the-BA : Science News Digest

Mars (NASA, http://visibleearth.nasa.gov)

In the science news this week: a fish fossil reveals live births happened at least 200 million years earlier than thought and monkeys control a robotic arm using their brainwaves. But while the Phoenix spacecraft landed safely on Mars, there’s toilet trouble on the International Space Station...

The week started with some excitement as Nasa’s Phoenix lander made a successful touchdown on Mars. It had been a tense moment for all at mission control waiting for the landing signal to come through – the culmination of a 10-month journey - but it went smoothly, and the signal was received at 23:53 CMT on 25 May.

Since landing, the probe has sent back the first close-up images of the north polar region where it came to rest and BBC News reported that small polygonal features on the surface support the idea that water-ice could be found very close to the surface.

A three-month scientific mission is now on track to investigate the red planet’s geological history and search for evidence of water-ice. The key tool, a robotic arm that will dig below the Martian topsoil, has been set free of its launch restraints and will undergo a health check before being set to work.

Read more about the landing and how the mission has proceeded, as well as why Colin Pillinger, the principle investigator for the 2003 European Space Agency’s Beagle 2 Mars mission, believes Britain and Europe have missed a huge opportunity.
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The Independent reported that monkeys have been trained to control a robot arm with their mind in order to retrieve and eat morsels of food. The aim of the research is to develop robotic prosthetic limbs and other devices such as wheelchairs that paralysed patients can manipulate through thought alone, and the latest work published online in the journal Nature is seen as a major breakthrough.

It is the first demonstrated use of ‘brain-machine interface’ technology to perform a practical behavioural act such as feeding, says John Kalaska, of the University of Montreal. (A video of the monkey using the arm is available on the Independent’s website.)

In the experiments, monkeys were initially trained to control the robot arm with a joystick. Then, electrodes were used to monitor a representative sample of brain cells in the motor centre of the monkey’s brain that control muscle movements. The electrical patterns were relayed to a computer that had been programmed to translate them into controls for the robotic arm. The animal’s arms were gently restrained while they were trained to operate the robotic arm by imagining the movements they wanted it to perform.

Now, researchers must develop a way to feed back sensory information through the robotic arm so that users can learn to grip objects with appropriate force. This advance is essential for human interactions where objects must be gripped firmly enough so they don’t slip out of the hand, but no so strongly that they are crushed.
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Scientists published evidence of the oldest-known example of a mother giving birth to live young after a remarkably preserved fossil fish was found with an embryo still attached by its umbilical cord.

The discovery of the 380 million-year-old specimen means the emergence of this form of reproduction has been pushed back some 200 million years. Up until now, reptile fossils from the Mesozoic Era (248 to 65 million years ago) were the earliest known examples and scientists thought creatures from the earlier period had only evolved to reproduce using externally fertilised eggs.

The fossil, a new species of ‘placoderm’ fish, was found in the Gogo area of Western Australia in 2005. It has been named Materpiscis attenboroughi, in honour of Sir David Attenborough, who first drew attention to the site in the 1970s.

Dr John Long, who led the team from Museum Victoria who found the specimen, said: ‘This is not only the first time ever that a fossil embryo has been found with an umbilical cord, but it is also the oldest known example of any creature giving birth to live young. The existence of the embryo and umbilical cord within the specimen provides scientists with the first ever example of internal fertilisation – or sex – confirming that some placoderms had remarkably advanced reproductive biology.’

Zerina Johanson, a palaeontologist at London’s Natural History Museum, told BBC News: ‘Placoderms represent the most primitive group of jawed vertebrates, so this work shows that the capacity for internal fertilisation and giving birth to live young evolved very early during vertebrate history.’
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Scientists believe they have found microbes living in rock 1.6 km under the sea bed, twice as deep as the previous record, according to the Guardian. Found in sediment cores extracted off the coast of Newfoundland in Canada, the single-celled organisms called archaea are able to survive extreme pressure and temperatures of up to 100 degrees Celcius.

’All the evidence suggests they are viable, active organisms,’ said Cardiff University’s Professor John Parkes. The DNA hadn’t broken down into small pieces, as would be expected at high temperature.

