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| SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY |
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Varied and exciting drug sources Grand Canyon flooded Mars avalanche photographed
Possible to “see” what others see? Prof Yash
Pal THIS UNIVERSE |
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Varied and exciting drug sources Producing
widely used and effective drug formulations is a complicated, time consuming and costly proposition. Drug researchers screen hundreds upon thousands of molecules to zero in on a few molecules, from out of which a drug can be formulated. Looking for molecules as part of formulating a drug is indeed a tedious job. In a development of significance, researchers from as many as nine scientific institutions from across India along with the leading drug outfit Nicholas Piramal have zeroed in on the rich forests of Western Ghats in search of microbial varieties which may provide an answer to the search for new and novel drugs. The objective of the mission is to sift through 7,000-microbial species each month and generate a repository of 2 lakh microbes after five years at the National Centre for Cell Sciences at Pune. After initial screening, scientists will pass on the promising leads to the pharma company for further development. It is expected that some of the microbes may provide leads to develop drugs for widely prevalent diseases such as cancer, diabetes and inflammation. A team of Japanese life science researchers has now covered much ground in developing a rice based vaccine, which if approved for use, could provide third world countries a cost effective treatment for cholera. In distinct contrast to the conventional cholera shots, which need to be stored in a refrigerator, this vaccine based on a genetically modified rice variety does not require refrigeration and has a shelf life of several years. As such, this vaccine would make it much easier for distribution in cholera hotspots in the developing world. Preliminary trials involving mice have proved the efficacy of the vaccine against cholera. However, it would need to be tested on humans. As it is, the Japanese researchers developed this innovative vaccine by inserting parts of the cholera inducing bacterium Vibrio Cholerae into the Kitaake rice plant. Meanwhile, a team of South Korean researchers led by Prof Kim.-Se-Kwan of Pukyong University has claimed that it has successfully isolated a peptide featuring antioxidant properties from the skin of a bull frog. Because of its antioxidant property, it has the potential to impede the ageing process of the human cells. Researchers point out that this new chemical can provide an economic alternative to tocopherol whose price has been surging on the back of its growing demand. Significantly, alpha tocopherol is the most active antioxidant and is widely used in medicines and health food. In a related development, a team of researchers from the University of Ulster in Northern Ireland in association with the UAE University has successfully zeroed in on chemical found on the skin of the South American “paradoxical frog” which is known to possess the capability of boosting the production of insulin, the key hormone whose deficiency causes diabetes. On their part researchers have made a copy of the peptide, a type of protein that protects the frog species from infection, which they hope to press into service for producing drugs capable of tackling Type Two diabetes. As a researcher from UAE University said, the peptide has the potential for the development into a compound for the treatment of Type Two diabetes in which the body does not produce sufficient quantities of insulin or becomes resistant to the available quantity of insulin. |
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More than 300,000 gallons of water per second were released from Lake Powell above the dam near the Arizona-Utah border. That’s enough water to fill the Empire State Building in 20 minutes, said Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne. “This gives you a glimpse of what nature has been doing for millions of years, cutting through and creating this magnificent canyon,” Kempthorne said after he pulled the lever releasing the water from Glen Canyon Dam, upstream from Grand Canyon National Park. The water gushed from two of four giant steel tubes in parallel arcs into the Colorado River. By afternoon, water poured from all four tubes, creating a churning pool beneath the sheer, sandstone canyon walls rising hundreds of feet. The water level in the Grand Canyon rose 2 to 15 feet in some places. After the flood ends Friday, officials hope the water will leave behind sediment and restore sandbars as it goes back to normal levels. Officials have flooded the canyon twice before, in 1996 and 2004. Before the dam was built in 1963, the river was warm and muddy, and natural flooding built up sandbars that are essential to native plant and fish species. The river is now cool and clear, its sediment blocked by the dam. The change helped speed the extinction of four fish species and push two others, including the endangered humpback chub, near the edge. Shrinking beaches have led to the loss of half the camping sites in the canyon in the past decade. Since Glen Canyon Dam was built, 98 percent of the sediment carried by the Colorado River has been lost, Grand Canyon National Park Superintendent Steve Martin said. Martin said manmade floods need to occur every time there’s enough sediment to do so - about every one to two years depending on Arizona’s volatile monsoon season. “The science is really clear that’s what we need to do,” Martin said. The Grand Canyon Trust, a Flagstaff-based group that has been critical of the federal Bureau of Reclamation’s management of the dam, also is calling for more regular high flows. “The power industry is driving the Bureau of Reclamation more than anything else, as opposed as to what’s best for the canyon,” trust spokesman Richard Mayol said.
