Science Headlines for March 6, 2009

Climate Change Affecting Europe's Birds Now, Say Researchers

Climate change is already having a detectable impact on birds across Europe, according to new research. They have shown a strong link between recent population changes of individual species and their projected future range changes, associated with climate change, among a number of widespread and common European birds, including the goldfinch and the lesser spotted woodpecker.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 6 Mar 2009 | 7:00 pm

Visual Cues Help People Understand Spoken Words

Seeing the lip and face movements as a person speaks can improve your understanding of spoken words by as much as sixfold, according to researchers.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 6 Mar 2009 | 7:00 pm

Influence Of 'Obesity Gene' Can Be Offset By Healthy Diet

Children who carry a gene strongly associated with obesity could offset its effect by eating a low energy density diet, according to new research.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 6 Mar 2009 | 7:00 pm

Muscular Dystrophy: Stem Cell Breakthrough Gives New Hope To Sufferers Of Muscle-wasting Diseases

An experimental procedure that dramatically strengthens stem cells' ability to regenerate damaged tissue could offer new hope to sufferers of muscle-wasting diseases such as myopathy and muscular dystrophy, according to researchers. The world-first procedure has been successfully used to regrow muscles in a mouse model, but it could be applied to all tissue-based illnesses in humans such as in the liver, pancreas or brain.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 6 Mar 2009 | 7:00 pm

Stem-cell Genes That Help Form Plant Organs Identified

Biologists have identified all the genes expressed in the stem cells of Arabidopsis, a mustard-like plant that is a model for studying plant biology. The achievement paves the way to developing better varieties of crops and plants. Besides revealing the molecular pathways that stem cells employ, the discovery also can help scientists better understand why stem cells -- in both plants and animals -- give rise to specialized cells at all.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 6 Mar 2009 | 7:00 pm

Geologists Map Rocks To Soak Carbon Dioxide From Air

A new report points to an abundant supply of carbon-trapping rock in the US that could be used to help stabilize global warming.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 6 Mar 2009 | 7:00 pm

Children With Hypertension Have Trouble With Thinking, Memory

Children with high blood pressure are not as good at complicated, goal-directed tasks, have more working memory problems and are not as adept at planning as their peers without hypertension, according to recent research. If they are both hypertensive and obese, they are also more likely to have anxiety and depression.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 6 Mar 2009 | 4:00 pm

Novel Pandemic Flu Vaccine Effective Against H5N1 In Mice

Virus-like particles offer a chicken egg-free method of producing influenza vaccines. Immunization with virus-like particles effectively protects mice from H5N1 influenza and could be an attractive mode of vaccination in humans.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 6 Mar 2009 | 4:00 pm

Assembling Cells Into Artificial 3-D Microtissues, Including A Tiny Gland

Chemists have developed a way to assemble cells into 3-D microtissues and even tiny glands, much like snapping together toy building blocks to make a simple machine. Such microtissues could serve as niches for studying how cells, such as stem cells, work together. Or they could be assembled into larger structures as artificial, implantable organs.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 6 Mar 2009 | 4:00 pm

Diversity Of Birds Buffer Against West Nile Virus

Scientists studying West Nile virus have shown that more diverse bird populations can help to buffer people against infection. Since the virus first spread to North America it has reached epidemic proportions and claimed over 1,100 human lives.
Source: ScienceDaily: Latest Science News | 6 Mar 2009 | 4:00 pm

Horses first domesticated 5,000 years ago (AP)

AP - Medieval knights, the warriors of Saladin, Roy Rogers and fans lining racetracks around the world all owe a debt to the Botai culture, residents of Central Asia who domesticated horses more than 5,000 years ago.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 6 Mar 2009 | 12:16 pm

Shark attack in New Caledonia kills French surfer (AP)

AP - Police say a shark has killed a young French surfer in the waters off the French territory of New Caledonia in the south Pacific.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 6 Mar 2009 | 11:32 am

Arctic diary

The team has a dramatic night on melting Arctic ice
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 6 Mar 2009 | 11:09 am

Hurricane Season 2008 (weather.com)

weather.com -
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 6 Mar 2009 | 11:07 am

Japan considers putting robot on moon

TOKYO (Reuters) - Japan is considering putting a robot on the moon by 2020 and an astronaut by 2030, a report from a government office showed on Friday, amid fears that the country will be left behind in Asia's space race.

