Tag: Science & Technology

AHMEDABAD (TIP): Normally, helmets protect your head – but here is one developed by four Gujarat students that will help you when your rationality fails! Tushar Patel and his three friends studying electronic communication engineering at the Babaria Institute of Technology, Vadodara, have designed a booze-sniffing helmet that will cut off a bike’s engine if the driver unwisely plans to drive while drunk. Moreover, sensors in the helmet tell the bike not to move unless the driver is wearing the helmet.

Patel and his friends – Renny David, Kishan Joshi, and Monal Jaiswani – were concerned about youngsters in their neighbourhood who had been involved in accidents, some proving fatal, after consuming country liquor and then driving. “We have also lost some close relatives to drunk driving,” says Patel. The students have used a wireless system that links the sensors-fitted helmet to the engine ignition. If the alcohol sensor on the helmet detects liquor breath, or if its special infrared sensors find that the driver is not wearing the helmet, the bike won’t start.

There is an added feature in the system. The helmet has a GSM mobile SIM slot. “If the driver has met with an accident, sensors will detect the impact and immediately send SMSs to friends and family members,” says Patel. “An advanced feature of the system is that it can show the exact place of the accident on a Google map on a smartphone.” Does the device enhance the weight of the helmet? “My guide Mayank Chavda had helped me reduce the weight of the system to just 200g,” Patel says. “The integration cost of the system is not more than Rs 2,500 and hence is affordable.”

WASHINGTON (TIP): Imagine a shirt that could grow back a sleeve if it rips off or a couch that can grow when you want to rest your feet. Researchers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology are developing “living materials” from biological particles that could be used in everyday items. “We want to leverage the ability of biology. With things such as trees and bone are materials made without human intervention, we want to grow similar materials from the ground up,” Timothy Lu, associate professor at MIT, told ‘Mashable’.

The researchers recently completed a proof of concept that was meant to be a first step towards the creation of ‘living materials’ or cell-based factories for materials. “We modified E coli bacteria to form biofilms and engineered them to contain artificial genetic programmes that allowed us to control the materials they made by adding external chemicals,” Lu said. “By changing when and where we added these chemicals, we were able to create biofilms that formed different materials,” Lu said.

The researchers also designed bacteria that could talk to each other and coordinate the formation of different materials, without human input. “Using this platform, we made biofilms that could bind to gold nanoparticles to conduct electricity or to bind to quantum dots and emit fluorescence,” he added. “We are still technologically far away from this becoming a reality, but we could see it in the next five to 10 years,” Lu said.

“There are also regulatory issues and society ones too — people might not be quick to adopt something like this. “If we could use live cells to grow the material and then remove those cells from the final product, I think more people would be willing to give it a try,” Lu added.

LONDON (TIP): An international team of planetary scientists have now calculated the exact age of the Moon. The team of researchers from France, Germany and the US has simulated the growth of the terrestrial planets (Mercury, Earth and Mars) from a disk of thousands of planetary building blocks orbiting the Sun. By analysing the growth history of the earth-like planets from 259 such simulations, the scientists have discovered the relationship between the time the earth was impacted by a mars-sized object to create the moon and the amount of material added to the earth after that impact.

The conclusion they have reached is that the moon formed nearly 100 million years after the start of the solar system. This is the first geologic clock in early solar system history that does not rely on measurements and interpretations of the radioactive decay of atomic nuclei to determine age. The conclusion, they say, is based on measurements from the interior of the earth combined with computer simulations of the proto-planetary disk from which the earth and other terrestrial planets formed. The research was funded by the European Research Council, as well as NASA’s Astrobiology Virtual Planetary Laboratory.

Augmenting the computer simulation with details on the mass of material added to the earth by accretion after the formation of the moon revealed a relationship that works much like a clock to date the moon-forming event. “We were excited to find a clock for the formation time of the moon that didn’t rely on radiometric dating methods. This correlation just jumped out of the simulations and held in each set of old simulations we looked at,” says lead author Seth Jacobson of the Observatory de la Cote d’Azur in Nice, France.

From geochemical measurements, the newly established clock dates the moon to just over 95 million years after the beginning of the solar system. This estimate for the moon-formation agrees with some interpretations of radioactive dating measurements. Because the new dating method is an independent and direct measurement of the age of the moon, it helps to guide which radioactive dating measurements are the most useful for this longstanding problem.

