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Protein Synthesis Science Video
Posted on September 15th, 2008
We've already seen a video about how proteins are made. That video, from 1970, used humans to illustrate the science in a fun and energetic (if a touch weird) way.
Well now someone has made a new video explaining the science of protein synthesis using cut-out paper set to a rock soundtrack. Gotta love it 
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Space News Round-up
Posted on August 28th, 2008
 There has been a lot of cool and very exciting astronomy news lately that I want to share with you in one big gulp.
First up is news about a new massive object discovered at the edge of the solar system. True to astronomers' tradition of coming up with cuddly names, the object is called 2006 SQ372. It's just over two billion miles from Earth in the inner Oort Cloud, putting it a touch closer to us than the planet Neptune. More details from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and for the geeks, from NASA
 Space Ropes: A paper published in the journal Nature introduces a theory about how the filaments seen in the galaxy NGC 1275 (image above) are stablized. NGC 1275 is one of the closest giant elliptical galaxies and lies at the centre of the Perseus Cluster of galaxies. It is an active galaxy, hosting a supermassive black hole at its core, which blows bubbles of radio-wave emitting material into the surrounding cluster gas. Its most spectacular feature is the lacy filigree of gaseous filaments reaching out beyond the galaxy into the multi-million degree X-ray emitting gas that fills the cluster.
Astronomers have long failed to understand how the delicate structures withstood the hostile high-energy environment of the galaxy cluster for more than 100 million years. They should have heated up, dispersed, and evaporated over a very short period of time, or collapsed under their own gravity to form stars. Even more puzzling is the fact that they haven't been ripped apart by the strong tidal pull of gravity in the cluster's core. The new study proposes that magnetic fields hold the charged gas in place and resist forces that would distort the filaments. This skeletal structure has been able to contain and suspend these peculiarly long threads for over 100 million years!
Our first video is from NASA about a new camera going into the Hubble Telescope when the fourth servicing mission launches.
Next up is another cool video about every-day life on the space station:
Finally, sunrise on Mars:
Credits: Large Magellanic Cloud: NASA, ESA, and the Hubble Heritage Team (STScI/AURA). Martian sunrise: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona/Texas A&M University. NGC 1275: NASA, ESA and Andy Fabian (University of Cambridge, UK).
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What Does an Ant Colony Look Like?
Posted on August 4th, 2008
I found this very cool video about scientists studying ant colonies. They found a large grass-cutter ants colony and studied how the colony is ventillated. In another colony, they poured a ridiculous amount of cement to freeze the colony's structure underground, which they then excavated.
What they found was utterly amazing. Check it out!
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Water Confirmed on Mars; Liquid Lake on Titan
Posted on July 31st, 2008
NASA just scored a double whammy: water is now confirmed for the first time ever on Mars and a liquid hydrocarbon lake, which is the only other place in the solar system that has liquid on its surface.
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First Mars: For the past few days, the Phoenix Mars Lander has been having problems getting icy soil unstuck from its bucket scooper. And just four hours ago, NASA announced, on twitter, that the ice is chemically confirmed to be water. The robotic arm delivered the soil sample to an oven which then heated the soil and the water vapor observed. We've had evidence for water on Mars for a while now but this is the first confirmation by chemical "tasting".
The sample came from a frozen layer 2 inches deep under the Martian surface soil. The sticky soil was difficult to move into the oven and so the sample was exposed to the Martian air to get some of the water to evaporate and make it easier to handle. The oven is known as Thermal and Evolved-Gas Analyzer, or TEGA.
For more Pheonix updates, follow @MarsPhoenix on twitter and keep an eye on the Lander's home page on NASA's website.
The other news is of Cassini finding a liquid lake on Saturn's moon Titan. Before Cassini, scientists thought Titan would have global oceans of methane, ethane and other hydrocarbons. Now after more than 40 close flybys of Titan by Cassini, we have not seen any such oceans. Instead, hundreds of dark, lake-like features were seen but we weren't sure if they were made of dark material or really lakes.
The results came from a mapping instrument of lake Ontario Lacus, in Titan's south polar region, during a close Cassini flyby in December 2007. The lake is roughly 20,000 square kilometers (7,800 square miles) in area, slightly larger than North America's Lake Ontario, and now is known to be made of liquid ethane. The ethane is in a liquid solution with methane, other hydrocarbons and nitrogen. At Titan's surface temperatures, approximately 300 degrees Fahrenheit below zero, these substances can exist as both liquid and gas. Titan shows overwhelming evidence of evaporation, rain, and fluid-carved channels draining into what, in this case, is a liquid hydrocarbon lake.
Full details about the Cassini's mission to Saturn at the NASA Cassini-Huygens's home page.
Is that cool or what?
Image credits: TOP: This partial view of a full-circle panorama shows NASA's Mars Phoenix Lander and the polygonal patterning of the ground at the landing area. The image is in approximately true color. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University Arizona/Texas A&M University. BOTTOM: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute.
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A New Way to Age?
Posted on July 25th, 2008
A very interesting paper has just been published about aging in worms. The paper basically uncovers evidence that goes against the current thinking about how and why animals age and might in the future shed light on how and why humans age. Worms? Yes, because they are a good genetic model that is easy to grow and experiment on.
Some background: there are two theories that explain how cells and animals age:
Cells get damaged and the damage accumulates over time, which leads to cells malfunctioning and dying.