Source: Reuters: Science News | 6 Mar 2009 | 10:43 am

Telescope 'cousins' meet at last

Europe's Herschel and Planck space observatories are in the same cleanroom, just weeks before their historic launch.
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 6 Mar 2009 | 10:43 am

Kepler telescope to hunt for Earth-like planets (AFP)

AFP - NASA is preparing to launch the Kepler space telescope Friday to help answer a question that has boggled the minds of astronomers for centuries: is Earth the only habitable planet in the galaxy?

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 6 Mar 2009 | 10:24 am

In pictures

Butterfly migration under threat in Mexico
Source: BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition | 6 Mar 2009 | 5:53 am

Oldest sea turtle fossil unveiled in Mexico (AFP)

AFP - Paleontologists on Thursday unveiled the oldest fossil remains of a sea turtle that lived 72 million years ago in northern Mexico, the National Institute of Anthropology and History (INAH) said.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 6 Mar 2009 | 3:53 am

New species of bamboo coral identified off Hawaii (AP)

AP - Scientists have identified seven new species of bamboo coral discovered thousands of feet below the ocean's surface, officials said Thursday.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 6 Mar 2009 | 2:19 am

Metal Bits Self-Assemble Into Lifelike Snakes

Magnetic_snakes

ARGONNE, Illinois — In the basement of a nondescript building here at Argonne National Laboratory, nickel particles in a beaker are building themselves into magnetic snakes that may one day give clues about how life originally organized itself.

These chains of metal particles look so much like real, living animals, it is hard not to think of them as alive. (See exclusive video below.) But they are actually bits of metal that came together under the influence of a specially tuned magnetic field.

"It behaves like some live object," says physicist Alex Snezhko. "It moves. It crashes onto free-floating particles and absorbs them."

On the spectrum of scientific endeavor, this is very far upstream in the realm where people are just trying to figure how stuff works and why. There is some talk of applications, but at the heart of it, this is really just pure research. Snezhko and fellow physicist Igor Aronson — both tall, thin men who have matching Russian accents and familial rapport — have discovered something really cool, and they're trying to simply figure out what's behind it. Along the way, they could learn something fundamental about how the world works.

Looking at how their particles self-organize, the scientists see echoes of herds of sheep and schools of fish. It seems that there might be some common rules that underpin the behavior and movement of groups of things, but it's not clear what those rules are. It took a couple of years of exhaustive research to figure out how the systems emerge, some of which will be published this week in Physical Review Letters A.

Perhaps, by studying this simple system, they can understand what Aronson calls "the fundamentals of self assembly, how nature can organize itself into ordered states." The idea is that if they can determine how magnetic fields and water tension can excite these particles into complex emergent behavior, they will get closer to understanding more complicated, messier systems — like the primordial soup from which life arose on Earth.

"We still don't know what physics is appropriate for biology. This is a wonderful intermediate," Iain Couzin, who heads Princeton's Collective Animal Behaviour Laboratory told Wired.com in a phone interview. "There's nothing biological about the interactions between the surface swimmers, but their collective dynamics can give us insight into how we can begin to study real biological systems."

Back at Argonne, this is physics for the fun of physics. Though Snezhko tried hard to kill the snakes when they first started forming during an unrelated experiment, they soon became more interesting than the experiment they were ruining. Now he and Aronson can't stop smiling as they talk about discovering something so unexpected. The system exhibits new, dynamic behavior every time they turn it on. It's mesmerizing.

The exciting science stands in stark contrast to the drab appearance of the Argonne campus. The low-slung, plain buildings look more like a middle school — complete with linoleum floors and fluorescent lighting — than a prestigious national lab doing world-class research.

But inside his basement lab, Snezhko shows us a captivating video of what looks almost like a line drawing of a small man — one larger "head" particle trailed by a "body" of skinny chains of particles — swimming around a beaker.

As it starts heading for other chains of particles in an unpredictable and eccentric way, it's nearly impossible not to anthropomorphize the structure. It just acts too much like life. The damn thing practically has ... personality.

"It also has a very bad temper," Aronson jokes, noting that this creature, this figment of nature, appears to "hunt" the other particles. Indeed it does. As you can see in the video, the metallic monster, technically known as a "surface swimmer," acts hungry. As it snatches more particles, it swims faster and faster.

The experimental setup is simple: just a liquid-filled beaker surrounded by a magnet. That magnet is hooked up to alternating current, which creates a magnetic field that can flip direction very quickly. Most of the time, when the scientists sprinkle particles into the liquid and turn on the current, nothing really interesting happens. Maybe the particles link together in static strings. But when the magnetic field is tuned just right, something strange happens. The particles snap into chains that just start swimming around.

