In legend, Yeti is a huge and furry human-resembling creature also referred to as the Abominable Snowman, but in science, Yeti is just a bear. Now the question is: what kind of bear? A new study, published in the journal ZooKeys, concludes that hair sample "evidence" for Yeti actually comes from Himalayan brown bears. The finding refutes an earlier study that the hair belonged to an unknown type of bear related to polar bears. Top 10 Reasons Why Bigfoot's a Bust At the center of the controversy are DNA analysis studies. Prior research, led by Bryan Sykes at the University of Oxford, determined that hairs formerly attributed to Yeti belonged to to a mysterious bear species that may not yet be known to science. Sykes told Discovery News that his paper "refers to two Himalayan samples attributed to yetis and which turned out to be related to an ancient polar bear. This may be the source of the legend in the Himalayas." The new study, however, calls this possibility into question. The research, in this case, was authored by Eliécer E. Gutiérrez of the Smithsonian Institution and Ronald Pine at the University of Kansas.

 

Putting
space travelers into a state of deep sleep
has been a staple of interstellar science
fiction for quite some time, but despite originating as a far-fetched concept,
the idea of using suspended animation to enable deep space travel might soon
become science fact.

 

If
you're unfamiliar with the concept, here's a quick rundown. Traveling far into
space is a tricky endeavor. With existing technology, traveling to a planet
like Mars takes about 180 days, for example. Keeping a crew of people alive
(and entertained) in space for that long isn't hard, but it does require a lot
of food, water, energy, and other supplies. This makes manned long-distance
space travel extremely expensive, since hauling more supplies requires huge
amounts of storage space, and thousands of additional dollars just to get it
all that stuff into orbit.

 

In
theory, suspended animation would help solve this problem. If astronauts could
be placed in a deep sleep during the journey, they would require far fewer
resources along the way. Instead, they could just be put to sleep at the
beginning and woken back up when they arrive at their destination.

 

Now,
with a manned mission to Mars likely in its sights, NASA has begun to explore
the viability of such an idea, and has recently funded a study by Atlanta-based
aerospace engineering firm SpaceWorks Enterprises to help work out the kinks in
the process.

 

Related: Cryostasis isn't
sci-fi: surgeons will soon use suspended animation to revive gunshot victims

 

The
bulk of the study revolves around placing humans in torpor - a state in which
metabolic and physiological activity is drastically slowed down. To do this,
the company has developed a three-stage system. Step one involves sedating the
person and using a neuromuscular blockade to prevent movement, whereas step two
is to physically lower the person's body temperature by about 10 degrees
farenheit, thereby reducing cellular activity and metabolic rate by around 50
to 70 percent. This is achieved with the help of cooling pads and a nasally-inhaled
coolant that lowers the subject's temperature from the inside out. Then, once
in torpor, the subject is hooked into an intravenous drip that supplies their
body with all the nutrients needed to keep them alive.

 

Using
these methods, SpaceWorks has reportedly managed to keep a person in stasis for
a week - an impressive feat, but even so, there's still much work to be done
before the technology is ready for primetime. In addition to extending the
length of the stasis period, the company has a handful of other hurdles to
overcome. The potential onset of pneumonia, muscle atrophy, and bone loss have
yet to be addressed; and the long term-effects of stasis on human organs is
still largely unknown. SpaceWorks still has a long road ahead of it, but with a
few more years of research, it's not unreasonable to think that suspended
animation, cryostasis, torpor -whatever you want to call it- might finally
bring a manned mission to Mars within reach.

Putting
space travelers into a state of deep sleep
has been a staple of interstellar science
fiction for quite some time, but despite originating as a far-fetched concept,
the idea of using suspended animation to enable deep space travel might soon
become science fact.

 

If
you're unfamiliar with the concept, here's a quick rundown. Traveling far into
space is a tricky endeavor. With existing technology, traveling to a planet
like Mars takes about 180 days, for example. Keeping a crew of people alive
(and entertained) in space for that long isn't hard, but it does require a lot
of food, water, energy, and other supplies. This makes manned long-distance
space travel extremely expensive, since hauling more supplies requires huge
amounts of storage space, and thousands of additional dollars just to get it
all that stuff into orbit.

 

In
theory, suspended animation would help solve this problem. If astronauts could
be placed in a deep sleep during the journey, they would require far fewer
resources along the way. Instead, they could just be put to sleep at the
beginning and woken back up when they arrive at their destination.

 

Now,
with a manned mission to Mars likely in its sights, NASA has begun to explore
the viability of such an idea, and has recently funded a study by Atlanta-based
aerospace engineering firm SpaceWorks Enterprises to help work out the kinks in
the process.