The control mechanisms inside the cell break over time leading to the cell's processes to stop functioning properly, something descriptively called antagonistic pleiotropy.
Cell damage can come from sources such as cellular stress, free radicals, and disease, and there is evidence to support this theory. The life span of worms can be extended by feeding them harmless bacteria and growing them in conditions that reduce cell damage. Some experimental strains of worms have longer lifespans because they have mutations that allow them to survive stress better. So there is evidence for this kind of thinking but it's not the whole story.
Today's paper uncovers 3 genes that are master control switches for many cellular processes - they control over 1200 genes in total! These genes, known as elt-3, elt-5, and elt-6, interact: elt-5 and elt-6 inhibit elt-3 late in life and lower levels of elt-3 mean that some processes are switched off. When the researchers knocked out elt-5 and elt-6 (i.e. removed their inhibitory effects), high levels of elt-3 were seen in older worms just like in younger worms, and not just that, the worms lived longer - about 25 days compared to 20 days.
So what does this mean? The evidence in this paper looks good and of course it needs to be repeated and validated. Furthermore, it may or may not apply to humans because humans live for decades as opposed to the days a worm lives which could mean that different aging mechanisms may be important in humans. Still, this research opens the door for further experimentation and gives us a handle on how to approach this age-old problem.
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Richard Dawkins Interview
Posted on July 24th, 2008
Finally a sensible (and civil!) interview with Prof Dawkins in a mainstream news channel, AlJazeera English. The interviewer, Riz Khan, explores the whole evolution/creationism/intelligent design debate (as if we needed one...) in very broad strokes with Prof Dawkins and takes 2 questions via email and one by phone.
My favourite answer is the one that starts around 5:30 min into the interview.
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Einstein Prediction Shown Correct… AGAIN!
Posted on July 18th, 2008
Two years ago, I blogged about how Einstein's E=mc2 was supported by experimental evidence. Well now an international group of astronomers have observed evidence that supports another prediction from Einstein's General Relativity from 1915.
The video below explains the experiment, so I'll give some background and a quick explanation. When massive stars die and explode as supernovae, they leave behind an ultradense object called pulsars. One such stellar ruin, affectionately known PSR J0737-3039A/B and lying about 1700 light years away from us, is the only known double pulsar, meaning there are two objects that orbit each other. Actually, they are so close to each other the whole system can fit inside our sun. As pulsars rotate, they emit very powerful radio waves which we can detect on Earth, and that's what allowed the astrophysicists to test Einstein's theory.
What Einstein's theory predicted is that in a system like a double pulsar, the two objects will affect each others motion. The change in motion is a slow one and called a "precession". You can see something similar at home: spin a top but make it spin slightly off-vertical. You'll see the axis of the top rotate slowly, like the image to the right. The question is: can we observe such precession in PSR J0737-3039A/B? Yes we do.
A paper just published in Science magazine describes how such a precession was observed. But don't bother with the paper, just watch the video below.
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The Double Slit Experiment
Posted on July 16th, 2008
One of the key experiments in physics is called the double slit experiment. The experiment very elegantly demonstrates why quantum physics is so counter intuitive. The double slit experiment shows that light is both particles and waves. It also tells us that electrons, subatomic particles themselves, can behave like waves. This so-called wave-particle duality is one of the key concepts in quantum physics.
Today's video is a cool cartoon that explains this concept and describes the experiment in simple terms. It really is one of the best explanations I've seen for the subject.
Finally, if you want a reference to dive into further, check out this Physics World article.
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The Tail of Two BDNF Transcripts
Posted on July 14th, 2008
In animal brains, there is a gene called the brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) that is important for neurons in the hippocampus to grow and connect to each other, processes that are the basis of memory and learning. The gene produces a growth factor that makes neurons grow which plays a key role in the initial development of the brain: Mice born without BDNF have developmental deficits and die soon after birth. BDNF is also secreted by neurons in adult brains when synaptic junctions between neurons require strengthening (something called "synaptic plasticity") which again are processes that underly memory and learning. Just in case this is not enough, BDNF production has been linked to exercise and to treating depression.
(Quick recap of The Central Dogma of genetics as it's about to feature in our story: DNA stores the genetic material which is then transcribed into RNA that is then translated into proteins. This DNA->RNA->Protein is at the heart of genetics and molecular biology as it summarizes how genetic material is transmitted between generations (via DNA) and how the DNA controls the cell's processes via the RNA and proteins.)
There's been a weird twist in the BDNF story: when the BDNF gene is transcribed into RNA it makes two different types of RNA, a long one and a short one, differing in the tail length of the RNA that's produced. This is not uncommon in genetics as lots of genes produce more than one type of RNA that end up producing variants of the same protein product. The weird thing about BDNF is that both RNA types end up producing the exact same protein. The question is why does it do that? Why does BDNF need two types of RNA to produce the same exact product when only one would suffice?
The answer seems to be transportation. A paper recently published in the journal Cell shows that the long version of the BDNF RNA is transported down the long axons of nerve cells. Nerve cells can be quite long and the long BDNF RNA has anchors that transport proteins dock to and move the RNA towards the tips of the nerve cells. There, the same exact BDNF protein is made but it is at the tip of the nerve instead near the main body of the nerve cell. Neat!
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Academic Lectures
Posted on December 27th, 2007
How many lectures and seminars have you attended that sounded a lot like this one?
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