"We call this structure Snake," Snezhko says, pointing to one of the simple structures, and indeed, it looks like that game you used to play on your pre-iPhone Nokia. (You can see a slew of other clips of the snakes at Wired Video.)

The snakes' motion, Snezhko says, is a kind of "resonance." As the magnetic field flips back and forth, the particles' movement changes the surface of the water, which changes how the particles move, which changes the surface of the water, and so on. The simulation they've developed, in the video below, helps show how the process starts.

By slightly changing the parameters — the frequency of the current, or the mixture of particle sizes — they can generate different types of systems. Besides the hunter, they've generated single- and multiple-snake systems, chains that stay still but pump water, and others that just shimmy in place.

"You have a deliberately nonbiological system, but it's behaving a bit like a biological system," says Iain Couzin, who heads Princeton's Collective Animal Behaviour Laboratory. "I just like the way that it spans across biology and physics in quite a beautiful way."

And the research may one day have practical applications. Some day, the swimmers may be used to help scrub the surfaces of materials — or maybe they'll hook up one of the snakes to a cell and drag it around. Wai Kwok, the head of the Materials Science Division at Argonne, calls attaching magnetic particles to living cells "feasible."

"If you can do that, you can control an actual living organism," Kwok says.

At the very least, the work could help biologists understand how tiny microorganisms propel themselves. Aronson runs another Argonne lab that tries to apply some of the snake work to single-celled organism locomotion.

Going to an even small smaller scale, self-assembled, self-propelled nanoscale swimmers could clean surfaces or deliver medications, but the scientists agree that there would be serious engineering challenges at that scale.

And in any case, standing next to his self-assembling snakes in a beaker, Snezhko has a response for reporters asking typical questions about applications. He points to a sign that's taped over his bench. It's a famous quote from Richard Feynman: "Physics is like sex. Sure, it may give some practical results, but that's not why we do it."

See Also:

Image: Betsy Mason/Wired.com.
Videos: Alex Snezhko and Igor Aronson/Argonne National Laboratory.

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 | 6 Mar 2009 | 1:28 am

Scientists remove cancer genes from stem cells

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Scientists have taken another important step toward using ordinary skin cells that are made to behave like embryonic stem cells to find treatments for conditions like Parkinson's disease.

Source: Reuters: Science News | 6 Mar 2009 | 12:50 am

Exercise: The Best Medicine (LiveScience.com)

LiveScience.com - It just seems too good to be true. Study after research study consistently promoting the endless benefits of exercise. Couch potatoes everywhere are waiting for the other shoe to drop, telling us that all of those scientists were wrong and we should remain as sedentary as possible.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 6 Mar 2009 | 12:15 am

Kepler spacecraft will hunt for planets that are just right for life

Nasa mission due for liftoff tomorrow will identify extrasolar planets in the 'Goldilocks zone' around their star – not too hot and not too cold for liquid water

The most extensive search for Earth-like planets that could harbour life beyond the solar system is due to get under way in the early hours of tomorrow morning with the launch of a one-tonne spacecraft from Cape Canaveral in Florida.

The Kepler probe is the first Nasa mission capable of finding habitable planets like our own in faraway regions of the galaxy. If all goes to plan, the probe will be blasted into space at 03.48 GMT on Saturday atop a Delta-2 rocket, which will put the spacecraft into a solar orbit that lags behind the Earth as it circles the Sun.

From this vantage point, the spacecraft will spend three-and-a-half years gazing at a star-rich region of the Milky Way in the hope of spotting planets like our own that are in their solar systems' "Goldilocks zone", or just the right distance from their suns for liquid water to exist. To find life as we know it, Nasa's mantra is "follow the water".

A major task for the mission is to find out how many Earth-like planets there are beyond our own solar system, a question that has profound significance for the likelihood of life elsewhere.

"Finding that most stars have Earths implies that the conditions that support the development of life could be common throughout our galaxy," said William Borucki, Kepler's chief scientist at Nasa's Ames Research Center in California. "Finding few or no Earths indicates that we might be alone."

Mission scientists will use Kepler's 95 megapixel digital camera to survey the brightness of 100,000 stars in the constellations of Cygnus and Lyra every half an hour. Planets will reveal themselves as almost imperceptible reductions in brightness as they move across the faces of their stars.

"If Kepler were to look down at a small town on Earth at night from space, it would be able to detect the dimming of a porch light as somebody passed in front," said James Fanson, project manager at Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.