“This result is exciting because in the same simulations that can successfully form Mars in only 2 to 5 million years, we can also form the Moon at 100 million years. These vastly different timescales have been very hard to capture in simulations,” says author Dr Kevin Walsh from the Southwest Research Institute Space Science and Engineering Division.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (TIP):
Scientists have uncovered a vast ocean beneath the icy surface of Saturn’s little moon Enceladus. Italian and American researchers made the discovery using Cassini, a Nasa-European spacecraft still exploring Saturn and its rings 17 years after its launch from Cape Canaveral. Their findings were announced on April 3. This new ocean of liquid water — as big as or even bigger than North America’s Lake Superior — is centered at the south pole of Enceladus and could encompass much if not most of the moon.

Enceladus (ehn-SEHL’-uh-duhs) is about 310 miles across. The data do not show if the ocean extends to the north pole, said the lead researcher, Luciano Iess of Sapienza University of Rome. At the very least, it’s a regional sea some 25 miles deep under miles — thick ice. On Earth, it would stretch from our South Pole up to New Zealand — at the very least. Cassini’s rudimentary instruments also cannot determine whether the moon’s ocean harbors any form of life.

Another mission using more sophisticated instruments is needed to make that search. This latest discovery makes the interior of Enceladus “a very attractive potential place to look for life,” said Cornell University planetary scientist Jonathan Lunine, who took part in the study. Back in 2005, Cassini detected a plume streaming from cracks in the south polar region. Scientists suspected these jets of salty water vapor and ice — containing some light organic molecules like methane — might come from a subsurface ocean. On April 3, they confirmed its presence. Their findings appear in the journal Science.

Cassini provided gravity measurements from three close fly-bys of Enceladus from 2010 to 2012. The Doppler data indicated a dense material beneath the surface of the south pole, most likely liquid water. The ocean is believed to be sandwiched between miles of surface ice and a rocky core. “It’s extraordinary what Cassini has been able to do for this small moon,” California Institute of Technology’s David Stevenson, part of the research team, told reporters this week. But “this is not like mapping the surface of the Earth or mapping the surface of the moon, it’s nothing like that.

It’s much cruder, and it’s amazing that we’ve been able to do as much as we can.” Enceladus is hardly the only moon in the solar system with a subsurface sea. Titan, the largest of Saturn’s dozens of moons, is believed to have a global ocean. Evidence points to oceans inside the giant Jupiter moons of Callisto and Ganymede. And Jupiter’s Europa also has a hidden reservoir similar to that of Enceladus, complete with plumes and a rocky bottom. Cassini, already exceeding its life expectancy, is to make three more flybys of Enceladus before the mission ends in 2017.

LONDON (TIP):
Researchers have developed a fist-sized robot surgeon that slides into the body through an incision in the belly button and can help perform surgery on astronauts in deep space. After the robot enters the abdominal cavity – which has been filled with inert gas to make room for it to work – the robot can remove an ailing appendix, cut pieces from a diseased colon or perforate a gastric ulcer.

The robot, developed by Virtual Incision in Lincoln, Nebraska, will have its first zero-gravity test – in an aircraft flying in parabolic arcs – in the next few months, ‘New Scientist’ reported. While aloft, the robot will perform a set of exercises to demonstrate its dexterity, such as manipulating rubber bands and other inanimate objects. The hope is that such robots will accompany future astronauts on long deep-space missions, when the chances are higher that someone will experience physical trauma.

“It must be an emergency if you would consider surgery in space,” said team member Shane Farritor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Surgery in space would be extremely difficult. Without gravity, it is easy for bodily fluids like blood to float free and contaminate the cabin. Also, space capsules can only carry a certain amount of weight, so medical tools need to be relatively light but capable of handling many kinds of situations. Virtual Incision has been working on its design for a few years.

The latest version weighs 0.4kg and has two arms loaded with tools to grab, cauterise and suture tissue, and its head is a small video camera. The feed relays to a control station, where a human surgeon operates it using joysticks. Prototypes have performed several dozen procedures in pigs.

The team said the next step is to work in human cadavers and then test the technology in a living human on Earth. Remote-operated technologies would have a disadvantage in space, because the further away a spaceship gets, the greater the time delay in communications signals. Virtual Incision hopes to avoid this problem by training astronauts to perform procedures on each other.

LONDON (TIP): Scientists have built the clearest picture yet of how our genetic material is regulated in order to make the human body work. They have mapped how a network of switches, built into our DNA, controls where and when our genes are turned on and off.

Scientists at the University of Edinburgh led the international project — called FANTOM5 — which has been examining how our genome holds the code for creating the fantastic diversity of cell types that make up a human. The three year project, steered by the RIKEN Centre for Life Science Technologies in Japan, has involved more than 250 scientists in more than 20 countries and regions.