— AP |
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The image, taken last month, reveals at least four avalanches of fine ice and dust breaking off from a steep cliff and settling on the slope below. The cascade kicked up massive debris clouds, with some measuring more than 590 feet across. The landslides were spied by the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter during a routine tracking of seasonal changes. The probe arrived at the planet in 2006. It is rare for scientists to catch a natural event in action on the surface of Mars. Most of the landscape that has been recorded so far has not changed much in millions of years. The avalanches occurred near the north pole
and broke part of a 2,300-foot cliff. “We were checking for springtime changes in the carbon-dioxide frost covering a dune field and finding the avalanches was completely serendipitous,” Jet Propulsion Laboratory scientist Candice Hansen said in a statement. Scientists were unsure what set off the avalanches and whether they occur frequently or only during the
spring. — AP |
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Possible to “see” what others see?
Such a device would make it possible to decode brain signals and track attention. It may even be possible to “see” someone else’s dream, the team at the University of California Berkeley said. “Our results suggest that it may soon be possible to reconstruct a picture of a person’s visual experience from measurements of brain activity alone,” Jack Gallant and colleagues wrote in their report, published in the journal Nature. “Imagine a general brain-reading device that could reconstruct a picture of a person’s visual experience at any moment in time, and perhaps even provide access to the visual content of phenomena such as dreams and imagery.” Gallant’s team did not get that far but they used a type of real-time imaging called functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, to predict which photograph a volunteer was looking at. For the first step, they calibrated their experiment by having two members of the team look at 1,750 photographs while being scanned by fMRI. “The content of the photographs included animals, buildings, food, humans, indoor scenes, man-made objects, outdoor scenes, and textures,” they wrote. For the second stage, the two researchers looked at 120 new images while the fMRI machine was on. The research team then tried to figure out which photograph each one had been looking at. They got the right answer 92 percent of the time for one researcher and 72 percent of the time for the second.
— Reuters |
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THIS UNIVERSE If my watch shows that the time is 12 hours, zero minutes and zero seconds during the daytime how do I decide whether it should be shown as “am” or “pm”? You would have the same problem at 12 O’clock midnight. It seems I could give you an easy reply by saying that during the day you can say 12 noon and at night as 12 midnight. That way you can avoid am or pm. But this would be a rather trivial answer, because at the back of your question there must be another one: how well can we find out the transition of time? This will depend on the accuracy of measuring time. Let us start with human capability. When we produce a film where the image flows without any jerk, we need to put about 25 frames of still pictures per second in a string. From this it would appear that one twenty-fifth of a second is the smallest time interval we can appreciate and detect with our eyes. We might be able to do better with music, but I am not sure. Coming to our normal concept of time, we all know that it originated with the regulated coming of night after day and vice versa. This, we all know is due to the uniform rotation of the earth. If the rotation period of the earth were to change the length of the day would also change. Contrary to our normal belief this rotation period is actually changing gradually! Accurate measurements indicate that the earth rotation is slowing down by about 2.7 seconds every 1,000 days. The days are getting longer and we need to adjust our clocks, even though it is only by about one second every four months. We have all learnt in school that angular momentum is conserved. Therefore the question does arise: why does the earth not remember this? The reason is not far to seek. The earth is not being naughty. The planet has a near companion, the Moon which goes around once every 27 days, dragging enormous amount of the ocean water on the earth. The sea tides do not occur in unison with the rotation of the earth. This results in frictional braking which reduces the rotational speed of the earth, increasing its period of rotation. As already mentioned this is only by a second every four months. Therefore, unless your clock is adjusted properly you might be wrong in assuming that the time is actually after noon or past midnight! For accurate work in astronomy, even for time measurement for finding our position using the Satellite Navigation System (GPS) we depend on atomic time. Atomic clocks now have been designed that would give accuracy better than one second over 20 million years.
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FOUR arcs of water unleashed from a dam coursed through the Grand Canyon on Wednesday in a flood meant to mimic the natural ones that used to nourish the ecosystem by spreading sediment.
A robotic spacecraft circling Mars has snapped the first image of a series of active avalanches near the planet’s north pole, scientists said Monday.
BRAIN imaging may make it possible to someday see what others are seeing, U.S. researchers reported on Wednesday.