ScienceBlog.com

NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope has discovered some of life’s most basic ingredients in the dust swirling around a young star. The ingredients – gaseous precursors to DNA and protein – were detected in the star’s terrestrial planet zone, a region where rocky planets such as Earth are thought to be born.

Spotted this via Gizmodo, which grabbed it via MAKE. A homemade FM transmitter for the little-loved (but I own one!) iPod Shuffle.

Four pioneers of American cryptology were inducted into the NSA/CSS Hall of Honor today at the National Cryptologic Museum. In his keynote remarks during the induction ceremony, William B. Black, Jr., Deputy Director, National Security Agency, highlighted the distinguished achievements of each of the inductees. The Hall of Honor, created in 1999, pays tribute to the pioneers and heroes who have made significant and enduring contributions to American cryptology.

A single unifying physics theory can essentially describe how animals of every ilk, from flying insects to fish, get around, researchers at Duke University’s Pratt School of Engineering and Pennsylvania State University have found. The team reports that all animals bear the same stamp of physics in their design.

When a woman is giving birth, having a “coach” tell her to push during contractions makes almost no difference in shortening labor, and may actually increase her risk of subsequent problems with her bladder, researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center have found.

Astronomers have used ESO’s Very Large Telescope in Chile and the Anglo-Australian Telescope in eastern Australia as a ‘stellar stethoscope’ to listen to the internal rumblings of a nearby star. The data collected with the VLT have a precision better than 1.5 cm/s, or less than 0.06 km per hour!

As part of its continuing initiative to provide Americans with the information they need to make healthy nutritional choices about foods and dietary supplements, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) today announced that whole grain barley and barley-containing products are allowed to claim that they reduce the risk of coronary heart disease (CHD).

The activity of connections among brain cells significantly affects levels of the toxic protein beta-amyloid (Aß) that is a major cause of Alzheimer’s disease (AD), researchers have found. Aß is produced by the cleavage of amyloid precursor protein (APP) within brain cells.

Growing tree plantations to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to mitigate global warming — so called “carbon sequestration” — could trigger environmental changes that outweigh some of the benefits, a multi-institutional team led by Duke University suggested in a new report. Those effects include water and nutrient depletion and increased soil salinity and acidity, said the researchers.

“Where have all the bloody teaspoons gone?” is an age old question in the workplace. Researchers at the Burnet Institute in Australia have attempted to measure the phenomenon of teaspoon loss and its effect on office life. They purchased and discreetly numbered 70 stainless steel teaspoons (54 of standard quality and 16 of higher quality). The teaspoons were placed in tearooms around the institute and were counted weekly over five months. During the study, 56 (80%) of the 70 teaspoons disappeared.

Commercial insectaries that produce wasps as biocontrol agents will benefit from new Agricultural Research Service (ARS) findings showing that killing fly pupae–the food source for the wasp larvae–with heat shock is an affordable alternative to irradiation. The heat shock alternative will help insectaries meet fluctuating demand for two parasitic wasps used to control filth flies.

A perspective article by Stephen Soumerai, professor in the Department of Ambulatory Care and Prevention (of Harvard Medical School and Harvard Pilgrim Health Care), suggests that the new Medicare Drug Benefit may be harmful to the health of the poor, elderly, and disabled, the so-called “dually eligible” beneficiaries enrolled in both Medicare and Medicaid.

In an unusual observation, a team of scientists has scanned the northern polar region of Earth with NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory. The results show that the aurora borealis, or “northern lights,” also dance in X-ray light, creating changing bright arcs of X-ray energy above the Earth’s surface.

Human identical twins have different fingerprints and march to the beat of subtly different phenotypes, an indication of heterogeneity which led bioengineering researchers to devised computer algorithms that identify the underlying sources of variation at the basic level of life: unscripted fluctuations within individual cells and variations between identical cells.

Having a sibling with a history of cardiovascular disease carries the same or greater risk as having a parent with a history of the disease, according to a new report from the long-standing Framingham Heart Study conducted by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), a part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). Personal risk of having a cardiovascular event, such as a heart attack, stroke, or peripheral artery disease, may be raised by as much as 45 percent in middle-aged people whose brother or sister has had such an event.

According to a study to be published in the American Journal of Physiology-Heart and Circulation Physiology, a typical course of hyperbaric oxygen treatments increases by eight-fold the number of stem cells circulating in a patient’s body. Stem cells, also called progenitor cells are crucial to injury repair. The study currently appears on-line and is scheduled for publication in the April 2006 edition of the American Journal.

Clinicians at Bradley Hospital, the nation’s first psychiatric hospital for children and adolescents, have found that bipolar disorder is more common than expected in teens in a psychiatric inpatient setting. “In the past, mental health professionals thought that about one percent of teens was bipolar – our research indicates that if a strict definition of the illness is applied, up to twenty percent of adolescents on psychiatric units may be manic-depressive,” says lead author Jeffrey Hunt, MD, a child psychiatrist at Bradley Hospital and clinical assistant professor of psychiatry at Brown Medical School. The study appears in the December issue of the Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychopharmacology.

Like boxers wearied by a 15-round bout, the immune system’s CD8 T cells eventually become “exhausted” in their battle against persistent viral infection, and less effective in fighting the disease. In a study to be published Dec. 28 on the journal Nature’s website, researchers at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Emory University have traced the problem to a gene that turns off the infection-fighting drive of CD8 T cells in mice. The discovery raises the possibility that CD8 cell exhaustion can be reversed in human patients, reinvigorating the immune system’s defenses against chronic viral infections ranging from hepatitis to HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.

Evolution has been the foundation and guiding theory of biology since Darwin gave the theory its proper scientific debut in 1859. But Darwin probably never dreamed that researchers in 2005 would still be uncovering new details about the nuts and bolts of his theory — how does evolution actually work in the world of influenza genes and chimpanzee genes and stickleback fish armor? Studies that follow evolution in action claim top honors as the Breakthrough of the Year, named by Science and its publisher AAAS, the nonprofit science society.

In the bizarre and rule-bound world of quantum physics, every tiny spec of matter has something called “spin” – an intrinsic trait like eye color – that cannot be changed and which dictates, very specifically, what other bits of matter the spec can share quantum space with. When fermions, the most antisocial type of quantum particle, do get together, they pair up in a wondrous dance that enables such things as superconductivity. For the first time, researchers have succeeded in creating and observing an elusive and long-sought quantum state – a superfluid of fermions with mismatched numbers of dance partners.