By watching for long enough, Kepler should be able to spot planets that take a year or longer to orbit their star. Most of the stars in the camera's field of view, which is as wide as two outstretched hands, are hundreds or thousands of light years from Earth.

Since before the days of Isaac Newton astronomers have speculated about planets in far-off solar systems, but the first confirmed sighting came only in the late 1980s. Since then more than 340 "exoplanets" have been discovered. The majority are what astronomers call "hot Jupiters": gas giants that orbit so close to their stars it only takes them a few days to complete an orbit.

Earlier this year, the French space agency's Corot spacecraft spotted the smallest exoplanet yet, in orbit around a star in the constellation Monoceros, 390 light years away. The planet, which is nearly twice the size of Earth, orbits so close to its parent star, temperatures on its molten surface are thought to approach 1500C.

"There's a very raw instinct to want to know if there are worlds like ours out there. It leads us to question are we alone, are there other forms of life out there, forms we might recognise as akin to our own civilised form of life? But it goes way beyond that. As scientists we're always trying to explore uncharted areas and we haven't been able to find planets like ours outside the Solar System, so this is a new frontier to explore," said Suzanne Aigrain, an astrophysicist at Exeter University in the UK who works on Corot.

Alan Boss, a member of the Kepler team and an astronomer at the Carnegie Institute in Washington DC, said last month there could be as many habitable, Earth-like planets in the Milky Way as there are Sun-like stars – around 100 billion. In the observable universe, there might be 10 billion trillion planets like ours. In other words, a one followed by 22 zeroes.

The Kepler scientists still have some formidable challenges ahead if they are to confirm there are Earth-like planets out there. For a claim to be taken seriously, they will have to work out the masses of any planets they find, and that cannot be done using the Kepler probe alone.

Traditionally, scientists work out a planet's mass using a ground-based telescope to measure how much its star wobbles as the planet goes around it. But Earth-sized planets exert such a tiny tug on their parent stars, the Kepler team will would need to spot shifts in a star's movement of less than one metre per second.

The most sensitive equipment for doing this is strapped to a telescope at the La Silla observatory in Chile, but this instrument cannot survey the starfield Kepler will be looking at. The Kepler team is now hoping to get a replica device built onto the William Herschel telescope in La Palma in the Canary Islands, which would help them to measure the mass of any planets that the spacecraft detects.

Though the Kepler mission should reveal Earth-sized planets in habitable orbits around stars, it will not be able to tell us if they are home to alien life. For that, we will have to wait for future missions that can analyse the atmospheres of the alien worlds Kepler finds.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2009 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds

Source: Evolution, genetics, medicine, physics & astronomy news | guardian.co.uk | 6 Mar 2009 | 12:06 am

Senate leader offers plan for `green' power grid (AP)

AP - The Senate's top Democrat on Thursday proposed new federal authority to build special power lines that carry renewable energy like solar and wind power from remote places.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 5 Mar 2009 | 11:46 pm

Scientists remove cancer genes from stem cells (Reuters)

Reuters - Scientists have taken another important step toward using ordinary skin cells that are made to behave like embryonic stem cells to find treatments for conditions like Parkinson's disease.
Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 5 Mar 2009 | 11:25 pm

Class, SHUT-UP - Computer-Modeling Misbehavior

Interaction maps show order and disorder in teacher=student interactions.
Source: Livescience.com | 5 Mar 2009 | 11:01 pm

Stem Cells for Broken Brains

Researcher seeks repair for brain injuries, while colleagues explore other health benefits of stem cell bio-technology.
Source: Livescience.com | 5 Mar 2009 | 10:55 pm

Tree Toppling for Science

Blown-down trees change the dynamics of an ecosystem. Researcher Jim Clark's team deliberately fells parts of a forest to learn precisely how.
Source: Livescience.com | 5 Mar 2009 | 10:50 pm

Robert Bigelow: Lessons, Visions, Realities...

Bigelow Aerospace’s CEO illuminates the foresight driving his company’s market positioning strategy.
Source: Livescience.com | 5 Mar 2009 | 10:46 pm

Revealing Profiles: Breast Cancer Genes

Combining clinical characteristics with a genomic profile may provide important information for predicting a patient's prognosis.
Source: Livescience.com | 5 Mar 2009 | 10:43 pm

Quantum Dots - Breakthrough for Solar Cells and Lasers

Researcher Adrienne Stiff-Roberts explains how new nanotechnology can enhance and fine-tune vital optical devices.
Source: Livescience.com | 5 Mar 2009 | 10:42 pm

Exercise: The Best Medicine

Four new studies tout the benefits of exercise.
Source: Livescience.com | 5 Mar 2009 | 10:17 pm

Turning Skin Cells to Stem Cells, Without Cancer

Like hackers one-upping each others' code, stem cell scientists keep finding better ways to turn flakes of skin into stem cells. And the latest technique could avoid the cancer-causing side effects of previous methods.