The study is a step change in our understanding of the human genome, which contains the genetic instructions needed to build and maintain all the many different cell types in the body, researchers said. All of our cells contain the same instructions, but genes are turned on and off at different times in different cells. This process is controlled by switches — called promoters and enhancers ?— found within the genome.

It is the flicking of these switches that makes a muscle cell different to a liver or skin cell. The team studied the largest ever set of cell types and tissues from human and mouse in order to identify the location of these switches within the genome. They also mapped where and when the switches are active in different cell types and how they interact with each other. In a separate study, researchers used information from the atlas to investigate the regulation of an important set of genes that are required to build muscle and bone. Another study has used the atlas to investigate the regulation of genes in cells of the immune system. “The FANTOM5 project is a tremendous achievement.

To use the analogy of an aeroplane,we have made a leap in understanding the function of all of the parts,” Professor David Hume, Director of The Roslin Institute and a lead researcher on the project, said. “And we have gone well beyond that, to understanding how they are connected and control the structures that enable flight,” said Hume. “The FANTOM5 project has identified new elements in the genome that are the targets of functional genetic variations in human populations, and also have obvious applications to other species,” Hume said.

“The research gives us an insight as to why humans are different from other animals, even though we share many genes in common,” Dr Martin Taylor, from the MRC Institute of Genetics and Molecular Medicine at the university, said. “Comparing the mouse and human atlases reveals extensive rewiring of gene switches that has occurred over time, helping us to understand more about how we have evolved,” said Taylor. The findings were reported in a series of papers published in the journal Nature.

LONDON (TIP): Until 2012, nobody was certain it existed till the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) announced they had found the God Particle. Scientists now say that it is more likely than ever now that there must be particles smaller than Higgs particle “Nobody has seen them yet; particles that are smaller than the Higgs particle.

However theories predict their existence, and now the most important of these theories have been critically tested,” they said. The result: The existence of the yet unseen particles is now more likely than ever”. The Higgs Boson is central part of the Standard Model of particle physics that describes how the world is constructed. According to the Standard Model, everything, from flowers and people to stars and planets, consists of just a few building blocks: matter particles.

These particles are governed by forces mediated by force particles that make sure everything works as it should. The entire Standard Model also rests on the existence of a special kind of particle: the Higgs particle. This particle originates from an invisible field that fills up all space. Even when the universe seems empty this field is there. Without it, we would not exist, because it is from contact with the field that particles acquire mass. On 4 July 2012, at the CERN laboratory for particle physics, the theory was confirmed by the discovery of a Higgs particle.

CERN’s particle collider, LHC (Large Hadron Collider), is probably the largest and the most complex machine ever constructed by humans. Last year, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced that the 2013 Nobel Prize for Physics to Peter Higgs after whom the particle is named. But in a new twist, Thomas Ryttov, particle physicist and associate professor at the Centre for Cosmology and Particle Physics Phenomenology refers to the theories, that over the last five years have been put forward for the existence of particles in the universe that are smaller than the Higgs particle.

LONDON (TIP): Scientists have for the first time ever created the brightest light ever imagined in the entire universe. X-rays brighter than a million suns were created which exposed the biochemical structure of a 50 million-year-old fossil plant to stunning visual effect when they were bombarded on it.

The team of palaeontologists, geochemists and physicists investigated the chemistry of exceptionally preserved fossil leaves from the Eoceneaged “Green River Formation” of the western United States by bombarding the fossils with X-rays produced by synchrotron particle accelerators. Researchers from Britain’s University of Manchester and Diamond Light Source combined the unique capabilities of two synchrotron facilities to produce detailed images of where the various elements of the periodic table were located within both living and fossil leaves.

The work shows that the distribution of copper, zinc and nickel in the fossil leaves was almost identical to that in modern leaves. Each element was concentrated in distinct biological structures such as the veins and the edges of the leaves and the way these trace elements and sulphur were attached to other elements was very similar to that seen in modern leaves and plant matter in soils.

WASHINGTON (TIP): A Nasa spacecraft has discovered a new gully channel on the surface of Mars which may have formed only within the last three years. A comparison of images taken by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on Nasa’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter in November 2010 and May 2013 reveal the formation of a new gully channel on a crater-wall slope in the southern highlands of Mars.