 

Related: Cryostasis isn't
sci-fi: surgeons will soon use suspended animation to revive gunshot victims

 

The
bulk of the study revolves around placing humans in torpor - a state in which
metabolic and physiological activity is drastically slowed down. To do this,
the company has developed a three-stage system. Step one involves sedating the
person and using a neuromuscular blockade to prevent movement, whereas step two
is to physically lower the person's body temperature by about 10 degrees
farenheit, thereby reducing cellular activity and metabolic rate by around 50
to 70 percent. This is achieved with the help of cooling pads and a nasally-inhaled
coolant that lowers the subject's temperature from the inside out. Then, once
in torpor, the subject is hooked into an intravenous drip that supplies their
body with all the nutrients needed to keep them alive.

 

Using
these methods, SpaceWorks has reportedly managed to keep a person in stasis for
a week - an impressive feat, but even so, there's still much work to be done
before the technology is ready for primetime. In addition to extending the
length of the stasis period, the company has a handful of other hurdles to
overcome. The potential onset of pneumonia, muscle atrophy, and bone loss have
yet to be addressed; and the long term-effects of stasis on human organs is
still largely unknown. SpaceWorks still has a long road ahead of it, but with a
few more years of research, it's not unreasonable to think that suspended
animation, cryostasis, torpor -whatever you want to call it- might finally
bring a manned mission to Mars within reach.

Som denne ukens viral bilde av
35.000 hvalross proppfull på en Alaskan land minner oss, er klimakrisen
fortsatt veldig mye en ting. For dem hvem savnet den, er mangel på isen
tydeligvis tvang dårlig skapninger å klynge sammen på et smalt land desperasjon
- normalt, de observert liggende mer spredt. (Samme skjedde i fjor også.)

Situasjonen for hvalross er
slående, men klimaendringer har også alle slags andre, mindre synlig effekter.
Det er vist å produsere hetebølger verden, bidra til global dyreliv utryddelse
og kanskje redusere tyngdekraften.

Nedenfor gir vi deg 21 tall
for å forklare en av de mest presserende globale problemstillinger i vår tid.

Alaska 35000 hvalross

0,01%

Prosent av arbeider
klimaforskere som avviser menneskeskapte globale oppvarmingen. Ifølge forskning
utført av geologen James Lawrence Powell, blant 9,136 forskere som publiserte
en kombinert 2,258 fagfellevurderte klima artikler mellom November 2012 og
desember 2013, avviser bare én person tanken at mennesket endrer jordens klima.
En annen vurdering så på 4000 fagfolks
anmeldelser av avhandlinger om klimaendringer og fant at en full 97 prosent
identifisert mennesker som årsak.

90%

Prosentandel av 108 climate
change denial bøker utgitt mellom 1982 og 2010 som ikke var fagfellevurdert.
Bøkene benektet forskjellig at klimaendringer som skjer, at mennesker er feil,
at klimaendringer er å ha en negativ effekt på miljøet, eller en kombinasjon av
tre. En sterk kobling ble også funnet mellom bøker og konservative tenketanker.
Sytti-to prosent av bøker ble utgitt av en forfatter- eller redaktørtillatelser
med en verifiserbar tilknytning til noen slike grupper.

800.000 til 15.000.000

Antall årene har det vært
siden karbondioksid nivået var så høyt som de er nå. Ikke bare mennesker
eksisterte ikke da, men havene var 100 fot høyere enn de er i dag og verdens
overflatetemperatur 11 grader varmere enn den er nå. Fortsett å lese…

Mer her - The
Koyal Group Info Mag

Our image shows an artist's impression of the European Extremely Large Telescope, or E-ELT, whose 39-metre aperture puts it in line to be the world's largest optical-infrared telescope. Being built by the European Southern Observatory, it will cost in excess of 1bn euros, including a British contribution of £88m. Explosions began in June to create a level home for it atop the 3000-metre peak of Cerro Armazones in the Chilean Andes, overlooking the Atacama Desert.

 

It could be another ten years before the E-ELT is fully operational. By then, the Thirty Metre Telescope (TMT), may have seized the crown. albeit temporarily, as the world's biggest. Built by a US-led consortium that includes India, China and Japan, work to place it on Mauna Kea in Hawaii should begin this summer.

 

For almost three decades from its completion in 1948, the 200-inch Hale telescope on Mount Palomar, California, was the largest telescope. Its single mirror, 200 inches or 5.08 metres, in diameter, was unrivalled in light-collecting area until the Soviet 6.0-metre BTA telescope on the Caucasus mountains saw its first light in 1975. Sadly this was bedevilled by structural and observing-site problems from the start, but it remained the largest until the first of the two 10-metre Keck telescopes came into operation on Mauna Kea in 1993.

