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Tailor-made Recombinant Proteins In Mammals"Aldehyde tags" are used to label proteins in bacterial recombinant-DNA systems -- and now in proteins that can only be expressed by mammalian systems. While some recombinant drugs like insulin are made in bacterial systems, most have to be produced by mammalian cells. Aldehyde tags direct chemical modifications to specific sites on proteins, including monoclonal antibodies and other therapeutics important in the pharmaceutical industry.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 15 Feb 2009 | 10:00 pm Better Artificial Nose Inspired By Sniffer-dogsFor the sensitive work of detecting explosives and drugs in airports and other high-risk areas, humans have long relied on a marvel of evolutionary biology: the sniffer dog. The canine nose can detect a seemingly infinite range of odors, alone and in combination, at concentrations down to the parts per trillion level.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 15 Feb 2009 | 10:00 pm Pre-verbal Number Sense Common To Monkeys, Babies, College KidsScientists are studying how human adults and infants, lemurs, and monkeys think about numbers without using language. One researcher is looking for the brain systems that support number sense and trying to figure out how this cognitive skill develops.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 15 Feb 2009 | 10:00 pm Inuit Trails Represent Complex Social Network Spanning Canadian ArcticInuit trails are more than merely means to get from A to B. In reality, they represent a complex social network spanning the Canadian Arctic and are a distinctive aspect of the Inuit cultural identity. And what is remarkable is that the Inuit's vast geographic knowledge has been passed through many generations by oral means, without the use of maps or any other written documentation.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 15 Feb 2009 | 10:00 pm Volcanic Spreading And Lateral Variations In Structure Of Olympus Mons, MarsThe immense Olympus Mons volcano on Mars (about 23 km tall and 600 km wide) exhibits a somewhat lopsided structure: elongated to the northwest, shortened to the southeast, with corresponding types of faulting (extensional and compressional, respectively) prevalent in each sector.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 15 Feb 2009 | 10:00 pm Shades Of 1918? Comparing Avian Flu With A Notorious Killer From The PastScientists compared the recent avian strain known in the scientific community as H5N1, with genetic ressortants of the 1918 virus -- source of the most severe influenza pandemic in recorded history. H5N1 was found to replicate profusely within the first 24 hours, causing severe damage to respiratory tissues while sending the host's innate immune response into a lethal overdrive, reminiscent of the trajectory of the original 1918 virus.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 15 Feb 2009 | 10:00 pm New Data Suggest 'Jumping Genes' Play A Significant Role In Gene Regulatory NetworksNew research suggests that mobile repetitive elements -- also known as transposons or "jumping genes" -- do indeed affect the evolution of gene regulatory networks.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 15 Feb 2009 | 4:00 pm Climate Change Likely To Be More Devastating Than Experts Predicted, Warns Top IPCC ScientistWithout decisive action, global warming is likely to accelerate at a much faster pace and cause more environmental damage than predicted, says Stanford scientist Chris Field, a leading member of the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Field warns that higher temperatures could ignite tropical forests and melt the Arctic tundra, releasing billions of tons of greenhouse gas that could raise temperatures even more -- a vicious cycle that could spiral out of control.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 15 Feb 2009 | 4:00 pm How Deadly Fungus Protects ItselfResearchers have discovered how a deadly microbe evades the human immune system and causes disease. The study may help scientists develop new therapies or vaccines against infections caused by Cryptococcus neoformans. These fungal infections occur most commonly in those with compromised immune systems ý especially AIDS patients and transplant patients who must take lifelong immunosuppressive therapy.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 15 Feb 2009 | 4:00 pm Ways To Minimize Tinnitus -- Troublesome Noises In The EarsRinging, whining, whistling, hissing or whooshing. Any of those sounds in one or both ears when there is no external noise present could be a sign of tinnitus.Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 15 Feb 2009 | 4:00 pm Galaxy has 'billions of Earths'There could be one hundred billion Earth-like planets in the Milky Way galaxy, a US conference is told.Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 15 Feb 2009 | 10:25 am Cross Words: Talking About Bad Feelings Helps Control Them