According to Space.com the feature was not present in HiRISE photos of the area taken on November 5, 2010. While the Mars gully looks a lot like river channels on Earth, it likely was not carved out by flowing water and may have resulted from activity of carbon dioxide frost. Gully or ravine landforms are common on Mars, particularly in the southern highlands, Nasa said. Th images show that material flowing down from an alcove at the head of a gully broke out of an older route and eroded a new channel.

The dates of the images are more than a full Martian year apart, so the observations did not pin down the Martian season of the activity at this site. Before-and-after HiRISE pairs of similar activity at other sites demonstrate that this type of activity generally occurs in winter, at temperatures so cold that carbon dioxide, rather than water, is likely to play the key role.

LONDON (TIP): A specimen of moss that has been buried frozen in the Antarctic permafrost for over 1,500 years has suddenly sprung back to life. Interestingly, getting them to grow didn’t even take any coaxing.

Researchers from the British Antarctic Survey and Reading University found that this moss specimen came back to life and grow once again in what is the longest period of time that frozen plants have been able to survive. Mosses are an important part of the biology of both the polar areas. They are the dominant plants and are the major store houses of fixed carbon. Previously, moss was known to survive being frozen for about 20 years — surviving for a millennium or more suggests the plants may be able to survive an ice age.

For the first time, this vital part of the ecosystem has been shown to have the ability to survive century to millennial scale ice ages. Professor Peter Convey from the British Antarctic Survey explains: “What mosses do in the ecosystem is far more important than we would generally realize when we look at a moss on a wall here for instance. Understanding what controls their growth and distribution, particularly in a fast-changing part of the world such as the Antarctic Peninsula region, is therefore of much wider significance.” The team took cores of moss from deep in a frozen moss bank in the Antarctic.

This moss would already have been at least decades old when it was first frozen. They sliced the frozen moss cores very carefully, keeping them free from contamination and placed them in an incubator at a normal growth temperature and light level. After only a few weeks, the moss began to grow. Using carbon dating, the team identified the moss to be at least 1,530 years of age and possibly even older, at the depth where the new growth was seen.

“We actually did very little other than slice the moss core very carefully,” Convey said, adding that they also make sure not to accidentally get any other life forms in the mix. They placed the sliced and seemingly lifeless mosses in an incubator environment at a normal growth temperature and light level, and voila, new shoots of the parent species began to appear. While 1,500 years on ice is impressive to say the least, the findings suggest that it may be possible for mosses to persist for even longer.

According to Professor Convey: “This experiment shows that multicellular organisms, plants in this case, can survive over far longer timescales than previously thought. If they can survive in this way, then decolonization following an ice age, once the ice retreats, would be a lot easier than migrating transoceanic distances from warmer regions. It also maintains diversity in an area that would otherwise be wiped clean of life by the ice advance.”

MUMBAI (TIP): Researchers from a Spanish university have developed a new computer software to diagnose cardiovascular risk on the basis of an eye scan. Doctors from Valenica University have started studying the blood vessel network around the retina of low-birth weight babies.

They scan the fundus of the retina to diagnose whether the child will develop hypertension or heart diseases in adult age. “We want to know the caliber and the branching angle of the retinal vessels because that information helps us to understand how the blood is circulating,” said Empar Lurbe, head of the paediatrics unit of the university hospital.

The measurement of the branching angles and the characteristics of the vessels’ caliber -if they are wider or narrower or if the branching angle is bigger or smaller- tells if the child who has a different branching angle could have an increase in blood pressure over the years.

Lurbe said children with fetuses with growth retardation are those who are at a greater risk of developing cardiovascular diseases, such as hypertension or type 2 diabetes. Because of this, we are using the measurements to see if the branching angles of the vessels of children who have intrauterine growth retardation are different than those who do not,” the doctor added.

NEW DELHI (TIP): The 8GB version of Apple’s iPhone 5C is official. The company has launched the 8GB version of iPhone 5C, the cheaper plastic body variant of the iPhone, in several countries in Europe. The 8GB iPhone 5C model (unlocked) has been priced at 429 pounds in the UK, 40 pounds cheaper than the 16GB variant of the same phone.

The phone is also being offered at zero upfront cost in UK and France through telecom operators O2 and SFR, as part of multi-year contracts. Apple is expected to list the 8GB version of the phone in the US, as well. The only difference between the 8GB model and the existing variants of the phone is reduced storage space, other specs of iPhone 5C remain same. Apple iPhone 5C sports a 4-inch Retina IPS LCD display (640x1136p, 326ppi).

The phone is powered by Apple’s A6 chip, that also powers iPhone 5. iPhone 5C features an 8MP rear camera with LED flash and a 1.2MP front-facing camera. According to reports, iPhone 5C has not done too well when it comes to sales. Apple’s decision to introduce a cheaper variant looks like an acknowledgement of the same.