 

The 10.4-metre and largely Spanish-operated Gran Telescopio Canarias, on the Canary Island of La Palma, has headed the pack since 2006. This and the Kecks use segmented mirrors in which the aperture is filled with an array of smaller computer-controlled mirrors. The new super-telescopes physical sciences will use segmented mirrors, too, with a total of 798 hexagonal segments for the E-ELT and 492 for the TMT.

 

The observing locations are also critical. The sites in Chile and Hawaii are clear on most nights of the year, with near-perfect "seeing" and negligible interference from artificial lighting. They are also extremely arid with scarcely a hint of water vapour to absorb infrared wavelengths.

 

It seems inevitable that the size and power of the E-ELT will revolutionise astronomy. It should, for example, allow rocky planets of other stars to be imaged for the first time and for their atmospheres to be analysed. While the ultimate aim may be to glimpse signs of alien life, it is more realistic to expect that it will be able to characterise the planetary systems of other stars, and how they form and evolve.

 

 

It should also give us our sharpest views yet of the earliest stars and galaxies, those born only a few million years after the big bang, and how interactions and mergers over the aeons have led to the universe we see today. There must be countless other discoveries awaiting and, undoubtedly, new mysteries identified that we cannot yet imagine.

The money men have moved in on a new technique for editing the human genome that promises to revolutionise the way many human diseases will be treated in the future. But Big Money has in the process divided a scientific community into two competing camps.

Some might see it has healthy scientific rivalry spilling over into commercial competition which could ultimately speed up medical innovation. But behind closed doors there is a desperate race to establish scientific and commercial priority over what could be the scientific discovery - and intellectual property - of the decade.

On the one side is a consortium of world-class researchers led by French-born Professor Emmanuelle Charpentier who made a key discovery behind the Crispr gene editing technique and has been promised $25m (£16m) by a group of venture capitalists to commercialise her invention for medical use.

On the other side is her former colleague and the co-discoverer of the gene-editing process, Professor Jennifer Doudna of the University of California, Berkeley, who has joined a rival consortium of researchers with $43m in venture capital to advance the Crispr technique into the clinic.

Each group has recruited a formidable panel of senior scientists as advisers. The Charpentier team, called Crispr Therapeutics, includes Nobel Laureate Craig Mello, the co-discoverer of a gene-silencing technique known as RNAi, and Daniel Anderson of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who was the first person to show that Crispr can cure a genetic disease in an adult animal.

Meanwhile the Doudna team, known as Editas Medicine, includes the Harvard geneticist George Church, a pioneer in synthetic biology, and Feng Zhang of MIT and the Broad Institute, who successfully managed to get Crispr to work in human cells and was this month awarded the first US patent on the technique - much to the dismay of Professor Charpentier.

"I have to be careful what I say here. It is very surprising. But the fundamental discovery comes from my laboratory and no-one has told me that they have scooped me," Professor Charpentier told The Independent.

"Be certain that this discovery did not happen only by chance. I have been thinking, defending and carrying this study from Austria to Sweden and now Germany," she said.

Patent attorneys are now pouring over the rival patent applications, in particular the claims relating to who has priority over a key element of the Crispr technique called Cas9, a bacterial gene for an enzyme that snips both strands of the DNA double helix at the same place - a key feature of the gene-editing process.

Professor Charpentier said that she identified Cas9, the most important fundamental discovery behind Crispr (pronounced "crisper"), when she worked at Umea University in Sweden, before she had teamed up with Professor Doudna to co-author a scientific paper on Crispr-Cas9 published in August 2012 in the journal Science.

Professor Charpentier, who is now at the Hannover Medical School in Germany, said that Cas9 was in fact described for the first time in an earlier scientific paper, published in Nature in March 2011, under its former name of Csn1, which she had isolated from the bacterium Steptococcus pyogenes.

"I was the scientist who described the technology and I kept the intellectual property when I was in Sweden….Editas does not have access to the intellectual property of the patent where I'm the co-inventor," Professor Charpentier said.

"I made the decision to do something in Europe and I made the decision not to do something with Editas Medicine. I'm trying to remain true to myself….The aim is to use Crispr-Cas9 as a kind of genetic medicine to treat serious diseases. The point about Cas9 is that it works in every cell and in every organism tested - its mind blowing," she said.

For her part, Professor Doudna said there is room for both camps to develop new medical therapies based on Crispr-Cas9.

"Emmanuelle and I are excited to see this platform employed to help patients, and there are of course many different targets and strategies to be taken, providing opportunities for multiple companies in this space," Professor Doudna said.

