human-produced eutrophic events," said Kuypers.

Detoxification of sulphidic African shelf waters by blooming chemolithotrophs [Nature]

Image: World Resources Institute

See Also:

WiSci 2.0: Brandon Keim's Twitter stream and Del.icio.us feed; Wired Science on Facebook.

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 10 Dec 2008 | 9:50 pm

Sugar Can Be Addictive, Study Suggests

A study of rats finds they show all the signs of addiction to sugar.
Source: Livescience.com | 10 Dec 2008 | 9:20 pm

Brain-Enhancing Drugs: Legalize 'Em, Scientists Say

If drugs can safely give your brain a boost, why not take them? And if you don't want to, why stop others?

In an era when attention-disorder drugs are regularly — and illegally — being used for off-label purposes by people seeking a better grade or year-end job review, these are timely ethical questions.

The latest answer comes from Nature, where seven prominent ethicists and neuroscientists recently published a paper entitled, "Towards a responsible use of cognitive-enhancing drugs by the healthy."

In short: Legalize 'em.

"Mentally competent adults," they write, "should be able to engage in cognitive enhancement using drugs."

Roughly seven percent of all college students, and up to 20 percent of scientists, have already used Ritalin or Adderall — originally intended to treat attention-deficit disorders — to improve their mental performance.

Some people argue that chemical cognition-enhancement is a form of cheating. Others say that it's unnatural. The Nature authors counter these charges: Brain boosters are only cheating, they say, if prohibited by the rules — which need not be the case. As for the drugs being unnatural, the authors argue, they're no more unnatural than medicine, education and housing.

In many ways, the arguments are compelling. Nobody rejects pasteurized milk or dental anesthesia or central heating because it's unnatural. And whether a brain is altered by drugs, education or healthy eating, it's being altered at the same neurobiological level. Making moral distinctions between them is arbitrary.

But if a few people use cognition-enhancing drugs, might everyone else be forced to follow, whether they want to or not?

If enough people improve their performance, then improvement becomes the status quo. Brain-boosting drug use could become a basic job requirement.

Ritalin and Adderall, now ubiquitous as academic pick-me-ups, are merely the first generation of brain boosters. Next up is Provigil, a "wakefulness promoting agent" that lets people go for days without sleep, and improves memory to boot. More powerful drugs will follow.

As the Nature authors write, "cognitive enhancements affect the most complex and important human organ and the risk of unintended side effects is therefore both high and consequential." But even if their safety could be assured, what happens when workers are expected to be capable of marathon bouts of high-functioning sleeplessness?

Most people I know already work 50 hours a week and struggle to find time for friends, family and the demands of life. None wish to become fully robotic in order to keep their jobs. So I posed the question to Michael Gazzaniga, a University of California, Santa Barbara, psychobiologist and Nature article co-author.

"It is possible to do all of that now with existing drugs," he said. "One has to set their goals and know when to tell their boss to get lost!"

Which is not, perhaps, the most practical career advice these days. And Penn State neuroethicist Martha Farah, another of the paper's authors, was a bit less sanguine.

"First the early adopters use the enhancements to get an edge. Then, as more people adopt them, those who don't, feel they must just to stay competitive with what is, in effect, a new higher standard," she said.

Citing the now-normal stresses produced by expectations of round-the-clock worker availability and inhuman powers of multitasking, Farah said, "There is definitely a risk of this dynamic repeating itself with cognition-enhancing drugs."

But people are already using them, she said. Some version of this scenario is inevitable — and the solution, she said, isn't to simply say that cognition enhancement is bad.

Instead we should develop better drugs, understand why people use them, promote alternatives and create sensible policies that minimize their harm.

As Gazzaniga also pointed out, "People might stop research on drugs that may well help memory loss in the elderly" — or cognition problems in the young — "because of concerns over misuse or abuse."

This would certainly be unfortunate collateral damage in the 21st century theater of the War on Drugs — and the question of brain enhancement needs to be seen in the context of this costly and destructive war. As Schedule II substances, Ritalin and Adderall are legally equivalent in the United States to opium or cocaine.

"These laws," write the Nature authors, "should be adjusted to avoid making felons out of those who seek to use safe cognitive enhancements."

After all, according to the law's letter, seven percent of college students and 20 percent of scientists should have done jail time — this journalist, too.

Towards responsible use of cognitive-enhancing drugs by the healthy [Nature]

Image: Todd Page

See Also:

WiSci 2.0: Brandon Keim's Twitter stream and Del.icio.us feed; Wired Science on Facebook.

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 10 Dec 2008 | 9:09 pm

Robot Jumps Like a Grasshopper, Rolls Like a Ball

The “Jollbot” can jump over obstacles and roll over smoother terrain. [No Sound]
Source: Livescience.com | 10 Dec 2008 | 8:18 pm

Perfume vials from Christ's era unearthed in Israel

ROME (Reuters) - A team of Franciscan archaeologists digging in the biblical town of Magdala in what is now Israel say they have unearthed vials of perfume similar to those that may have been used by the woman said to have washed Jesus' feet.

Source: Reuters: Science News | 10 Dec 2008 | 7:57 pm

Water found in hot planet's orbit

Water vapour and CO2 have been detected in the atmosphere of a "hot Jupiter" exoplanet, scientists say.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 10 Dec 2008 | 7:52 pm

EPA Puts Environmental Fugitives on Most-wanted List

EPA makes up most-wanted list of fugitives wanted for environmental crimes.
Source: Livescience.com | 10 Dec 2008 | 6:58 pm

Who Owns the Moon?

A global rush to the moon has some pondering property rights out there.
Source: Livescience.com | 10 Dec 2008 | 6:37 pm

Water Vapor Confirmed on Alien Planet

The unequivocal signature of water vapor has been found on a planet beyond our solar system.

