the-BA : Science News Digest

Abstract supernova image (copyright: istockphoto.com)

In the science news this week: an ambitious plan to catalogue all life, the lonely albatross looking for love, and the best star-show ever. Plus, Australia puts its love of beer to good use...

The Guardian announced ambitious plans by scientists to compile an encyclopedia of life. The unprecedented worldwide effort will see researchers gathering information about the planet’s 1.8 million known living species, including animals, plants and other organisms, over the next 10 years. The completed resource – the most comprehensive archive ever – will be made freely available online. It will contain records of habitats, population assessments, and prey and predators, as well as descriptions of genetic make-up and diseases carried, among other things.

Software programmes called “bots” will be created to gather information already on the internet; the details will be checked by experts and basic web pages created for each species. The Natural History Museum in London and Royal Botanic Garden at Kew will contribute data from their vast collections of historic records.

Jim Edwards, Executive Director of the project, said: ‘Bringing this critical mass of information together, and for people to have it at their fingertips wherever they are in the world, will create a fantastic resource for understanding our ecosystems. This will be an enormously powerful tool for professional scientists, the general public, educators, schoolkids, and citizen scientists.’

The grey, short-tailed opossum has become the first marsupial to have its genetic code sequenced, reported the Daily Telegraph. The advance will have an important impact on biomedical research.

Monodelphis domestica is used worldwide in research on human health and disease. It is the only mammal known to develop melanoma skin cancer from exposure to ultraviolet light alone. Since this is the cause of most human cases of the disease, the animal is invaluable for research into the rising incidence of skin cancer.

The opossum is also able to regenerate a crushed or severed spinal cord up to about 1 week of age. Knowledge of the animal’s genome will greatly aid research into what genes enable this healing, and what causes the loss of this ability as the animal matures, possibly leading to new therapies for human spinal cord injury.

The marsupial’s genome includes in the region of 20,000 genes. Most of these have human counterparts and the differences predominantly relate to immunity, sensory perception and detoxification. Comparison with the human genome will provide insights into how human DNA has evolved and is organised. It could also suggest new ways to tackle human infections, by seeing how the opossum’s genes have helped it deal with onslaughts from parasites and bacteria.

The Times reported the sad story of a lonely albatross that has once again begun its annual search for a mate, not realising it is looking in the wrong hemisphere. The black-browed albatross, affectionately named Albert by twitchers, has been spotted for the third year running on the Scottish island of Sula Sgeir. It is thought that he is the same individual first observed in the 1960s and it is likely that a storm blew him over the Equator from his native South Atlantic. He has been wandering alone ever since.

In the absence of another member of his own species, Albert has tried to woo gannets, but with no success. However, his lonesome existence in the northern hemisphere may actually have ensured Albert’s survival: few black-browed albatross reach old age in the South Atlantic because of the threat due to long-line fishing, and the species has been classified as endangered.

Bats have developed a very different way of flying to birds, reported the Times, in part to cope with the absence of feathers on their wings. US scientists studied the wake left behind in flight by a small species of bat that has a superficially similar wing structure to birds of a similar size. They discovered that the two animals generate lift and power in distinctive ways; bats use both the upstroke and downstroke of their wings to generate thrust, whereas birds use only the latter.

Modelling bat flight more precisely could help design aircraft with improved aerodynamic performance.

Aerospace engineer Geoffrey Spedding, who led the study, believes learning from the flight abilities of bats could help design more capable unmanned air vehicles: ‘Bats are agile hunters, capable of plotting and executing complex maneuvers through cluttered environments. These are traits we’d like our unmanned air vehicles to have because there are so many complex rural and urban environments in which we could use them.’

Astronomers have witnessed the most spectacular supernova ever, that at its peak was 100,000 times brighter than our sun. The star that exploded may have been 150 times more massive than the sun and it released about 100 times more energy than a typical supernova, reported the Guardian.