Thriving in an ecosystem devoid of sunlight, Professor Parkes thinks the bacteria-like creatures could be surviving by ‘eating oil’ – using the compounds such as methane that are broken down by heat from hydrocarbons in sediment.

The discovery, reported in the journal Science, supports the idea that most of Earth’s organisms are actually hardy, single-celled creatures living in rock beneath the surface - researchers estimate that two thirds of the planet’s biomass is underground. How these particular organisms came to live so far under is a mystery, but hypotheses are that a population remained in the rocks ever since they were formed at the surface 111 million years ago, or that they migrated there in underground water currents.
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Other news in brief:

As the US Senate prepares to debate a bill that would impose economy-wide limits on greenhouse emissions next week, 1,700 leading scientists, including six Nobel prize winners, have called for action from the US government. The letter, issued by the non-profit Union of Concerned Scientists, warns of the severe impacts that the US and wider-world face if emissions continue unabated, and calls on the government to ‘put our nation on to a path to reduce emissions on the order of 80 per cent below 2000 levels by 2050’, saying ‘there is no time to waste’.
(The Guardian)
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Meanwhile, a major report has concluded that, while current rates of damage to the environment might reduce global GDP by about seven per cent, it could halve the living standards of the world’s poor. It was produced by The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) review which was established during the German G8 presidency by the German government and European Commission. It is being released at the Convention on Biological Diversity meeting in Bonn, where 60 countries pledged to halt net deforestation by 2020.
(BBC News)
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Scientists at the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention say that it is critical that global research and surveillance includes the H7 family of flu virus as well as the more obvious H5N1 bird flu virus. H7 flu viruses also primarily infect birds, and while there’s no immediate danger to humans, the CDC team say that a few strains have started to acquire some of traits that would be needed to easily infect people.
(Read more in the Times)
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Work reported in the FASEB Journal indicates that changing the microflora of the gut could be helpful in tackling type 2 diabetes. Insulin resistance leading to diabetes can be spurred by consuming excess calories. In the latest research, changing the make up of microbes in the guts of obese, diabetic animals – using antibiotics – was found to alter the way that their bodies used glucose (a process that is controlled by insulin).

The work adds to evidence that microbes influence energy and fat use in the body, commented Professor Jeremy Nicholson of Imperial College London, but to what extent this contributes to obesity and how the influence varies from person to person is still unknown.
(The Telegraph)
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Vets at London and Whipsnade zoos are taking an unusual approach to collecting blood samples – using a bloodsucking insect. The kissing bugs, which are bred at Wuppertal Zoo in Germany, release a pain-reducing enzyme as they bite the animal’s skin. So far the method has been trialled on a hippo, cheetah, giraffe, elephant and white rhino. The insects are killed humanely after the blood samples are collected.

’This pioneering procedure means we can take a stress-free blood sample from an animal that we would otherwise need to sedate or anaesthetise,’ explained London Zoo vet Tim Bouts. ‘The process is non-invasive and painless for the animal.’
(BBC News)
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Other interesting video footage on the web this week:

Watch a BBC News video of lab-induced lightning at the National Grid High Voltage Laboratory at the University of Manchester – one of the few places in the UK where scientists can work with huge voltages at first-hand.
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See the world’s rarest rhinoceros in its natural habitat in the jungles of Java, Indonesia. Only 60-70 of the animals remain in the wild. The recording was made using a motion-triggered camera, designed to be unobtrusive and with infrared lights used as the source of illumination so as not to scare animals away. So it was surprising to researchers that the female rhino, who was accompanied by a calf, charged the camera and sent it flying.
(BBC News)
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And finally…

Talk about inconvenient! The crew of the international space station have had to call mission control for plumbing supplies after their toilet broke down. Fortunately for them, the Discovery shuttle was due to take off this weekend, and a Nasa employee was rushing from Russia to Florida to deliver the spare parts for the Russian-built toilet in time to be loaded. In the meantime, the three male crew members are having to manually operate the pump that separates the solid and liquid waste, reported BBC News.

’Clearly, having a working toilet is a priority for us,’ said shuttle payload manager Scott Higginbotham - items have had to be removed from the shuttle to make way for the toilet parts.