Opening Up A Colorful Cosmic Jewel Box

Star clusters are among the most visually alluring and astrophysically fascinating objects in the sky. One of the most spectacular nestles deep in the southern skies near the Southern Cross in the constellation of Crux.

The Kappa Crucis Cluster, also known as NGC 4755 or simply the "Jewel Box" is just bright enough to be seen with the unaided eye. It was given its nickname by the English astronomer John Herschel in the 1830s because the striking colour contrasts of its pale blue and orange stars seen through a telescope reminded Herschel of a piece of exotic jewellery.

Open clusters [1] such as NGC 4755 typically contain anything from a few to thousands of stars that are loosely bound together by gravity. Because the stars all formed together from the same cloud of gas and dust their ages and chemical makeup are similar, which makes them ideal laboratories for studying how stars evolve.

The position of the cluster amongst the rich star fields and dust clouds of the southern Milky Way is shown in the very wide field view generated from the Digitized Sky Survey 2 data. This image also includes one of the stars of the Southern Cross as well as part of the huge dark cloud of the Coal Sack [2].

A new image taken with the Wide Field Imager (WFI) on the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at ESO's La Silla Observatory in Chile shows the cluster and its rich surroundings in all their multicoloured glory. The large field of view of the WFI shows a vast number of stars. Many are located behind the dusty clouds of the Milky Way and therefore appear red [3].

The FORS1 instrument on the ESO Very Large Telescope (VLT) allows a much closer look at the cluster itself. The telescope's huge mirror and exquisite image quality have resulted in a brand-new, very sharp view despite a total exposure time of just 5 seconds. This new image is one of the best ever taken of this cluster from the ground.

The Jewel Box may be visually colourful in images taken on Earth, but observing from space allows the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope to capture light of shorter wavelengths than can not be seen by telescopes on the ground. This new Hubble image of the core of the cluster represents the first comprehensive far ultraviolet to near-infrared image of an open galactic cluster. It was created from images taken through seven filters, allowing viewers to see details never seen before. It was taken near the end of the long life of the Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 ― Hubble's workhorse camera up until the recent Servicing Mission, when it was removed and brought back to Earth. Several very bright, pale blue supergiant stars, a solitary ruby-red supergiant and a variety of other brilliantly coloured stars are visible in the Hubble image, as well as many much fainter ones. The intriguing colours of many of the stars result from their differing intensities at different ultraviolet wavelengths.

The huge variety in brightness of the stars in the cluster exists because the brighter stars are 15 to 20 times the mass of the Sun, while the dimmest stars in the Hubble image are less than half the mass of the Sun. More massive stars shine much more brilliantly. They also age faster and make the transition to giant stars much more quickly than their faint, less-massive siblings.

The Jewel Box cluster is about 6400 light-years away and is approximately 16 million years old.


Notes

[1] Open, or galactic, star clusters are not to be confused with globular clusters ― huge balls of tens of thousands of ancient stars in orbit around our galaxy and others. It seems that most stars, including our Sun, formed in open clusters.

[2] The Coal Sack is a dark nebula in the Southern Hemisphere, near the Southern Cross, that can be seen with the unaided eye. A dark nebula is not the complete absence of light, but an interstellar cloud of thick dust that obscures most background light in the visible.

[3] If the light from a distant star passes through dust clouds in space the blue light is scattered and absorbed more than the red. As a result the starlight looks redder when it arrives on Earth. The same effect creates the glorious red colours of terrestrial sunsets.

HIV Tamed By Designer 'Leash'

Researchers have shown how an antiviral protein produced by the immune system, dubbed tetherin, tames HIV and other viruses by literally putting them on a leash, to prevent their escape from infected cells. The insights, reported in the October 30th issue of the journal Cell, a Cell Press publication, allowed the research team to design a completely artificial protein -- one that did not resemble native tetherin in its sequence at all -- that could nonetheless put a similar stop to the virus.