CHICAGO — Perhaps all those blog posts you wrote about your break up really did have a purpose. Naming feelings takes some of the emotional impact out of them by engaging a brain region that aids self-control, according to new research. In a clever series of experiments, UCLA psychologist Matthew Lieberman found that labeling a picture of someone who looked angry as "angry" reduced the negative emotional feelings that most people feel when viewing such a photograph. "Putting feelings into words activates this region that's capable of producing emotional regulatory outcomes, which could explain why putting feelings into words dampens them down," Lieberman said in a presentation at the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences annual meeting on Saturday. While plenty of psychological treatments have involved talking about one's feelings, Lieberman's work is some of the first to demonstrate the underlying neural basis for the therapeutic nature of talking something out. The research is based on the idea that engaging a part of the brain that aids in self-control, the right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex helps put a damper on feelings, no matter how you get that part of the brain involved. First, the researchers had subjects view photographs of men and women with some positive and some negative facial expressions. The negative facial expressions tended to stimulate activity in the amygdala, a region of the brain associated with processing emotions. The researchers had the subjects play a simple game while looking at the photos. If the photo was of a woman — and 80 percent of the pictures were — they pressed the "go" button, but if the picture was of a man, they didn't press the button. In other words, their brain had to intervene to inhibit the motor response of pressing the button. Amazingly, the simple act of exerting self-control over the motor function by not pressing the button led to reduced emotional response to the bad feelings associated with the negative photographs. They call the idea "inhibitory spillover." In the next set of studies, they had two sets of people label the photos either with simple gender name matching — match Seth to the picture of a man, not Sarah — or with the emotions on the faces of the people in the pictures. The subjects who named the emotions experienced less negative emotion associated with bad images. It's important to note that the emotional regulatory effect didn't come from some sort of increased self-awareness about one's relationship to the emotion. The more tightly-regulated emotional response was practically a side effect of the cognitive task of labeling the emotion in the face. It's possible that these techniques could be used to treat fear-based conditions from arachnophobia, the fear of spiders, to zemmiphobia, the fear of the great mole rat. One downside: the researchers found that naming happy feelings also reduces their intensity, so the next time you're watching the Puppy Cam, you can keep all those "They are so cute!" comments to yourself. Image: flickr/lij See Also:
WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal's Twitter , Google Reader feed, and project site, Inventing Green: the lost history of American clean tech; Wired Science on Facebook. Source: Wired: Wired Science | 15 Feb 2009 | 6:23 am Global warming 'underestimated'The severity of global warming over the next century will be worse than forecast, a leading climate scientist warns.Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 15 Feb 2009 | 2:11 am New Artificial DNA Points to Alien Life (LiveScience.com)LiveScience.com - CHICAGO - A strange, new genetic code a lot like that found in all terrestrial life is sitting in a beaker full of oily water in a laboratory in Florida, a scientist said today, calling it the first example of an artificial chemical system that is capable of Darwinian evolution.Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 15 Feb 2009 | 1:07 am New Artificial DNA Points to Alien LifeA new artificial form of almost-life is sitting in a beaker full of oily water in a laboratory in Florida.Source: Livescience.com | 15 Feb 2009 | 12:55 am Think You'd Remember the Face of Your Torturer? Think Again
CHICAGO — Imagine you've just been through a Guantanamo-style interrogation by a man in a prisoner-of-war camp. You're sitting in an isolation cell, when another of your captors bursts in the door, brandishing a photo of a man, and asking, "Did your interrogator give you anything to eat?" The man leaves, but later as your ordeal is ending, you're asked to pick out your interrogator from nine faces. Surely, his image would be burned into your memory, right? Wrong. Using data from soldiers in a mock prisoner-of-war exercise within the Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape programs of the U.S. military, new research shows that eighty-five percent of soldiers chose the man in the photograph — who was not involved in any way — instead of the man who'd actually subjected them to what the military calls a "very stressful interrogation" that could have included a variety of physically demanding tasks and some violence. In other words, soldiers undergoing mock interrogations can be tricked by simple psychological techniques into misidentifying their interrogator. Combined with other research carried out by Elizabeth Loftus at the University of California, Irvine, psychologists are closing in on the exact procedures for creating false memories in individuals in a wide variety of circumstances. "It can be said that we're on the brink of having a recipe for how we go about developing a false memory," Loftus told a packed lecture hall here at the American Association for the Advancement of Sciences annual meeting on Saturday. The study of misinformation and false memories have consistently shown that human beings are highly susceptible to suggestion. Much of the work has focused on creating or changing people's memories of the past. Loftus gave several humorous examples of memories that her team has been able to plant in substantial portions of the people in their studies, including convincing people that they