Category Archives: Research

2006 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine

The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2006 goes to: Andrew Z. Fire and Craig C. Mello for their discovery of
RNA interference – gene silencing by double-stranded RNA.

This mechanism, RNA interference, is activated when RNA molecules occur as double-stranded pairs in the cell. Double-stranded RNA activates biochemical machinery which degrades those mRNA molecules that carry a genetic code identical to that of the double-stranded RNA. When such mRNA molecules disappear, the corresponding gene is silenced and no protein of the encoded type is made.

RNA interference occurs in plants, animals, and humans. It is of great importance for the regulation of gene expression, participates in defense against viral infections, and keeps jumping genes under control. RNA interference is already being widely used in basic science as a method to study the function of genes and it may lead to novel therapies in the future.

The Nobel Prize site also includes does a great job by including advanced information on this work.

Another Strike Against Cola

This is definately not the year of Cola. This summer has seen many stories on Drinking Soda and Obesity. High visability attempts to rid schools of Cola have grown. And now news that, Drinking cola may increase risk to women’s bones

A study of 2,500 people concluded that drinking the carbonated beverages was linked with low bone mineral density in three different hip sites in women, regardless of age, menopausal status, calcium and vitamin D intake and use of cigarettes or alcohol.

Similar results were seen for diet pop and less strongly for decaffeinated pop.

In men, there was no link with lower bone mineral density at the hip, and both sexes showed no link for the spine.

As with most medical studies one big conclusion from this study: more study is needed. While this may be frustrating it is still true, it is not easy to get a full picture of health effects, see: Medical Study Results Questioned. So from some results (with varying degrees of confidence) experts can give the best advice they can and seek to better understand the situation with more studies.

Nanoparticles to Aid Brain Imaging

Nanoparticles to aid brain imaging, team reports by Cathryn M. Delude

If you want to see precisely what the 10 billion neurons in a person’s brain are doing, a good way to start is to track calcium as it flows into neurons when they fire.
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So Jasanoff designed the new sensor to incorporate so-called “superparamagnetic nanoparticles”–extra-strength molecular-sized magnets previously designed for ultrasensitive tumor imaging. They produce large MRI contrast changes capable of producing very high-resolution images.

5th State of Matter

Physicists create ‘new state’ of matter in a solid

An international team of physicists have coaxed particles into an exotic “fifth state” of matter at a higher temperature than ever before, according to new research.

The research also represents the first time a Bose-Einstein condensate has been created in a solid, rather than in a super-cooled gas.

The Bose-Einstein condensate is a super-cooled state of matter in which all the atoms have the same energy and quantum characteristics, similar to the way all photons in a laser share the same characteristics.

This new form of matter was first predicted mathematically by Indian physicist S.N. Bose and Albert Einstein in 1924.

Three American physicists — Eric Cornell, Wolfgang Ketterle and Carl Wieman — first created a Bose-Einstein condensate in the lab in 1995 and shared the 2001 Nobel Prize for physics for their work.

Open Science Computer Grid

The Open Science Grid is a distributed computing infrastructure for large-scale scientific research:

Researchers from many fields, including astrophysics, bioinformatics, computer science, medical imaging, nanotechnology and physics, use the OSG infrastructure to advance their research. OSG provides help for new communities to adapt their applications to use the distributed facility and make their resources accessible.
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The OSG includes two grids: an Integration Grid and a Production Grid. The Integration Grid is used to test new grid applications, sites and technologies, while the Production Grid provides a stable, supported environment on which researchers run their scientific applications.

Computer scientist spearheads $30 million ‘Open Science Grid’

The National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Office of Science announced today that they have joined forces to fund a five-year, $30 million program to operate and expand upon the two-year-old national grid.

Matter to Anti-Matter 3 Trillion Times a Second

Fermilab press release:

Fermilab’s CDF scientists make it official: They have discovered the quick-change behavior of the B-sub-s meson, which switches between matter and antimatter 3 trillion times a second.
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Determining the astonishing rate of 3 trillion oscillations per second required sophisticated analysis techniques. CDF cospokespersons Konigsberg and Fermilab’s Rob Roser explained that the B_s meson is a very short-lived particle. In order to understand its underlying characteristics, scientists have to observe how each particle decays to determine its true make-up.

Protein Knots

graphic of human ubiquitin hydrolase

Knotty problem puzzles protein researchers by Anne Trafton:

Knots are rare in proteins–less than 1 percent of all proteins have any knots, and most are fairly simple. The researchers analyzed 32,853 proteins, using a computational technique never before applied to proteins at this scale.

Of those that had knots, all were enzymes. Most had a simple three-crossing, or trefoil knot, a few had four crossings, and the most complicated, a five-crossing knot, was initially found in only one protein–ubiquitin hydrolase.

That complex knot may hold some protective value for ubiquitin hydrolase, whose function is to rescue other proteins from being destroyed–a dangerous job.

Photo: MIT researchers recently found that human ubiquitin hydrolase, shown here, has the most complicated knot ever observed in a protein. The simplified diagram, inset, shows the knot in the protein, which crosses itself five times. Larger image.

String Theory

image of book cover: The Trouble With Physics

String theory: Hanging on by a thread? by Dan Vergano:

String theory is on the ropes. After decades of prominence as the key to physics’ elusive “theory of everything,” challengers say the hypothesis is unraveling.

Why? Because there haven’t been experiments to prove it — and there don’t seem to be any on the horizon.

“The interplay with experiments is essential, and string theory just doesn’t have that,” says physicist Lee Smolin, author of The Trouble With Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of Science, and What Comes Next
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Schwartz, one of the fathers of modern string theory, replies by e-mail that experiments will verify string theory in the future. The big question is how much energy an experiment would have to pound into a collision between particles to reveal strings, he adds. Many physicists hope that Europe’s Large Hadron Collider facility will offer some answers, starting in 2007.

Ultimately, Carroll says, “the only way for someone to kill string theory will be to come up with a better one.”

The The Elegant Universe:Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory by Brain Greene is a great read.

Engine on a Chip – the Future Battery

micro engine - battery replacement

Engine on a chip promises to best the battery

MIT researchers are putting a tiny gas-turbine engine inside a silicon chip about the size of a quarter. The resulting device could run 10 times longer than a battery of the same weight can, powering laptops, cell phones, radios and other electronic devices.
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The MIT team has now used this process to make all the components needed for their engine, and each part works. Inside a tiny combustion chamber, fuel and air quickly mix and burn at the melting point of steel. Turbine blades, made of low-defect, high-strength microfabricated materials, spin at 20,000 revolutions per second — 100 times faster than those in jet engines.

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340 Years of Royal Society Journals Online

The complete archive (from 1665) of the Royal Society journals, is freely available electronically for two months. You can try using the Journal archive – it sure does have spectacular content, if only you can unearth it:

The archive contains seminal research papers including accounts of Michael Faraday’s groundbreaking series of electrical experiments, Isaac Newton’s invention of the reflecting telescope, and the first research paper published by Stephen Hawking.

Note to anyone with scientific content of high value that decides to allow internet access. Please contact Google and have them help you make it available online. They don’t have any official program to do so, but for collections of enough merit I can’t imagine you would have any trouble getting some Google engineer to take on the project.
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