It is believed that SN 2006gy may have been the first observed example of a new and long sought after type of supernova that involves antimatter, such as might have occurred when the universe was young. At 240 million light years away, this blast poses no threat to the Earth. However, there is a star called Eta Carinae, just 7,500 light years away in the Milky Way, which is similarly massive. It has been rapidly losing mass and may develop into a supernova. If it does, some suggest it might be visible alongside the sun during the day.

The Guardian reported that an American study in which 700 children were observed for 20 years has shown that watching too much television leads to poor academic achievement. Other factors such as poor attention and learning problems were taken into account, as was socio-economic status.

Among children who demonstrated no learning problems at the start of the study, 22 per cent of those who watched more than three hours of television at age 14 did not go on to higher education. This compared to seven per cent of those who watched less than one hour of television a day at that age. The team found that the equivalent figures for those who had learning problems at the start of the study were 45 and 29 per cent, respectively.

The researchers believe that adolescents who watch lot of television become accustomed to rapidly changing and highly stimulating visual material that doesn’t require much intellectual effort, with the result that other activities such as listening in class, reading and homework become more boring and difficult to concentrate on.

In other news:

Laser scanning has been used to record 3D images of thousands of dinosaur footprints that were being lost to erosion in the Spanish Pyrenees. It was the first attempt to digitally preserve dinosaur tracks.
(The Times)

UK scientists have developed a 3D model of a specific type of breast cancer that could help researchers understand how the cancer develops in the early stages. Researchers were able to grow a mixture of cell-types in the lab to form structures similar to those found in breast tissue. The technique could eventually reduce the need for animal models of the disease.
(BBC News)

UK insurers have indicated that after 2007 they may seek approval to use details of genetic tests for mutations linked to breast and ovarian cancer when setting premiums for high value policies, BBC News reported. A moratorium on the use of predictive genetic tests excludes their use for policies that aren’t high value. To date, the Genetics and Insurance Committee (GAIC), which advises the government, has only approved the use of such results for Huntingdon’s disease with respect to life insurance policies over 500,000 pounds.

The current moratorium is due to stand until November 2011. Campaigners fear that after this the use of predictive tests could be used more widely by the insurance industry. However, the Department of Health emphasised that predictive genetic tests can be life saving and that nobody should be put off having one through fears that insurers might use the results against them.

A UN report has emphasized the importance of properly planning the production and use of biofuels, saying that while they can be a force for good, they could bring adverse consequences if not properly thought out. The report concludes that ‘only through a convergence of biodiversity, greenhouse gas emissions and water-use policies can bioenergy find its proper environmental context and agricultural scale.’
(BBC News)

About 2,000 delegates from 190 countries are meeting in Germany for two weeks to discuss climate change and how to take the Kyoto Protocol forward.
(BBC News)

According to new evidence, it was actually Egyptians, not the ancient Greeks, who were the true fathers of medicine. Medical papyri written in 1,500BC demonstrate that ‘ancient Egyptians were practising a credible form of pharmacy long before the Greeks’. Many of the remedies prescribed in the ancient document were found to have therapeutic merit, with some – such as acacia in cough medicines and aloes in treatments to soothe skin conditions – even remaining in use today.
(Daily Telegraph)

And finally...

Australians are well known for their beer. But the fact that the lengthy process to make it produces millions of litres of waste water each day is probably less well known. Now scientists have developed a way to both clean the water and produce energy in the process, both of which are important in light of Australia’s increasing water-shortage and its status as one of the world’s leading per capita greenhouse gas emitters.

The recycling process features a microbial fuel cell which contains bacteria that release chemical energy from organic material present in the waste brewing water, such as sugar, starch and alcohol. This energy can be converted into either electrical or gas energy.

According to the Times, a chemical reactor is currently being built on the site of Australia’s largest brewery – Foster’s in Brisbane – and is the first such project to be tested on an industrial site. The fuel cell will use only a fraction, approximately 2,500 litres, of the 2.5 million litres of waste water generated daily but it is expected to produce enough electricity to power a household. Once the technology has been successfully tested outside of the lab, and any issues ironed out, it is hoped that it can again be scaled up.