French government reveals industry sponsored anti-piracy body Source:Current Global News Add Your News to Free News Source(Saturday, November 24, 2007) After brokering a deal between record companies, film corporations, internet firms and itself, the French government has unveiled a new anti-piracy body formed to counter what President Nicolas Sarkozy has described as the growing use of the internet as a "lawless zone where outlaws can pillage works with abandon or, worse, trade in them in total impunity".
Internet service providers will be forced to monitor the activities of their clients, and will restrict access for users known to be partaking in file sharing of ed media. In some cases, ISPs will be instructed to either cut off internet access entirely or threaten to do so.
The French consumer group UFC Que Choisir criticised the deal as being "very tough, potentially destructive of freedom, anti-economic and against digital history".
Film companies have agreed to hasten the cinema-to-DVD process as part of their obligations under the deal, and record companies have indicated future support for the sale of Digital Rights ... Go to Complete Coverage
Current Global News Add Your News to Free News Source (Thursday, November 22, 2007)
Two International Space Station astronauts completed a 7 hour and 16 minutes spacewalk this morning that saw the completion of the ISS's newest room, Harmony.
Commander Peggy Whitson and Flight Engineer Daniel Tani began their ... Go to Complete Coverage
Current Global News-Add your News to free news source (Tuesday, November 6, 2007)
The space shuttle Discovery is coming back to Earth after 11 days in orbit. The a scan of the Shuttle's heat shield (now routine since the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster showed no cause for concern and Discovery was cleared for the ... Go to Complete Coverage
Current Global News-Add your News to free news source (Thursday, October 25, 2007)
Lisa Coolett, a woman who lives in Christchurch, New Zealand has found a one centimeter
wide pebble that supposedly shows the image of the Virgin Mary. She found the pebble
while walking on a beach on the South Island of New ... Go to Complete Coverage
Current Global News-Add your News to free news source (Thursday, October 25, 2007)
The People's Republic of China today launched its first moon orbiter as part of the country's lunar exploration program.
At 18:00 hours local time (10:00 UTC) the rocket Chang'e 1 lifted off from Xichang Satellite Launch Center in ... Go to Complete Coverage
Current Global News Add Your News to Free News Source (Wednesday, October 17, 2007)
American preservationists breathed a sigh of relief in August as the Farnsworth House, a Ludwig Mies van der Rohe designed house widely considered a masterpiece of modern architecture, was spared by flooding along the Fox River in Plano. ... Go to Complete Coverage
Current Global News Add Your News to Free News Source (Tuesday, October 23, 2007)
The concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere is increasing faster than expected, according to a new study published in Tuesday's edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The study said that rising ... Go to Complete Coverage
Current Global News Add Your News to Free News Source (Sunday, October 7, 2007)
According to reports, American biologist Craig Venter is going to announce that he has created the first ever "artificial life form" on Earth at the J. Craig Venter Institute, a U.S. laboratory and research center, using synthetic ... Go to Complete Coverage
Members of NAIÂ’s Carnegie Institution of Washington, Indiana University, and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Teams and their colleagues have revisited the Miller-Urey experiments, and found some surprising results.
A classic experiment proving amino acids are created when inorganic molecules are exposed to electricity isnÂ’t the whole story, it turns out. The 1953 Miller-Urey Synthesis had two sibling studies, neither of which was published. Vials containing the products from those experiments were recently recovered and reanalyzed using modern technology. The results are reported in Science.
One of the unpublished experiments by American chemist Stanley Miller (under his University of Chicago mentor, Nobelist Harold Urey) actually produced a wider variety of organic molecules than the experiment that made Miller famous. The difference between the two experiments is small — the unpublished experiment used a tapering glass “aspirator” that simply increased air flow through a hollow, air-tight glass device. Increased air flow creates a more dynamic reaction vessel, or “vapor-rich volcanic” conditions, according to the present report’s authors.
“The apparatus Stanley Miller paid the least attention to gave the most exciting results,” said Adam Johnson, lead author of the Science report. “We suspect part of the reason for this was that he did not have the analytical tools we have today, so he would have missed a lot.”
Johnson is a doctoral student in IU BloomingtonÂ’s Biochemistry Program. His advisor is biogeochemist Lisa Pratt, professor of geological sciences and the director of NASAÂ’s Indiana-Princeton-Tennessee Astrobiology team.