A report by DigiTimes had reported that there were warehouses in Taiwan that had 3 million unsold iPhone 5C units in them. Umeng, China’s largest app analytics platform, reported that after four months of the phone’s launch, iPhone 5C activations remain way below those of the 5S. The 5C is on only 2% of devices on Umeng,while the 5S is on 12% of devices. It draws its data from 75,000 developers and 210,000 apps on its network.

LONDON (TIP): Not to be confused with the Xbox of the same name, the Moto 360 is Motorola’s new smartwatch, and one of the first to be announced with Android Wear. Android Wear is Google’s just-announced new mobile operating system spin-off, a modified version of Android designed specifically for smartwatches and other wearables.

Google mentioned Motorola alongside HTC, Samsung, Asus, and LG as its hardware brand partners for Android Wear smartwatches, and Motorola responded by revealing its own offering in full. The Moto 360 may look surprisingly like a traditional watch, but with Android Wear built in it’s anything but.

‘A truly modern timepiece’
In its announcement blog post Motorola’s Corporate Vice President of Product Management Lior Ron called the Moto 360 “a truly modern timepiece.” “It’s time for a watch that looks and feels great and gives you the information you need, when you need it,” Ron wrote. He emphasized the convenience and ease of use of getting notifications, checking appointments, perusing social networks, and even just checking the time and date with the Moto 360.

And like other Android Wear smartwatches, the Moto 360 relies heavily on Google Now’s voice command capabilities. Saying “OK, Google” will open up a variety of options. Ron said to expect the Motorola Moto 360 “in a variety of styles globally in summer 2014, starting in the US.” Motorola’s announcement of the Moto 360 was preceded by LG’s unveiling of the LG G Watch, its own Android Wear device.

WASHINGTON (TIP):
Researchers suggest that a beanstalk-like ‘space elevator’ consisting of an Earthanchored tether that extends 100,000km into space could eventually provide routine, safe, inexpensive and quiet access to the Earth’s orbit. An assessment of the concept has been put together in a study titled ‘Space Elevators: An Assessment of the Technological Feasibility and the Way Forward’. The study was conducted by experts from around the world under the auspices of the International Academy of Astronautics (IAA).

The study’s final judgment is twofold: A space elevator appears possible, with the understanding that risks must be mitigated through technological progress, and a space elevator infrastructure could indeed be built via a major international effort. The tether serving as a space elevator would be used to place payloads and people into space using electric vehicles called climbers that drive up and down the tether at train-like speeds. The rotation of the Earth would keep the tether taut and capable of supporting the climbers.

LONDON (TIP):
We all know that LED lights are durable and save energy. Now researchers have found a novel way to make LED lamps even more compact while supplying more light than commercially available models. And the key to success lies in transistors made of the semiconductor material gallium nitride. LEDs are extremely sensitive to variations and spikes in power. To function properly, they need a driver that ensures a constant supply of power at all times.

“This driver, which takes the alternating current from the grid and converts it into direct current with a reduced voltage, has a profound influence on the light yield and lifetime of the LED lamp as a whole,” said Michael Kunzer, group manager at the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Solid State Physics IAF in Germany. This prompted researchers to focus their attention on voltage transformers featuring gallium nitride (GaN) transistors. During practical testing, the scientists found that the drivers developed using this new semiconductor material were extremely robust.

Components made of GaN can operate at higher currents, voltages and temperatures than standard silicon transistors. “Heat plays a role both in the brightness and the service life of LED lamps,” Kunzer added.With the new semiconductor, the researchers were able to boost the efficiency of the GaN driver to 86 per cent – between one and four percentage points better than its silicon equivalent.”Nearly 20 per cent of energy consumption worldwide can be attributed to lighting so it is an area where savings are particularly worthwhile. One should not underestimate the role played by the efficiency of LED drivers as this is key to saving energy,” Kunzer noted.

LONDON:
In a blow to ozone-protection efforts, scientists have identified four new man-made gases in the atmosphere which are contributing to the destruction of the ozone layer. Two of the newly discovered gases are accumulating at a rate that is causing concern among scientists. New research by scientists at the University of East Anglia, UK, shows that more than 74,000 tonnes of three new chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and one new hydrochlorofluorocarbon (HCFC) have been released into the atmosphere.