By reprogramming skin cell DNA with a virus that literally removed itself afterwards, researchers have made a versatile, near-embryonic stem cell nearly free from glitches left by other manufacturing methods.

"The virus steadily integrates into the cell's genome. It does the miracle of reprogramming," said Rudolf Jaenisch, a Whitehead Institute cell biologist. Activating a gene in the virus "takes the virus back out, leaving a minimal trace in the human genome."

The miracle of reprogamming, also known as induced pluripotency, was universally recognized as a research milestone when demonstrated in human cells less than 18 months ago. Adding four development-regulating genes turned adult cells into the near-equivalent of pluripotent embryonic stem cells, capable of becoming almost any other type of cell in the body.

Though the medical promise of embryonic stem cells has yet to be fulfilled, scientists say they'll eventually be used to replace damaged or failing organs. Their production, however, is both ethically contentious and procedurally difficult: producing personalized versions is possible only through cloning, which is expensive, time-consuming and scientifically tricky.

Reprogrammed cells were hailed as an answer to all these problems — but there was a catch. The new genes were carried into the cells with viruses, and sometimes caused them to replicate uncontrollably, a phenomenon better known as cancer.

Researchers have subsequently looked for better reprogramming methods: using fewer genes, different genes, fewer viruses, different viruses. Many of the methods appear promising, but none have been efficient, functional and provisionally safe in human rather than animal cells.

"The goal for everybody for the moment is to generate iPS cells which don't have the genes in them any more," said Frank Soldner, another Whitehead Institute cell biologist. "We showed in our approach that the system not only works in mouse cells, but in human cells. The other systems are proofs of principle."

In a paper published Thursday in Cell, Jaenisch and Soldner's team used what is known as a Cre-recombinase excisable virus to add the reprogramming genes. The viruses fused with cellular DNA; the cells turned pluripotent; and then the researchers added Cre-recombinase, an enzyme which automatically made the viral genes disengage, snipping themselves out and sealing the chain behind.

When the gene expression patterns of their reprogrammed cells were compared to those of embryonic stem cells, the researchers found only trace differences. The method wasn't perfect, but was far cleaner than leaving the viruses inside, which left cellular DNA in relative disarray.

"It doesn't take away all the changes," Jaenisch said. "There is a minimal trace."

The cells used in the study were taken from people with unexplained, or idiopathic, Parkinson's disease and coaxed into becoming neurons.

These don't yet have therapeutic power, Jaenisch and Soldner said, but are still useful for studying disease in a person-specific way.

"You can take cells from patients, then differentiate the cells into types that are affected by their disease — in our case, dopaminergic neurons for Parkinson's disease," said Jaenisch. "For the first time, we can generate these cells in a culture dish, and study the mechanisms that led to their disease in the first place."

In the future, he said, it will be possible to supply reprogramming factors "not as genes, but as a proteins, a substance that's there only for a moment."

Citation: Parkinson’s Disease Patient-Derived Induced Pluripotent Stem Cells Free of Viral Reprogramming Factors Frank Soldner, Dirk Hockemeyer, Caroline Beard, Qing Gao, George W. Bell, Elizabeth G. Cook, Gunnar Hargus, Alexandra Blak, Oliver Cooper, Maisam Mitalipova, Ole Isacson, and Rudolf Jaenisch. Cell, Vol. 136, No. 5, March 5, 2009.

See Also:

Image: Cell

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

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 5 Mar 2009 | 9:51 pm

NASA telescope will hunt for Earth-like planets (AP)

AP - NASA will soon be on the lookout for possible Earths in one faraway corner of the galaxy. A planet-hunting spacecraft, named Kepler after the German 17th -century astrophysicist, is scheduled to rocket away from Cape Canaveral late Friday night. Excellent launch weather is forecast.

Source: Yahoo! News: Science News | 5 Mar 2009 | 9:45 pm

NASA to launch planet-hunting telescope Friday

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - A NASA telescope was cleared to launch on Friday on a mission to look for Earth-like planets around other stars and determine whether there are places that could support human-like life beyond our solar system.