In his May 15, 1953, article in Science, “A Production of Amino Acids Under Possible Primitive Earth Conditions,” Miller identified just five amino acids: aspartic acid, glycine, alpha-amino-butyric acid, and two versions of alanine. Aspartic acid, glycine and alanine are common constituents of natural proteins. Miller relied on a blotting technique to identify the organic molecules he’d created — primitive laboratory conditions by today’s standards. In a 1955 Journal of the American Chemical Society paper, Miller identified other compounds, such as carboxylic and hydroxy acids. But he would not have been able to identify anything present at very low levels.
Johnson, Scripps Institution of Oceanography marine chemist Jeffrey Bada (the present Science paper’s principal investigator), National Autonomous University of Mexico biologist Antonio Lazcano, Carnegie Institution of Washington chemist James Cleaves, and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center astrobiologists Jason Dworkin and Daniel Glavin examined vials left over from Miller’s experiments of the early 1950s. Vials associated with the original, published experiment contained far more organic molecules than Stanley Miller realized — 14 amino acids and five amines. The 11 vials scientists recovered from the unpublished aspirator experiment, however, produced 22 amino acids and the same five amines at yields comparable to the original experiment.
“We believed there was more to be learned from Miller’s original experiment,” Bada said. “We found that in comparison to his design everyone is familiar with from textbooks, the volcanic apparatus produces a wider variety of compounds.”
Johnson added, “Many of these other amino acids have hydroxyl groups attached to them, meaning they’d be more reactive and more likely to create totally new molecules, given enough time.”
The results of the revisited experiment delight but also perplex.
What is driving the second experimentÂ’s molecular diversity? And why didnÂ’t Miller publish the results of the second experiment?
A possible answer to the first question may be the increased flow rate itself, Johnson explained. “Removing newly formed molecules from the spark by increasing flow rate seems crucial,” he said. “It’s possible the jet of steam pushes newly synthesized molecules out of the spark discharge before additional reactions turn them into something less interesting. Another thought is that simply having more water present in the reaction allows a wider variety of reactions to occur.”
An answer to the second question is relegated to speculation — Miller, still a hero to many scientists, succumbed to a weak heart in 2007. Johnson says he and Bada suspect Miller wasn’t impressed with the experiment two’s results, instead opting to report the results of a simpler experiment to the editors at Science.
Miller’s third, also unpublished, experiment used an apparatus that had an aspirator but used a “silent” discharge. This third device appears to have produced a lower diversity of organic molecules.
Research on early planetary geochemistry and the origins of life isnÂ’t limited to Earth studies. As humans explore the Solar System, investigations of past or present extra-terrestrial life are inevitable. Recent speculations have centered on Mars, whose polar areas are now known to possess water ice, but other candidates include JupiterÂ’s moon Europa and SaturnÂ’s moon Enceladus, both of which are covered in water ice. The NASA Astrobiology Institute, which supports these investigations, has taken a keen interest in the revisiting of the Miller-Urey Synthesis.
“This research is both a link to the experimental foundations of astrobiology as well as an exciting result leading toward greater understanding of how life might have arisen on Earth,” said Carl Pilcher, director of the NASA Astrobiology Institute, headquartered at NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View, Calif.
Henderson Cleaves (Carnegie Institution for Science) also contributed to the report. It was funded with grants from the NASA Astrobiology Institute, the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass., and MexicoÂ’s El Consejo Nacional de Ciencia y Tecnologia.
An ecosystem discovered 2.8 kilometers underground in the Mponeng Gold Mine near Johannesburg, South Africa two years ago has now been shown to comprise only a single species of microbe, existing on energy from radioactivity, completely independently of the Sun. The community of rod-shaped bacteria of the species Desulforudis audaxviator was discovered in 2005-06 by members of the NAIÂ’s Indiana-Princeton-Tennessee Astrobiology Initiative (IPTAI) Team. Their current results are presented in the October 10th issue of Science.
Confirming earlier inferences, the new work shows that D. audaxviator’s metabolic processes are decoupled from the Sun and the photosynthetic biosphere. This ecosystem uses the energy of naturally occurring radioactivity to split water into hydrogen and hydrogen peroxide. The hydrogen peroxide reacts with naturally occurring sulfide in the rocks to make sulfate. The microbes then reduce the sulfate back to sulfide using electrons provided by the hydrogen left over from the splitting of water. This is the only ecosystem known to exist on an energy source other than light or chemical energy derived from the planet itself.