“Our research has shown four gases that were not around in the atmosphere at all until the 1960s which suggests they are human-made,” lead researcher Dr Johannes Laube from UEA’s School of Environmental Sciences said. “The identification of these four new gases is very worrying as they will contribute to the destruction of the ozone layer,” said Laube. Scientists made the discovery by comparing today’s air samples with air trapped in polar firn snow – which provides a century-old natural archive of the atmosphere.

SYDNEY (TIP):
The steam and heat from volcanoes allowed species of plants and animals to survive past ice ages, a study showed on Tuesday, offering help for scientists dealing with climate change. An international team of researchers said their analysis helped explain a long-running mystery about how some species thrived in areas covered by glaciers, with volcanoes acting as an oasis of life during long cold periods. “Volcanic steam can melt large ice caves under the glaciers, and it can be tens of degrees warmer in there than outside,” said Ceridwen Fraser, the joint team leader from the Australian National University. “Caves and warm steam fields would have been great places for species to hang out during ice ages.

“We can learn a lot from looking at the impacts of past climate change as we try to deal with the accelerated change that humans are now causing.” The team studied tens of thousands of records of Antarctic mosses, lichens and bugs, collected over decades by hundreds of researchers, and found there were more species close to volcanoes, and fewer further away. While the study was based on Antarctica, the findings will also help scientists understand how species survived past ice ages in other frigid regions, including in periods when it is thought there was little or no ice-free land on the planet.

Antarctica has at least 16 volcanoes which have been active since the last ice age 20,000 years ago with around 60 percent of Antarctic invertebrate species found nowhere else in the world. “The closer you get to volcanoes, the more species you find,” said Aleks Terauds from the Australian Antarctic Division, which ran the analysis that was published by the US-based journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“This pattern supports our hypothesis that species have been expanding their ranges and gradually moving out from volcanic areas since the last ice age.” Another team member Steven Chown, from Monash University in Melbourne, said the research findings could help guide conservation efforts in Antarctica. “Knowing where the ‘hotspots’ of diversity are will help us to protect them as human-induced environmental changes continue to affect Antarctica,” he said.

WASHINGTON (TIP):
The venom of Tarantula spiders may hold key to the development of a safe and effective new painkiller, a new study has found. Screening more than 100 spider toxins, Yale University researchers identified a protein from the venom of the Peruvian green velvet tarantula that blunts activity in pain-transmitting neurons. The findings show the new screening method used by the scientists has the potential to search millions of different spider toxins for safe pain-killing drugs and therapies. The researchers note that they tested the spider toxins on only one of a dozen suspected human pain channels.

“The likelihood is that within the vast diversity of spider toxins we will find others that are active against other channels important for pain,” said Michael Nitabach, senior author of the research paper. The researchers screened the toxins from a variety of tarantula species to find one that blocked TRPA1, an ion channel on the surface of pain-sensing neurons that is implicated in inflammation and neuropathic pain. In a process dubbed toxineering by researchers, the team generated another small library of mutated versions of the tarantula toxin to find one that blocked TRPA1 but had no effect on activity of other channels on the surface of neurons.

“The beauty of the system is we can also screen engineered toxins not found in nature, and identify higher-potency and more specific molecular variants that lack deleterious effects on essential nerve functions,” Nitabach said. Tarantulas comprise a group of often hairy and very large arachnids belonging to the Theraphosidae family of spiders.

LONDON (TIP):
We’ve yet to find definitive evidence of life on Mars but for Nasa the search is continuing further afield. In its latest budget request the US space agency set aside funds to explore a mission to Jupiter’s moon Europa, often described as one of the solar system’s best bets for hosting alien life. Nasa’s annual federal budget request of $17.5 billion (down by $1.2 billion from its 2010 peak) has set aside $15 million for “preformulation work” on a mission to the moon, with plans to make detailed observations and possibly sample its interior oceans.

Scientists believe that underneath Europa’s icy exterior is a single, massive ocean that contains almost twice as much water as is found on Earth, kept liquid by the gravitational pull of Jupiter – a force that creates tidal swells 1,000 times stronger than those caused by our own Moon. Although for many years it was believed that the existence of life was dependent on absorbing energy from the Sun, in the last 40 years scientists have discovered that microbial life can thrive even in the most extreme, sun-less environments. These include the discovery diverse organisms including tube worms and shrimp found around the deep-sea hydrothermal vents known as ‘black smokers’.

