Month: February 2013

WASHINGTON (TIP): A gap in the Antarctic ozone layer has impacted the way the waters in the southern oceans mix, with the potential to alter the amount of atmospheric CO2 and possibly affect climate change, warn scientists. Darryn W. Waugh, from the John Hopkins Kriegar School of Arts and Sciences, said: “This may sound entirely academic, but believe me, it’s not.

This matters because the southern oceans play an important role in the uptake of heat and carbon dioxide, so any changes in southern ocean circulation have the potential to change the global climate.” Waugh’s team used measurements taken from the early 1990s to the mid-to-late 2000s of the amount of a chemical compound known as “chlorofluorocarbon-12,” or CFC-12, in the southern oceans, the journal Science reports.

CFC-12 was first produced commercially in the 1930s and its concentration in the atmosphere increased rapidly until the 1990s when it was phased out by the Montreal Protocol on substances that deplete the ozone layer. Prior to the Montreal Protocol, CFC-12 was used in products such as aerosol hairsprays and refrigerants and in air conditioning systems, according to a Johns Hopkins’ statement.

From those ocean measurements, Waugh’s team was able to infer changes in how rapidly surface waters have mixed into the depths of the southern oceans. Because they knew that concentrations of CFCs at the ocean surface increased in tandem with those in the atmosphere, they were able to surmise that the higher the concentration of CFC-12 deeper in the ocean, the more recently those waters were at the surface.

WASHINGTON (TIP): Scientists have discovered that an old star — 176 light years away from Earth — thought to be past its prime may still be creating new planets. The disk of material surrounding the surprising star called TW Hydrae may be massive enough to make even more planets than we have in our own solar system, Nasa said in a statement.

The findings were made using the European Space Agency’s Herschel Space Telescope, a mission in which Nasa is a participant. At roughly 10 million years old and 176 light years away, TW Hydrae is relatively close to Earth by astronomical standards.

It is relatively young but, in theory, it is past the age at which giant planets already may have formed. “We didn’t expect to see so much gas around this star,” said lead researcher Edwin Bergin of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. “Typically stars of this age have cleared out their surrounding material, but this star still has enough mass to make the equivalent of 50 Jupiters,” Bergin said. In addition to revealing the peculiar state of the star, the findings also demonstrate a new, more precise method for weighing planet-forming disks. The new method can directly probe the gas that typically goes into making planets.

LONDON (TIP): The European Space Agency (ESA) plans to set up a base on Moon by using a 3D printer to build it from lunar materials, scientists say. Industrial partners including renowned architects Foster + Partners have joined with ESA to test the feasibility of 3D printing using lunar soil, the space agency said. ‘Terrestrial 3D printing technology has produced entire structures.

Our industrial team investigated if it could similarly be employed to build a lunar habitat,” said Laurent Pambaguian, who heads the project for ESA. Foster + Partners devised a weight-bearing ‘catenary” dome design with a cellular structured wall to shield against micro-meteoroids and space radiation, incorporating a pressurized infl atable to shelter astronauts. A hollow closed-cell structure — reminiscent of bird bones — provides a good combination of strength and weight.

The base’s design was guided in turn by the properties of 3D-printed lunar soil, with a 1.5 tonne building block produced as a demonstration. The UK’s Monolite supplied the D-Shape printer, with a mobile printing array of nozzles on a 6m frame to spray a binding solution onto a sand-like building material. ‘First, we needed to mix the simulated lunar material with magnesium oxide. This turns it into ‘paper”,” said Monolite founder Enrico Dini. ‘Then for our structural ‘ink’ we apply a binding salt which converts material to a stone-like solid.

LONDON (TIP): Understanding the most complex human organ — the brain, has now become a lot simpler. In a major breakthrough, scientists at Berkeley Lab has made it possible to get a front row view into how the brain develops and functions and pinpoint which part of the organ is playing truant during neurological disorders like autism, epilepsy and schizophrenia.

The scientists have created the world’s fi rst genome-wide digital atlas of gene enhancers in the brain — the switches that tell genes when and where they need to be switched on or off.

This atlas completely documents the cerebrum — the region that is of critical importance for cognition, motor functions and emotion identifies and locates thousands of gene-regulating elements which are the underlying causes of neurological disorders. Axel Visel, a geneticist with Berkeley Lab’s genomics division says, ‘Understanding how the brain functions and malfunctions in neurological disorders, remains one of the most daunting challenges in contemporary science. We’ve created a digital atlas of gene enhancers in the human brain.

This atlas will enable other scientists to study in more detail how individual genes are regulated during development of the brain and how genetic mutations may impact human neurological disorders.” Visel added, ‘Enhancers are short pieces of DNA in the human genome — they are not actual genes, so they do not give rise to proteins. Instead, they are switches that tell the actual genes when to become active and make a protein. Each cell type in our body has different sets of these enhancers switched on or off, and collectively they help to orchestrate the activities of our 20,000 genes in each single cell.”

WASHINGTON (TIP): Narrow ridges found in Martian craters may actually be fossilized remnants of underground cracks through which water once flowed on the red planet, a new study claims. Water flowing beneath the surface of ancient Mars suggests life may once have been possible on the Red planet, according to a new analysis by researchers from Brown University.

The study, published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, bolsters the idea that the subsurface environment on Mars once had an active hydrology and could be a good place to search for evidence of past life. The study conducted by Lee Saper and Jack Mustard suggest the ridges, many of them hundreds of metres in length and a few metres wide, had been noted in previous research, but how they had formed was not known.

Saper and Mustard thought they might once have been faults and fractures that formed underground when impact events rattled the planet’s crust.Water, if present in the subsurface, would have circulated through the cracks, slowly filling them in with mineral deposits, which would have been harder than the surrounding rocks. As those surrounding rocks eroded away over millions of years, the seams of mineral-hardened material would remain in place, forming the ridges seen today.