Science

Draft bill revives lunar mission, nixes asteroid capture

A new process for making a three-dimensional microstructure that can be used in the analysis of cells could prove useful in counterterrorism measures and in water and food safety concerns.

(Phys.org) —Improved methods for breaking down cellulose nanofibers are central to cost-effective biofuel production and the subject of new research from Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center (GLBRC). Scientists are investigating the unique properties of crystalline cellulose nanofibers to develop novel chemical pretreatments and designer enzymes for biofuel production from cellulosic—or non-food—plant derived biomass.

Industrial palladium-copper catalysts change their structures before they get to work, already during the activation process. As a result, the reaction is catalysed by a catalyst that is different from the one originally prepared for it. This surprising discovery was made by researchers from the Institute of Physical Chemistry of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw.

Neuroscientists may soon be modern-day harpooners, snaring individual brain-cell signals instead of whales with tiny spears made of carbon nanotubes.

Former Council of Higher Education President Kemal Gürüz has been detained for almost a year

Stone Age humans may have carried snails to Ireland from the Pyrenees

--> --> Today’s Newscripts post was written by C&EN intern and genomics fiend Puneet Kollipara. This year marks the 10th anniversary of the Human Genome Project’s completion—when scientists successfully sequenced nearly all the base pairs of human DNA. It’s also the 60th anniversary of James Watson and Francis Crick’s discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA. What better way to commemorate those milestones than with a museum exhibition devoted to genomics? VIPs browse “Genome: Unlocking Life’s Code,” which seeks to educate the public on genomics and its societal implications, following a reception honoring the exhibit’s launch. Credit: Puneet Kollipara That’s exactly what the Smithsonian Institution and the National Institutes of Health have done in a new partnership. Last week they opened “Genomics: Unlocking Life’s Code” to educate the public on the science of genomics and its societal implications. A website accompanying the exhibit provides additional educational resources. The 4,400-sq-ft exhibit runs at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, in Washington, D.C., through September 2014, after which it will travel to other museums around the country. The exhibit’s architects faced a number of challenges when dreaming up the installation. For starters, translating such a large, hard-to-visualize scientific field into a story that a general audience can understand was no easy task, says Vence Bonham, a researcher with NIH’s National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI). To aid in communicating the concepts, the exhibit features a number of high-resolution screens that play videos or animated graphics explaining key concepts in genetics and genomics. The exhibit also emphasizes the use of activities to teach complicated subjects; for example, an interactive puzzle teaches visitors about how genomics could improve medicine by having them use genetic information to find the best drug for a disease. Another display asks visitors’ opinions of controversial issues in genomics, such as whether people are obligated to participate in genomic research. Other activities within the exhibit are just plain cool: One lets you build a necklace that has a vial containing a visible sample of your own DNA — a way to remind you that nearly all your cells contain the code of life. To make the DNA visible, visitors take a sample of their cheek cells and place them into a detergent- and alcohol-containing solution that breaks down cell membranes and causes the genetic material to clump together. Another more unique challenge during the creation of “Genomics” was the ever-changing nature of the scientific field: Just as genomics is continually evolving, so too must the exhibit. To address this challenge, the designers made the exhibit flexible enough that individual elements can be swapped or edited easily, says NHGRI Director Eric Green. The exhibit architects don’t just expect to have to make changes — in a way they welcome them, because new discoveries will likely benefit society. The exhibit features a variety of activities, including a polling station where users can sound off on their opinions about controversial issues in genomics. Credit: Donald E. Hurlbert and James Di Loreto / Smithsonian Visitors won’t just be able to learn about genomics. Another interactive activity will let them participate in studying it, too — sort of. NIH researchers plan to set up a station where visitors can volunteer to participate in a series of surveys on their perceptions of genetics and genomics. They’ll also be asked to share how their perceptions of social norms and constructs change as they’re exposed to genomic information. The surveys aren’t ready to go public yet. Once the surveys are ready, though, the reports that follow from them, says Barbara Biesecker, also a researcher with NHGRI, will serve as a “first foray” into how the general public perceives and is influenced by genomics. The findings could help scientists impr

Ecologist J. Emmett Duffy aims to develop long-term, comparable data sets on coastal ecosystems

New research shows the grove snail, which has a white-lipped variety native to only Ireland and the Pyrenees, may have hitched a ride across Europe with Stone Age humans. Image via Wikimedia Commons/Mad_Max For nearly two centuries, biologists have been struck by a mystery of geography and biodiversity peculiar to Europe. As Edward Forbes pointed out as far back as 1846, there are a number of life forms (including the Kerry slug, a particular species of strawberry tree and the Pyrenean glass snail) that are found in two specific distant places—Ireland and the Iberian Peninsula—but few areas in between. Recently, Adele Grindon and Angus Davidson, a pair of scientists at the University of Nottingham in the UK, decided to come at the question with one of the tools of modern biology: DNA sequencing. By closely examining the genetic diversity of one of the species shared by these two locales, the grove snail, they thought they’d be able to trace the migratory history of the creatures and better understand their present-day distribution. When they sequenced the mitochondrial DNA of hundreds of these snails scattered across Europe, the data pointed them towards an unexpected explanation for the snails’ unusual range. As they suggest in a paper published today in PLOS ONE, the snails likely hitched a boat ride from Spain to Ireland some 8,000 years ago along with migrating bands of Stone Age humans. Grove snails as a whole are distributed all over Europe, but a specific variety of the snail, with a distinctive white-lipped shell, is found exclusively in Ireland and in the Pyrenees mountains that lie on the border between France and Spain. The researchers sampled a total of 423 snail specimens from 36 sites distributed across Europe, with an emphasis on gathering large numbers of the white-lipped variety. When they sequenced genes from the mitochondrial DNA of each of these snails and used algorithms to analyze the genetic diversity between them, they found that the snails fell into one of 7 different evolutionary lineages. And as indicated by the snails’ outward appearance, a distinct lineage (the snails with the white-lipped shells) was indeed endemic to the two very specific and distant places in question: The white-lipped ‘C’ variety of the snail, native to Ireland and the Pyrenees, demonstrated consistent genetic traits regardless of location. Image via PLOS ONE/Grindon and Davidson Explaining this is tricky. Previously, some had speculated that the strange distributions of creatures such as the white-lipped grove snails could be explained by convergent evolution—in which two populations evolve the same trait by coincidence—but the underlying genetic similarities between the two groups rules that out. Alternately, some scientists had suggested that the white-lipped variety had simply spread over the whole continent, then been wiped out everywhere besides Ireland and the Pyrenees, but the researchers say their sampling and subsequent DNA analysis eliminate that possibility too. “If the snails naturally colonized Ireland, you would expect to find some of the same genetic type in other areas of Europe, especially Britain. We just don’t find them,” Davidson, the lead author, said in a press statement. Moreover, if they’d gradually spread across the continent, there would be some genetic variation within the white-lipped type, because evolution would introduce variety over the thousands of years it would have taken them to spread from the Pyrenees to Ireland. That variation doesn’t exist, at least in the genes sampled. This means that rather than the organism gradually expanding its range, large populations instead were somehow moved en mass to the other location within the space of a few dozen generations, ensuring a lack of genetic variety. “There is a very clear pattern, which is difficult to explain except by involving humans,” Davidson said. Humans, after all,