Genomic analyses have revealed that the organism’s genes code for everything needed to sustain an independent existence and reproduce, including the ability to fix its own nitrogen, move freely, sense its environment, protect itself from viruses, and even sporulate during nutrient-poor periods. It cannot, however, survive oxic conditions, suggesting it hasn’t been exposed to oxygen for a very long time.
Such a community could in principle live in the subsurface of any rocky planet, Mars for example. Radioactivity, sulfide minerals, water, N2 and carbon dioxide—the main things this community needs to survive—are almost certainly common in rocky planets everywhere.
The species name, audaxviator, is taken from Jules Verne’s “Journey to the Center of the Earth,” and means “descend, bold traveler, and attain the center of the Earth.”
According to an article published in the Washington Post, scientists studying the Murchison meteorite have found that it contains clues to the origin of chirality. Amino acids in nature have two forms, referred to as right- and left-handed, that are mirror images of each other. The proteins in living organisms, however, are only made from left-handed amino acids. The reason for this chirality is not understood, but this new research suggests it may stem from meteorites that rained down on the young Earth.
Astrophysicists from the NAI’s Carnegie Institution of Washington team and their colleagues have shown for the first time that a supernova could have triggered the solar system’s formation under conditions of rapid heating and cooling. For several decades, scientists have thought that the solar system formed as a result of a shock wave from an exploding star—a supernova—that triggered the collapse of a dense, dusty gas cloud that contracted to form the sun and the planets. But detailed models of this formation process have only worked under the simplifying assumption that the temperatures during the violent events remained constant. The results, published in the October 20, 2008, issue of the Astrophysical Journal, have resolved this long-standing debate.
Researchers from NAIÂ’s University of HawaiÂ’i team have a paper in the September 17 edition of Nature about the evolution of the animal gut. For more than 100 years zoologists have speculated about scenarios of how the bilaterally symmetrical animals (animals that have a left and a right side, like flies, fish, and humans) evolved from a simple circular (radially symmetric) ancestor that looked similar to jelly fish or corals. In the commonly presented scenarios this transition is connected to the evolution of a through-gut with an anterior mouth and posterior anus. It has been thought that both openings emerged simultaneously from a single embryological opening through which the inner tissues enter (called blastopore).
Recent molecular phylogenies however, place the marine acoel flatworms at the base of the bilaterally symmetric animals. Acoels are thus survivors from the Pre-Cambrian era that retain many ancestral characters (e.g. a nervous system composed of multiple nerve cords and only one opening to their digestive system). One can see Acoels as an evolutionary stepping stone that offers clues about the sequence of character evolution of bilateral animals.
To find out how the acoel digestive system, with its single opening (“mouth”), is related to the through gut present in some bilaterians like humans and flies, the researchers looked at the expression patterns of genes that play a role in the formation of both the mouth and the anus in bilaterian animals.
They were able to show that the sac-like gut of the bilaterian ancestor possessed a single opening that was inherited as the mouth in such diverse animals like flies and sea stars. Furthermore, the team accumulated evidence from gene expression patterns that the anal orifice evolved independently in different animal lineages, possibly in association with the gonoduct (the duct through which eggs and sperm are released). The independent evolution of the anus can be explained by the increase in body size and an elongation of the body. Increased energetic needs and a long blind gut would have made sorting food and waste through a single opening inefficient.
Their work, in conjunction with a better understanding of the evolutionary relationships of animals, clearly rejects previous ideas found in every zoology text book about the evolution of the last common ancestor of flies and humans from a radial symmetric animal (e.g. the Gastraea-Hypothesis of Ernst Haeckel). The team states that this ancestor that lived over 550 myr ago, before the radiation of the bilateral animals was far less complex morphologically than previously thought. At this time our ancestors were hermaphroditic worms, that had only a mouth and no anus. We literally had to spit out our undigested food. Our ancestor was likely a very small, soft-bodied animal that lived between the sand grains in the ocean, similar to the life-style of most acoel species. This also explains why no fossils have yet been found of these animals. The team is certain that their ongoing studies of the nervous system of these worms will yield to similar important insights into the evolutionary roots of the human brain and spinal cord.
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