Source: Reuters: Science News | 5 Mar 2009 | 8:58 pm

Freed From Hand of Man, Animals Could Rise Again

Animals shrunken by the evolutionary pressures of hunting and fishing could someday recover their lost splendor.

After being left alone for just twelve generations, a population of experimentally stunted fish regained most of their original size — suggesting that the real-world dwarfism produced by continually killing the largest specimens may not be permanent.

"There's a fair amount of evidence now that in lots of hunted or harvested populations, there's a trend towards smaller body sizes or earlier ages at maturation," said Stephan Munch, a marine ecologist at Stony Brook University. "There's been relatively little evidence for what happens after you stop."

Shrinkage has been found across the animal kingdom, from cod to bighorn sheep — most any species that humans hunt, preferentially selecting the largest and allowing only the small to survive. A recent study of 29 human-hunted species found an average drop of 20% from pre-industrial sizes, with most of the loss occurring in the last several anthropocenic decades.

Whether these now-stunted species will regain their size is an open question. But if the findings of Munch's team on a population of Atlantic silversides hold true for other animals, it's at least possible.

The experiment, described in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, lasted for 10 years and spanned 17 successive generations of silversides, a foot-long fish found along the east coast of North America. For each of the first five generations, the researchers removed the largest 90 percent, allowing only the smallest one-tenth to breed — a selective pressure comparable to commercial fishing. The fish became, on average, 30 percent smaller.

Over the last 12 generations, the researchers still removed 90 percent of the fish, but picked them randomly without consideration of size — a selective pressure analogous to nature. By the experiment's end, they were almost back to normal size.

Most evolutionary simulations suggest that size recovery can occur only slowly, said Munch.

"I was really surprised that it turned out the way it did. My expectation was that they wouldn't rebound," he said. "It's kind of encouraging."

Citation: "Reversal of evolutionary downsizing caused by selective harvest of large fish." By David O Conover, Stephan B Munch and Stephen A Arnott. Proceedings of the Royal Society B, advance online publication, March 4, 2009.

Image: From an earlier University of California, Riverside study that documented rapid changes in size and breeding habits in a silverside population pressured to be small.

See Also:

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

Source: Wired: Wired Science | 5 Mar 2009 | 8:51 pm

NASA's Planet-Hunting Space Telescope to Launch Friday

NASA's planet-hunting space telescope Kepler is slated to launch the night of March 6 from Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, on a mission to find Earth-sized planets that could have liquid water at the surface and potentially harbor life.

"It's not just another science mission. This one has historical significance built into it," said Ed Weiler of the Science Mission Directorate at NASA headquarters. "It very possibly could tell us that earths are very, very common, that we've got lots of neighbors out there. Or it could tell us that Earths are really, really, really rare."

For a deeper dive into how Kepler works, check out our mission preview.

For live updates on the launch — which is tentatively scheduled for 10:49 pm Eastern, March 6 — follow @NASAKepler on Twitter.

Scientists have found more than 300 planets circling other stars, but none of them look like our pale blue dot. Most of them are gas giants like Jupiter. Others are small but very close to their stars and likely too hot to support life. Current telescopes can't see with quite enough resolution or sensitivity to detect the tiny change in a star's brightness that would indicate the presence of an Earth in an orbit in what is known as the habitable zone.

Kepler will change all that.

"We won't find E.T." said Bill Borucki, the Kepler mission's principal investigator. "but we might find E.T.'s home looking at all these stars."

Speaking at a press conference, Borucki seemed to want tamp down overheated expectations. He noted that it would be three years before the scientists will be able to say with certainty how common Earths really are.

"But at the the end of that 3 years we'll get the answer," Borucki said. "Are there other worlds like ours or are we alone?"

Following the failure of the Orbiting Carbon Observatory to reach orbit, NASA officials said this mission did not seem likely to meet a similar fate.

"We learned our lessons from OCO," said Jon Morse, NASA's astrophysics division director. "The launch services program has done an amazing job since last week pulling together an analysis of any commonality with the previous launch. They've given a clean bill of health."

Kepler is going up on a Delta 2 rocket, not the Taurus that OCO used, and doesn't share many common parts with the failed mission, said Omar Baez, NASA launch director and launch manager at Kennedy Space Center.

"We're not concerned," he said.

5:22 pm: Updated to correct Taurus/Delta 2 mixup. Also added links for both rocket types.

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 | 5 Mar 2009 | 8:44 pm

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