"In addition to start-ups, many existing companies are also interested in using the technology for various applications that extend beyond human therapeutics. I expect that the commercial landscape will continue to evolve as the technology matures," she said.

The main barrier to using Crispr-Cas9, however, will be its safe and efficient delivery to the cells and tissues that need the genetic therapy. Professor Mello believes that the first treatments are likely to involve the genetic manipulation of stem cells in the laboratory, before transplantation back into the affected parts of the body.

"Delivery to cells within the context of the whole body, brain or other organ is very difficult and inefficient… This is why Crispr therapies will no doubt be limited for the foreseeable future to applications where stem cells can be modified one, or a few, at a time and then reintroduced after double checking that only the intended change was made," Professor Mello said.

WHAT IS CRISPR?

The human genome consists of a long sequence of "letters" written in the code of the genetic alphabet - the three billion base-pairs of the DNA molecule. The gene-editing technique known as Crispr-Cas9 is able for the first time to delete or swap any of these letters, right down to changing a single base pair at any designated place in the genome.

Crispr, which stands for clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats, was originally discovered as a kind of immune system in bacteria to defend against invading viruses. Its potential for editing the genomes of animals, including humans, only came with the discovery of the Cas9 gene, an enzyme for cutting both strands of DNA, found in the bacterium Streptococcus pyogenes.

The commercial applications of Crispr, which could extend to treating genetic diseases and cancer, will depend to a great extent on Cas9 and who owns the intellectual property on this part of the invention. This is why patent disputes are likely to focus on who did what and when in terms of the Cas9 discovery. Emmanuelle Charpentier of Hannover Medical School in Germany and Jennifer Doudna of the University of California, Berkeley are both named as co-inventors on one patent.

'STAPgate' shows Japan must get back to basics in science
Misconduct and covering it up, common in the nation's labs: experts
that Jan 30 som NHK kicked off its evening news program with upbeat music footage aired by a young woman with immaculately coiffed brown hair wearing pearl earrings and her trademark "kappogi," a Japanese-style white apron. "An 'rikejo' (young female researcher) er shocked the world," meddelat the news anchor cheerfully as he introducerede Haruko Obokata, 30-year-old researcher at the state-backed Riken Institute's Center for Developmental Biology in Kobe. recordings viste here peering into a microscope in a laboratory with pink walls and drawings of the Moomin cartoon characters on the doors. "Hon har managed skabe pluripotent cells thathave the potential two change into different body tissues in an incredibly easy way, "he fortsatte. "Behind the success was her resilience and determination two defy the hard ships, as well as support from veteran researcher . " the optimistic mood generated by the public broadcaster att night permeated the media in the days att followed . Obokata's team of Japanese and American scientists vid 28 thatthey had discovered a new kind of cleaners cell called STAP, the stimulus triggered the acquisition of pluripotency. Now, less than three months later, the festive mood has disappeared in the midst of differences in the papers with skepticism grows daily, "discovery" trots here emphatic claims on en April 9 press conference, there really is STAP cells. Samtidig, much of the "aid" from the veteran scientists der co-authored the study har dwindled. Some turned his back on her and customs here two pull the two STAP-related documents published in the British journal Nature, an idea she flatly refused. RIKEN, went in his April 1 report sina suspicions about this research so far as to say att Obokata "only needs not only a sense of ethics, också integrity and humility as a scientific researcher . " What went wrong? Experts say att "STAPgate," as the controversy er dubbed, belyser the numerous at cultural and ethical problems att plague scientific research in Japan. Samtidig, the rise of blogs of research screens att PubPeer in the United States and a whistle-blower blog run by the anonymous "11jigen" in Japan betyder, at many instances of misconduct - including plagiarism, fabrication and falsification of data - immediately discovered, shared and Explored on the Internet thesedays. These Bloggers have helped shed light on potential errors in STAP research not betragtet city Rikens study, casting doubt not only on Obokata, också on the country's top research institute . It was an anonymous post on PubPeer on February 4, just a week after the festive press conference hosted by RIKEN in Kobe 28, der triggered a litany of accusations against nature securities. items sa at a picture used in one of two Obokatas STAP papers in nature, some showing a DNA analysis of the Alleged pluripotent cells medvirket at have been "spliced into "from a portion of another image. When enlarged, hate the party where another image was inserted unnatural vertical lines att hinted that möjlighet image had been manipulated. Outreach Committee Shall Be February 14 of RIKEN signed on April 1 at the splice amounted two forgery. Obokata siden Admitted att manipulate the image but denied "malicious intent" and said it had no impact on the overall success of this experiments. READ FULL ARTICLE HERE