had gotten sick from eating strawberry ice cream or the Pluto character at Disneyland had licked "their ears disturbingly and uncomfortably" when they were young children. The point of these strange-sounding experiments is to find out how reliable human memory is, particularly under assault from misinformation or leading questions. What makes the interrogation research, led by Yale psychiatrist C. Andrew Morgan, so interesting is that the false memory of the interrogator was created mere hours after the experience. Even with the experience fresh in mind, the soldiers proved highly susceptible to misinformation. Loftus group has tested planting simple misinformation as well as far more complex schemes in her efforts to probe the accuracy of human eyewitness testimony. DNA evidence and other high-tech methods had already created some doubt about how iron-clad the information you receive from seeing something with your own two eyes really is. The research calls into question the entire eyewitness-based legal system. False memories implanted by researchers, it turns out, look basically identical to real memories. Neuroimaging machines can't tell them apart and neither can researchers. So now, Loftus and her team are working to find out exactly who is most susceptible to having their memories altered by misinformation. "I believe to some extent we're all susceptible to succumbing to false memories and having people tinker with our autobiographies," Loftus said, but a big brain can provide some measure of protection. "The smarter you are, the more you resist the misinformation." Image: Screenshot from Dr. Charles Andrew Morgan's presentation of the earliest findings to Yale's Psychiatry Department in late 2007. Wired.com front page image: flickr/angusmcdiarmid See Also:
WiSci 2.0: Alexis Madrigal's Twitter , Google Reader feed, and project site, Inventing Green: the lost history of American clean tech; Wired Science on Facebook. Source: Wired: Wired Science | 15 Feb 2009 | 12:49 am 10 Awesome Summer Internships for Science Students
If you're a college student thinking about becoming a scientist, now is the time to apply for summer internships. Aside from studying hard, the most important thing that you can do for yourself is get some research experience. The National Science Foundation sponsors hundreds of summer programs, which allow sophomores and juniors to get their first taste of real labwork. Most of them last ten weeks and pay more than 3,000 dollars to cover your living expenses. Here are some stellar examples: Amgen Scholars Program at Caltech Summer Internship at the National Institutes of Health in Maryland The Big Muddy Expedition on the Missouri River Marine Science Internships in Oregon Research Experiences in Science and Engineering at UCSB Astrophysics and Space Science at Baylor University Research Experiences at Mote Marine Laboratory in Florida Center for Embedded Networked Sensing at UCLA Summer Scholarships at the Carnegie Institution in Washington, DC Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship at UC Santa Cruz Photo: SMercury98 / flickr
Source: Wired: Wired Science | 14 Feb 2009 | 11:56 pm Vibrations 'could save elephants'Zoologists in Namibia experiment using vibrations from the sound of female elephants to lure rampaging males back to safety.Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 14 Feb 2009 | 11:27 pm Hurricane Season 2008 (weather.com)weather.com -Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 14 Feb 2009 | 11:06 pm Global warming seen worse than predictedCHICAGO (Reuters) - The climate is heating up far faster than scientists had predicted, spurred by sharp increases in greenhouse gas emissions from developing countries like China and India, a top climate scientist said on Saturday.Source: Reuters: Science News | 14 Feb 2009 | 9:46 pm Biotechnology's potential barely exploited: scientists (AFP)
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 14 Feb 2009 | 9:15 pm Richard Dawkins on DarwinRichard Dawkins on the relevance of evolutionSource: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 14 Feb 2009 | 8:21 pm Kissing: It really is all about chemistryCHICAGO (Reuters) - Valentine Lotharios beware: There's a lot riding on a kiss, new studies on the science of smooching suggest.Source: Reuters: Science News | 14 Feb 2009 | 7:47 pm Words give brain handle on feelings: U.S. researcherCHICAGO (Reuters) - Brain scientists are starting to understand something poets, songwriters and diarists have long known: putting feelings into words helps ease the mind.Source: Reuters: Science News | 14 Feb 2009 | 7:46 pm Complex cluesWhat kissing says about the kisser... and the kissedSource: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 14 Feb 2009 | 7:15 pm Doorstep Astronomy: Spot 5 Planets (SPACE.com)SPACE.com - This month you'll have an opportunity to see all five naked-eye planets – but not all at once. Two of them are evening objects, while the other three are clustered together low in the east-southeast sky deep in the dawn twilight.Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 14 Feb 2009 | 4:15 pm Asthma May Start in the WombChildren born in areas with increased traffic-related pollution could be at greater risk of developing asthma.Source: Livescience.com | 14 Feb 2009 | 3:52 pm Light 'could detect Parkinson's'A light as bright as a million-watt bulb could help identify early signs of Parkinson's disease, British researchers say.Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 14 Feb 2009 | 10:39 am
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