 

"Tetherin is essentially a rod with anchors at either end that are critical for its function," says Paul Bieniasz of Howard Hughes Medical Institute and the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center at The Rockefeller University. Either one of those anchors gets incorporated into the envelope surrounding HIV or other viruses as they bud through the plasma membrane of an infected cell. "One anchor gets into the virus and the other in the cell membrane to inevitably form a tether.
"We showed we could design a completely different protein with the same configuration -- a rod with lipid anchors at either end -- and it worked very well," he continued. The finding helped to confirm that tetherin is capable of acting all on its own, he added.
They also explain tetherin's broad specificity to protect against many viruses. "It is just targeting lipids," Bieniasz said. "It's not about viral proteins." That's conceptually important, he continued, because there is no specific interaction between tetherin and any viral protein, which makes it a more difficult problem for viruses to evolve resistance. Rather than tweaking an existing protein-coding gene, "the virus has to make the more difficult adjustment of acquiring a new gene antagonist [of tetherin]."
Unfortunately, many viruses have managed to do just that. In the case of HIV, a protein called Vpu counteracts tetherin. They now show it does so by sequestering the host protein, which prevents its incorporation into the virus. The new insight into tetherin's and Vpu's modes of action, however, may lead to the development of Vpu blockers that could free up the innate host defense and inhibit HIV's spread, Bieniasz suggests.
Bieniasz said there is some possibility that tetherin exists in different forms that might explain differences among people in the progression of HIV or other viral infections. However, the only common variation they've seen in the tetherin gene so far does not appear to affect its function. The tetherin sequence does vary quite a lot from one species to the next, he added, as is often the case due to strong selection when host defense genes meet viral inhibitors.
To place the findings in context, Bieniasz says it is worth noting that tetherin is encoded by just one of more than 900 genes that get switched "on" in response to interferon, a cell signaling protein of the immune system.
"There are hundreds of interferon-induced genes," he said. "The functions are known for only a very small number -- less than a dozen. There are potentially a large number of antiviral mechanisms we still know nothing about."
Going forward, his team intends to look more closely at many of those others, and Bieniasz suspects more surprising mechanisms will be in store.
The researchers include David Perez-Caballero, The Rockefeller University, New York, NY; Trinity Zang, The Rockefeller University, New York, NY, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center, New York, NY; Alaleh Ebrahimi, The Rockefeller University, New York, NY; Matthew W. McNatt, The Rockefeller University, New York, NY; Devon A. Gregory, University of Missouri School of Medicine, Columbia, MO; Marc C. Johnson, University of Missouri School of Medicine, Columbia, MO; and Paul D. Bieniasz, The Rockefeller University, New York, NY, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center, New York, NY.
 

Polarized Peepers: Crustacean's Eyes Surpass Man-Made Optical Devices in Manipulating Light

A fierce crustacean known as the peacock mantis shrimp has eyes so refined they can perceive polarized light, including information that is invisible to nearly every other member of the animal kingdom. Not only can the ocean dweller extract polarization information from light, it can do so when the light is circularly polarized—an ability unknown outside a few species of the order of stomatopods to which the peacock mantis belongs.

Unlike linearly polarized light, in which the electric field oscillates along a plane, circularly polarized light's field twists like a spiral spring as the ray propagates. Such light is not commonly reflected from animal bodies and so was long dismissed as a virtual nonfactor in physiology, but research last year showed that some stomatopods have the ability to discriminate circular polarization. A paper published online October 25 in Nature Photonics unpacks the mechanism behind the mantis shrimp's ability and concludes that its eyes handle circularly polarized light more effectively than man-made optical devices do. (Scientific American is part of the Nature Publishing Group.)

The peacock mantis, or Odontodactylus scyllarus, packs a surprisingly powerful punch for its size. The crustacean, which ranges from three to 18 centimeters in length, is capable of shattering the glass of an aquarium with a blow from its forelimb, says Roy Caldwell, a University of California, Berkeley, biologist who did not participate in the new research. "We have had a couple cases where animals have hit a pane of glass dead in the center and there was a massive explosion," Caldwell says.

But the creature is physiologically remarkable in at least one other way: The compound eye of the peacock mantis, the new study's authors found, harbors a natural quarter-wave retarder, a sort of filter that converts circularly polarized light to linearly polarized light, which then activates receptors below. "Biologically, this is unique," says study co-author Thomas Cronin, a professor of biological sciences at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. "There is nothing else known anywhere in biology" that enables detection of circularly polarized light, he adds.

The stomatopods reflect circularly polarized light from their bodies, so their ability to detect such light—and to parse clockwise from counterclockwise polarization—likely plays a role in signaling or identification. In some stomatopod species, reflection of circularly polarized light is sex-specific, which could play a role in sexual signaling or mate selection.

