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Now a test that can predict death
Lost star tipped Earth’s orbit Prof Yash
Pal THIS UNIVERSE
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Now a test that can predict death A blood test to determine how fast someone is ageing has been shown to work on a population of wild birds, the first time the ageing test has been used successfully on animals living outside a laboratory setting. The test measures the average length of tiny structures on the tips of chromosomes called telomeres which are known to get shorter each time a cell divides during an Telomeres are believed to act like internal clocks by providing a more accurate estimate of a person’s true biological age rather than their actual chronological age. This has led some experts to suggest that telomere tests could be used to estimate not only how fast someone is ageing, but possibly how long they have left to live if they die of natural causes. Telomere tests have been widely used on experimental animals and at least one company is offering a £400 blood test in the UK for people interested in seeing how fast they are ageing based on their average telomere length. Now scientists have performed telomere tests on an isolated population of songbirds living on an island in the Seychelles and found that the test does indeed accurately predict an animal’s likely lifespan. “We saw that telomere length is a better indicator of life expectancy than chronological age. So by measuring telomere length we have a way of estimating the biological age of an individual - how much of its life it has used up,” said David Richardson of the University of East Anglia. The researchers tested the average telomere lengths of a population of 320 Seychelles Warblers living on the remote Cousin Island, which ornithologists have studied for 20 years, documenting the life history of each bird. “Our results provide the first clear and unambiguous evidence of a relationship between telomere length and mortality in the wild, and substantiate the prediction that telomere length and shortening rate can act as an indicator of biological age further to chronological age,” says the study published in the journal Molecular Ecology. Studying an island population of wild birds was important because there were no natural predators and little migration, meaning that the scientists could accurately study the link between telomere length and a bird’s natural lifespan. “We wanted to understand what happens over an entire lifetime, so the Seychelles warbler is an ideal research subject. They are naturally confined to an isolated tropical island, without any predators, so we can follow individuals throughout their lives, right into old age,” Dr Richardson said. “We investigated whether, at any given age, their telomere lengths could predict imminent death. We found that short and rapidly shortening telomeres were a good indication that the bird would die within a year,” he said. “We also found that individuals with longer telomeres had longer life spans overall. It used to be thought that telomere shortening occurred at a constant rate in individuals, and that telomere length could act as an internal clock to measure the chronological age of organisms in the wild,” Dr Richardson said. “However, while telomeres do shorten with chronological age, the rate at which this happens differs between individuals of the same age. This is because individuals experience different amounts of biological stress due to the challenges and exertions they face in life. Telomere length can be used as a measure of the amount of damage an individual has accumulated over its life,” he added. |
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Lost star tipped Earth’s orbit A new theory that suggests that one young star may yank another’s developing solar system has shed light on a long-standing puzzle — why Earth’s orbit is tipped 7 degree relative to the sun’s equator. In 1995, Swiss astronomers made the shocking discovery of the first “hot Jupiter”, a gas giant circling close to its star. But the disk migration theory suffered a blow in 2008, when astronomers began finding hot Jupiters on tilted and even backward orbits. Now astronomer Konstantin Batygin of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has provided an explanation to this mystery, according to Science Now. “Misaligned orbits are actually a natural outcome of disk migration-once you take into account the fact that planetary systems are usually born in multistellar environments,” he says, noting that many stars have stellar companions,” Batygin said. Batygin calculated how a young star’s protoplanetary disk gets torqued by a second star orbiting the first. When a giant planet spirals inward through this tilted disk, it ends up on a path that’s out of whack with its sun’s equator. “I think it’s an entirely plausible idea. The best thing about it is we can test it,” said Josh Winn, an astronomer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge who has measured orbital tilts of several hot Jupiters. If Batygin is right, Winn said, then misalignments should be just as common in solar systems that lack hot Jupiters, because tilting a disk doesn’t require the presence of a hot Jupiter. So far, NAS’s Kepler spacecraft has measured the tilt of just one multiplanet system: the three planets around Kepler 30, all of which have orbits that line up with their star’s equator. In the future, Winn plans to observe additional multiplanet systems and put Batygin’s theory to the test. One other multiplanet solar system has a known tilt: our own. “I think somewhere in the Milky Way, there’s a star that’s responsible for tilting us,” Batygin said. He suspects the sun once had a companion star that tipped the solar nebula by 7 degree, then fled the scene after the planets arose. But many other systems still have two or three stars. Our near neighbor Alpha Centauri consists of three stars, of which the second brightest sports a planet as massive as Earth. “There’s a good chance that astronomers will find misalignment in the Alpha Centauri system,” Batygin predicted. — ANI
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Path breaking particle change GENEVA: CERN researchers have spotted a particle reshaping into two others in their Large Hadron Collider, a breakthrough that could be crucial in exploring physics frontiers once the realm of science fiction. The mutation — in a process known as decay — was predicted under the so-called Standard Model (SM) of physics which describes how the universe works at the most fundamental level, but until now scientists had never seen it. — Reuters KOCHI: Turning waste to wealth, scientists of the Fisheries Research Institute, Kochi, have developed a lipstick using reddish brown spots from squid skin to give different hues instead of the normally used chemicals. Squid skin has reddish brown spores called chromatophores which have been isolated and used as natural pigment in the lipsticks, a senior scientist who along with her team has developed the lipstick, said. “We extracted the chromatophores and studied their characteristics which were then used as colourant for the lipstick,” said Dr Femeena Hassan, Senior Scientist, Quality Assurance and Management Division of Central Institute of Fisheries Technology (CIFT). Instead of artificial colours, the colourants extracted from squid skin can be used for lipsticks. The newly-formulated lipstick was subjected to physical, chemical and microbiological quality evaluation, she said. The new product also met with the national quality standards laid down for such category of products, she said. The lipsticks will have a shelf life of 15 months. Cost wise, also they would not be heavy on the pocket and would be 10 per cent less than the products available in the market, she said, adding there are plans to commercially launch the product. Super Jupiter-sized planet found A team of Canadian astrophysicists has discovered a ‘super-Jupiter’ sized planet around the massive star Kappa Andromedae, having a mass at least 13 times that of Jupiter and an orbit somewhat larger than Neptune’s. The object could represent the first new observed exoplanet system in almost four years. The host star around which the planet orbits has a mass 2.5 times that of the Sun, making it the highest mass star to ever host a directly observed planet. The star can be seen with the naked eye in the constellation Andromeda at a distance of about 170 light years, the Astrophysical Journal Letters reports. — IANS
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are well-researched and understood phenomena and there is absolutely no logic in such superstitions related to these. I am not surprised that most of such ridiculous restrictions are targeted against women.
To explain the odd find, theorists proposed that the planet formed far from its star but then migrated closer, spiraling through the protoplanetary disk of gas and dust that once swirled around its sun. During this so-called disk migration, the planet remained in the disk, and so the tilt of its orbit matched that of its star.