In addition to the possibility of life under the ice, observations made late last year by the Hubble telescope suggest that enormous jets of water some 200 kilometres tall (that’s twice as high as Earth’s atmosphere) are spurting from Europa’s southern pole. This would mean that the Europa Clipper — a concept space probe that Nasa has been developing for just such a mission — could conceivably fly through these plumes of water vapour, collecting samples from Europa’s interior without having to face the cost and difficulty of landing on the surface. Although the 2015 proposed budget is the first time funding to study Europa has been explicitly requested, Nasa has has stressed that all of this work is extremely preliminary.

Europa is a very challenging mission operating in a really high radiation environment, and there’s lots to do to prepare for it,” Nasa’s chief financial officer Beth Robinson said to reporters on Tuesday. “We’re looking for a launch some time in the mid-2020s.” And while the $15 million set aside for research on a Europa mission is tiny compared to the total budget, space enthusiasts should not be downhearted – more than of the proposed budget was allocated for “human exploration operations”, aka getting humans off the planet.

Nasa is currently working on a new crew vehicle (the Orion spacecraft) as well a heavy-lifting rocket designed “to take astronauts farther into the solar system than we have ever gone before.” Both of these craft will be instrumental in the space agency’s plans to send astronauts to an asteroid by 2025 and to Mars some time in the 2030s. So even if we don’t find extraterrestrial life elsewhere in the Solar System, it seems we’ll at least have escaped the boundaries of our own planet.

CAPE CANAVERAL (TIP): An asteroid is headed this way. But even though it will come closer than the moon, astronomers say it will pose no danger. The newly discovered asteroid, called 2014 DX110, will hurtle between the moon and Earth on Wednesday. DX110 will pass an estimated 217,000 miles from Earth. That’s approximately nine-tenths of the distance between the moon and Earth. The asteroid is an estimated 45 to 130 feet across. Relatively close approaches like this occur all the time, although DX110 is extra close.

NEW YORK (TIP): Here comes a potentially clean and low-cost way to convert carbon dioxide into methanol – a key ingredient in the production of plastics, adhesives and solvents and a promising fuel for the future. Scientists have identified a new nickel-gallium catalyst that converts hydrogen and carbon dioxide into methanol with fewer side-products than the conventional catalyst. “Methanol is processed in huge factories at very high pressures using hydrogen, carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide from natural gas,” said Felix Studt, a staff scientist at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, US. We are looking for materials than can make methanol from clean sources under low-pressure conditions, while generating low amounts of carbon monoxide, he said.

“Eventually we would also like to make higher alcohols, such as ethanol and propanol, which, unlike methanol, can be directly added to gasoline today,” added co-author Jens Norskov, a professor of chemical engineering at the Stanford University. Once the team understood methanol synthesis at the molecular level, they began the hunt for a new catalyst capable of synthesising methanol at low pressures using only hydrogen and carbon dioxide. The most promising candidate turned out to be a little-known compound called nickel-gallium. The team turned to a research group at the Technical University of Denmark. The Danish team carried out the task of synthesising nickel and gallium into a solid catalyst. In lab tests, nickel-gallium produced more methanol than the conventional copper-zinc-aluminium catalyst and considerably less of the carbon monoxide byproduct.

“You want to make methanol, not carbon monoxide. You also want a catalyst that is stable and does not decompose. The lab tests showed that nickel-gallium is, in fact, a very stable solid,” said Ib Chorkendorff from the Technical University of Denmark. The ultimate goal is to develop a large-scale manufacturing process that is non-polluting and carbon neutral using clean hydrogen, the authors said in the study that appeared in the journal Nature Chemistry.

NEW DELHI (TIP): Nasa’s NEOWISE spacecraft, which came out of a two year long sleep last year, has spotted a never-beforeseen comet —its first such discovery since coming out of hibernation late last year. The comet was spotted when it was 230 million kilometers from Earth. “We are so pleased to have discovered this frozen visitor from the outermost reaches of our solar system,” said Amy Mainzer, the mission’s principal investigator from Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. “This comet is a weirdo — it is in a retrograde orbit, meaning that it orbits the sun in the opposite sense from Earth and the other planets.” The new comet, officially named “C/2014 C3 (NEOWISE)”, has a tail about 40,000 kilometers long.

Although the comet’s orbit is still a bit uncertain, it appears to have arrived from its most distant point in the region of the outer planets. According to Universe Today, the comet has a highly-eccentric 20- year orbit that takes it high above the plane of the solar system and out past the orbit of Jupiter. “Technically, with a perihelion distance greater than 1.3 astronomical units, comet C/2014 C3 does not classify as a near-earth object (and its orbit does not intersect earth’s.) But it’s still good to know that NEOWISE is looking out for us,” UT said.