Using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope, astronomers detected the steamy signature of water vapor in the light coming from a large exoplanet circling around a star about 63 light-years from Earth. Though it's not the first sign of water vapor around this planet, it's the strongest evidence yet.

The planet, HD 189733b, is what's called a "Hot Jupiter" — a boiling, gigantic gas planet more akin to our own Jupiter or Saturn than to a terrestrial planet like Earth. It's not a good candidate itself for alien life, but the successful detection of water vapor here, in the location and quantities that theorists predicted, bodes well for further studies of more promising locales for extraterrestrial life.

"It means we're starting to understand these objects a little bit better than we did when we first started," astrophysicist Adam Burrows of Princeton University told Wired.com. "It’s a trial run for the much more detailed investigations that will be possible in the years to come as we take this stepping stone from giant planets to terrestrial planets."

Though water vapor is thought to be fairly common on planets — even our own Jupiter has it — the discovery of its presence on another world is significant and points the way toward future discoveries, scientists say. Yesterday scientists announced that the Hubble Space Telescope had found carbon dioxide, which under the right circumstances could be connected to life, on the same planet. The presence of methane has also been detected.

Burrows and the research team, led by Carl Grillmair of the California Institute of Technology, used a technique known as the secondary-eclipse method to observe the infrared light coming from the planet. The world is so close to its star that normally the light from the two objects cannot be distinguished. But when the planet orbits behind the star, only the light from the star is visible. By subtracting the star's light from the total light of star plus planet, the scientists were able to isolate only the planet's light. When they separated the image into its constituent colors in a process called spectroscopy, they found the characteristic dip in light of a certain wavelength that results from water in the planet's atmosphere absorbing that light.

"We’re looking at the brightness of the planet, as opposed to the effect of the stellar light," Burrows said. "The data we have is the best spectrum ever taken of a planet outside the solar system."

In an article accompanying the research paper, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, astronomer Drake Deming of the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, wrote, "We must first learn how to detect abundant molecules such as water before we can advance to identifying the more subtle signatures that scarcer molecules such as molecular oxygen leave in exoplanet spectra. Grillmair and colleagues have taken that first step."

Citation: "Strong water absorption in the dayside emission spectrum of the planet HD 189733b" by Carl J. Grillmair, Adam Burrows, David Charbonneau, Lee Armus, John Stauffer, Victoria Meadows, Jeffrey van Cleve, Kaspar von Braun and Deborah Levine. Nature: doi:10.1038/nature07574.

See Also:

Image: NASA/JPL-Caltech/T. Pyle (SSC)

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 10 Dec 2008 | 6:00 pm

Fifth of World's Corals Dead

Carbon emissions are largely to blame for the death of many of the world's reefs, say scientists.
Source: Discovery News Top Stories : Discovery Channel | 10 Dec 2008 | 5:03 pm

Study: More nano research needed (AP)

AP - The government needs a more comprehensive plan for studying the risks of nanotechnology, the National Research Council said Wednesday.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 10 Dec 2008 | 4:57 pm

What's inside a black hole?

Thanks to German astronomers, we now have the most accurate measurements yet of the giant black hole that sits at the centre of our galaxy.

And what a beast it is: as wide as Earth's orbit around the sun and 4.3 million times more massive than our home star. Lucky, then, that it is 27,000 light years away.

Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics used two telescopes operated by the European Southern Observatory in Chile to watch stars as they circled the centre of the Milky Way. The 16-year study, now published in the Astrophysical Journal, has proved beyond doubt that lurking at the very centre of the galaxy is a black hole.

Black holes are clearly intriguing, and not just to scientists. Earlier today, a colleague known more for his in-depth investigations into the wrongdoings of governments and multinationals than his knowledge of quantum gravity, asked what seems like a simple question: "What's inside a black hole?" Sensing my attempt at an answer wasn't good enough, I called Stefan Gillessen, one of the authors of the latest study, for an explanation.

To begin with, he pointed out that scientists should only ask questions that can be answered, and since it is impossible to get information out of a black hole (in the form of light, for example) we can never really know. But let's not give up just yet.

Black holes are created when large stars explode and collapse in on themselves. Many will have masses similar to our own sun, but others grow to much larger masses.

Theoretical physicists have thought long and hard about what goes on inside black holes and their conclusions are mind-bending to say the least. Despite the fact that they suck in material from anything and everything that strays too close, they are empty. The mass of a black hole is confined to an infinitely small point at its centre, called a singularity.

How much blackness surrounds a singularity – in effect, the size of the black hole – is defined by the strength of its gravitational pull. Far away from a black hole, light can zip around as usual, lighting up the heavens as it goes. But closer to a black hole, gravity becomes stronger and stronger until eventually, not even light can move fast enough to escape its pull. This is why a singularity is surrounded by a vast sphere of darkness. The point at which the hole's gravity becomes strong enough to prevent light escaping is known as the event horizon.

"To know what's inside a black hole, we need something to come out from behind the event horizon, and reach us via a telescope. The easiest thing for astronomers would be light, but a black hole is so massive not even light can escape so no information can get out," he said. "You could go and look, but once you're in you never come back out again."

Gillessen admits to feeling uncomfortable about the concept of singularities, but the late John Wheeler, who coined the term "black hole" in 1967, put it nicely in his 1999 autobiography, "Geons, Black Holes and Quantum Foam: A Life in Physics". He said black holes teach us that "space can be crumpled like a piece of paper into an infinitesimal dot, that time can be extinguished like a blown out flame, and that the laws of physics that we regard as sacred, as immutable, are anything but."

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2008 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Source: Science | guardian.co.uk | 10 Dec 2008 | 4:42 pm

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