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In
search of life under ice New
smartphone app can help you detect allergens Prof Yash
Pal THIS
UNIVERSE Trends |
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In search of life under ice BRITISH scientists this week started drilling in Antarctica in their quest to discover whether life exists in a lake that’s been isolated for hundreds of thousands of years 3 kilometres below the ice. The researchers are using a drill that pumps hot water at high pressure to bore through the ice. After firing the boiler’s burners, they’ll begin test drills before drilling down to the lake by December 16, said Chris Hill, program manager at the British Antarctic Survey for the project at Lake Ellsworth, near the centre of the West Antarctic ice sheet. “Since that boiler fired up, the mood’s been pretty good,” Hill said in a satellite phone interview from the drilling site. “We have to wait on this like expectant fathers.” The 8-million-pound plan is the culmination of 16 years of planning. Researchers aim to recover water and sediment samples from the lake to determine whether life exists there and shed clues on the past climate of Antarctica. “The most likely organisms to be found will be bacterial — they’re everywhere,” David Pearce, a microbiologist at the program said in an interview in October, shortly before heading to the southern continent to begin preparations. “If there’s nothing there, that will tell us the limits for the existence of life on Earth.” After testing the drill works, the researchers plan to bore down 300 meters where they’ll create a water-filled cavity to help balance the water pressure between the lake and the borehole. Then, they plan to make a separate hole from the top, through the cavity and down to the lake. Once the drill is removed, Hill said “the clock starts ticking” and the researchers have just 24 to 30 hours to recover samples before the hole refreezes and becomes too narrow to safely lower instruments. First they’ll lower a sterile ultraviolet lamp down to irradiate any life around the edges of the hole, Hill said in a briefing in October. Then, they’ll send down a probe with 24 canisters to collect water samples from different depths. Finally, a sediment corer will be dropped down to recover a length of sediment from the lake bed. By analysing a column of sediment, scientists can tell whether the ice sheet has retreated in the past, because of the presence or not of fossilised marine organisms in the silt. “We’ll probably reach the lake around Sunday (Dec 16), retract the drill by Monday and start deploying the instruments late Monday or Tuesday,” Hill said. As soon as the first probe returns to the surface, researchers will be able to study some of the samples to gauge whether life was found, said Hill. The rest will be sent back by sea to Britain, where they’ll arrive about May for study in laboratories across the country, with the first scientific papers likely by late 2013 or early 2014, he said. If conditions allow, they’ll re-drill the hole and lower a duplicate set of all the instruments down. Hill said the five-day weather forecast predicts low winds and some cloud cover. Temperatures in the Antarctic summer are currently around minus 18 degrees Celsius, falling to minus 35 degrees with wind-chill, he said. Lakes exist deep below the Antarctic surface because the pressure exerted by thousands of meters of ice drives down the freezing point of water. Lake Ellsworth is one of at least 387 known sub-glacial Antarctic lakes. The drilling program is the culmination of an ambition dating back 16 years, when the project’s principle scientist, Martin Siegert, a glaciologist now at the University of Edinburgh, began searching through radio echo-sounding data to uncover Antarctic lakes, according to Hill. Lake Ellsworth was identified as a potential target for exploration about eight years ago. The consortium of British universities that’s carrying out the program secured the funding they needed to begin preparing an expedition. A Russian team on February 5 penetrated more than 3.7 kilometers of ice to reach the waters of Lake Vostok, another body of water underneath Antarctica. That group collected samples of “fresh frozen” water, according to the country’s Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute. They have yet to publicise any findings. — The Independent
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New smartphone app can help you detect allergens ARE you allergic to peanuts and worried there might be some in that cookie? Don’t worry, help is at hand in the shape of an unlikely source: your smartphone. Researchers from Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science, University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), have developed a lightweight device called the iTube, which attached to a mobile phone can detect allergens in food samples. The iTube attachment uses the mobile phone’s in-built camera, along with an accompanying smartphone app that runs a test with the same high level of sensitivity a lab would. Food allergies are an emerging public concern, affecting as many as 8 per cent of young children and 2 per cent of adults, according to a California statement. Allergic reactions can be severe and even life-threatening. And while consumer-protection laws regulate the labelling of ingredients in pre-packaged foods, cross-contaminations can still occur during processing, manufacturing and transportation. Although several products that detect allergens in foods are currently available, they are complex and require bulky equipment, making them ill-suited for use in public settings. The iTube was developed to address these issues, said Aydogan Ozcan, associate professor of electrical engineering and bioengineering at California, who led the research team. Weighing less than two ounces, the attachment analyses a test tube-based allergen-concentration test known as a colorimetric assay. The kit digitally converts raw images from the mobile phone camera into concentration measurements detected in the food samples. And beyond just a “yes” or “no” answer as to whether allergens are present, the test can also quantify how much of an allergen is in a sample, in parts per million. The iTube platform can test for a variety of allergens, including peanuts, almonds, eggs, gluten and hazelnuts, Ozcan said. — IANS
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THIS UNIVERSE Does human body have a “soul”? I do not know of any "soul" that has been isolated and scientifically recognised. Some combination in the brain that defines consciousness might come close to it. There must be an essential dependence or connection with a number of physical well being indices. Any more I say in this regard would be heresy and will remain disputable. Why can’t we identify the colour of a car parked under a streetlight that has a sodium lamp fitted in it? A sodium lamp gives out predominantly yellow light. Therefore, the yellow colour dominates the light scattered back by the car. Normally, we see the car when illuminated by white light. It is clear that the two views will be different. A wave front in the air is defined as a continuous locus of the points that are vibrating in the same phase. But how can particles vibrate in the same phase, since particles of the air are moving randomly in all directions? Also, how is a wave front created in vacuum? I agree with definition of wave front given by you in the beginning of your question. The random motion of particles should not be confused with the vibrations of light at a very different scale. Light is a phenomenon that can take place in vacuum, but we see it only when the light is scattered by an intervening physical medium. Readers can e-mail questions to Prof Yash Pal at palyash.pal@gmail.com
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Trends LONDON: Scientists have found the earliest evidence of prehistoric cheese-making from a study of 7,500-year-old pottery fragments that are perforated just like modern cheese strainers. Milk production and dairy processing allowed early farmers to produce food without slaughtering precious livestock, and making cheese turned milk into a less perishable food that was more digestible for a population who at the time would have been intolerant to the lactose contained in milk.
New material for wearable electronics inspired by nature LONDON: Scientists in Switzerland have come up with a material mimicking the way tendons connect to bones, which could speed the development of stretchy, wearable electronic devices. The stretchable electronics industry is in its infancy but devices that are able to flex without breaking could revolutionise devices from smart phones and solar cells to medical implants. Ten Commandments join Isaac Newton’s notes online LONDON: A copy of The Ten Commandments dating back two millennia and the earliest written Gaelic are just two of a number of incredibly rare manuscripts now freely available online to the world as part of a Cambridge University digital project. The Nash Papyrus — one of the oldest known manuscripts containing text from the Hebrew Bible — has become one of the latest treasures of humanity to join Isaac Newton’s notebooks, the Nuremberg Chronicle and other rare texts as part of the Cambridge Digital Library, the university said on Wednesday. — Reuters |
British
scientists launch a project in Antarctica to drill 3 km into the earth
to hunt for life in a lake hidden beneath the ice sheet
New material for wearable electronics inspired by nature