The mission’s sophisticated software picked out the moving object against a background of stationary stars. As NEOWISE circled earth, scanning the sky, it observed the comet six times over half a day before the object moved out of its view. The discovery was confirmed by the Minor Planet Center, Cambridge, Massachusetts, when follow-up observations were received three days later from the Near Earth Object Observation project Spacewatch, Tucson, Arizona other follow-up observations were then quickly received. While this is the first comet NEOWISE has discovered since coming out of hibernation, the spacecraft is credited with the discovery of 21 other comets during its primary mission.

Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer or NEOWISE spacecraft was originally called the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE). It was shut down in 2011 after its primary mission was completed. In September 2013, it was reactivated, renamed NEOWISE and assigned a new mission to assist NASA’s efforts to identify the population of potentially hazardous near-earth objects. NEOWISE will also characterize previously known asteroids and comets to better understand their sizes and compositions.

LONDON (TIP): Water has been detected in the atmosphere of a planet outside our solar system. An international team of astronomers detected water in the atmosphere of Tau Bootis b which is as massive as Jupiter orbiting the star Tau Bootis. Chad Bender, a research associate in the Penn State Department of Astronomy in the US and used a new technique that could help researchers to learn how many planets with water, like earth, exist throughout the universe.

Chad said “Planets like Tau Bootes b which are as massive as Jupiter but much hotter do not exist in our solar system. Our detection of water in the atmosphere of tau Bootis b is important because it helps us understand how these exotic hot-Jupiter planets form and evolve. It also demonstrates the effectiveness of our new technique, which detects the infrared radiation in the atmospheres of these planets.”

The co-authors of the paper are at institutions including CalTech, Penn State University, the Naval Research Laboratory, the University of Arizona, and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Bender is leading a larger project to characterize the atmospheres of many hot-Jupiter extra-solar planets. Scientists had previously detected water vapor on a handful of other planets using a technique that works only if a planet has an orbit that passes it in front of its star when viewed from Earth.

Scientists also were able to use another imaging technique that works only if the planet is sufficiently far away from its host star. But significant portions of the population of extra-solar planets do not fit either of these criteria and there had not been a way to discover information about the atmospheres of these planets. “We now are applying our effective new infrared technique to several other non-transiting planets orbiting stars near the Sun,” Bender said.

“These planets are much closer to us than the nearest transiting planets, but largely have been ignored by astronomers because directly measuring their atmospheres with previously existing techniques was difficult or impossible,” he added. With the new detection technique and morepowerful telescopes in the future like the James Webb Space Telescope and the Thirty Meter Telescope, the astronomers expect to be able to examine the atmospheres of planets that are much cooler and more distant from their host stars where liquid water is even more likely to exist.

LONDON (TIP): Molten lava spit out from the depths of the earth’s crust has caused destruction for centuries. But scientists now say volcanic eruptions have actually benefited the planet. Such eruptions in the early part of the 21st century cooled the planet, according to a study led by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. This cooling partly offset the warming produced by greenhouse gases.

Despite continuing increases in atmospheric levels of greenhouse gases and in the total heat content of the ocean, global mean temperatures at the surface of the planet and in the troposphere (the lowest portion of the Earth’s atmosphere) have shown relatively little warming since 1998. This socalled slowdown or hiatus has received considerable scientific, political and popular attention. Volcanic eruptions inject sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere.

If the eruptions are large enough to add sulphur dioxide to the stratosphere (the atmospheric layer above the troposphere), the gas forms tiny droplets of sulphuric acid, also known as volcanic aerosols. These droplets reflect some portion of the incoming sunlight back into space, cooling the Earth’s surface and the lower atmosphere. “In the last decade, the amount of volcanic aerosol in the stratosphere has increased, so more sunlight is being reflected back into space,” said Lawrence Livermore climate scientist Benjamin Santer.

“This has created a natural cooling of the planet and has partly offset the increase in surface and atmospheric temperatures due to human influence.” The researchers performed two different statistical tests to determine whether recent volcanic eruptions have cooling effects that can be distinguished from the intrinsic variability of the climate.

The team found evidence for significant correlations between volcanic aerosol observations and satellite-based estimates of lower tropospheric temperatures as well as the sunlight reflected back to space by the aerosol particles. “This is the most comprehensive observational evaluation of the role of volcanic activity on climate in the early part of the 21st century,” said co-author Susan Solomon from MIT. “We assess the contributions of volcanoes on temperatures in the troposphere — the lowest layer of the atmosphere — and find they’ve certainly played some role in keeping the Earth cooler.”