Wave retarders work by refracting light differently depending on the angle of its polarization, delaying one wave component of a light wave relative to the other. "If it's just the right degree of delay, which is one-quarter wave or 90 degrees phase, that converts circularly polarized light to linearly polarized," Cronin explains. But unlike wave retarders available commercially, which are tuned for specific wavelengths (and hence colors) of visible light, the wave plate in the O. scyllarus eye performs almost identically across the visible spectrum.

The mantis shrimp's eye, Cronin explains, "works on a principle that is not used currently but could be used in manufacturing systems"—balancing the optical properties of the eye structure with those of the lipid molecules that fill the structure. "The two have different wavelength functions—they have different curves of changing retardance with wavelength—and so the animal trades them off," Cronin says. "It trades off structure against material to cancel out the two variations."

Sonja Kleinlogel, a biologist at the Max Planck Institute of Biophysics in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, points out that she and a colleague published a similar analysis last year in the journal PLoS ONE—an article that she was surprised to see omitted from the references section of the new paper. Nevertheless, she is pleased to see the subject advanced, noting that the research "is the first to look at the detailed structure" of the cells that act as quarter-wave retarders and to compare their efficacy with man-made analogues. U.C. Berkeley's Caldwell concurs, noting that the unique capability of the stomatopod eye had been described but "how that actually was done was pretty much a mystery."

"We didn't know anything about the operating principle of the retarder," Cronin says. "It wasn't like anything we had seen in the lab."

Link Between Alcohol And Cancer Explained: Alcohol Activates Cellular Changes That Make Tumor Cells Spread

Alcohol consumption has long been linked to cancer and its spread, but the underlying mechanism has never been clear. Now, researchers at Rush University Medical Center have identified a cellular pathway that may explain the link.

In a study published in a recent issue of Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research, the researchers found that alcohol stimulates what is called the epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition, in which run-of-the-mill cancer cells morph into a more aggressive form and begin to spread throughout the body.

"Our data are the first to show that alcohol turns on certain signals inside a cell that are involved in this critical transition," said Christopher Forsyth, PhD, assistant professor of medicine and biochemistry at Rush University Medical Center and lead author of the study.

The epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition is a hot area of research right now, implicated in the process whereby cancer cells become metastatic. A large body of laboratory and clinical research suggests that it plays a key role in making cancer cells aggressive.

"Cancer cells become dangerous when they metastasize," Forsyth said. "Surgery can remove a tumor, but aggressive tumor cells invade tissues throughout the body and take over. If we can thwart this transition, we can limit cancer's toll."

The researchers treated colon and breast cancer cell lines with alcohol and then looked for the biochemical hallmarks of the epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition, including evidence of a transcription factor called Snail and of the receptor for epidermal growth factor. Snail controls the epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition; when overexpressed in mice, it induces the formation of multiple tumors. Epidermal growth factor is required by many cancer cells. "They need lots of it," Forsyth said. "They are addicted to it."

Laboratory tests showed that alcohol activated both these and other biochemicals characteristic of the epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition. Tests also demonstrated that the alcohol-treated cells had lost their tight junctions with adjacent cells, a preparation for migrating, as metastatic cells do.

In addition, Forsyth and his colleagues found that the same roster of biomarkers was activated in normal intestinal cells treated with alcohol, suggesting that alcohol not only worsens the profile of existing cancer cells but also may initiate cancer by stimulating the epithelial-to-mesenchymal transition.

Genome Of Microbe Silently Shaping Ecology Of Ocean Dead Zones Described

Among the many changes in the ocean is the expansion of oxygen-deficient or oxygen minimum zones (OMZs), also known as dead zones, which affect the processes by which carbon is captured and sequestered on the seafloor and alter the microbial activities that impact the rate and magnitude of ocean carbon sequestration. Despite the importance of these effects, very little is known about the metabolism of OMZ microbes and how they respond to environmental changes.

In the Oct. 23 issue of the journal Science, researchers from the University of British Columbia and the U.S. Department of Energy Joint Genome Institute (DOE JGI) describe the metagenome of an abundant but uncultivated microbe, known as SUP05, that is silently helping to shape the ecology of OMZs worldwide. Researchers studied the microbe in Saanich Inlet, a fjord on the coast of Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada. The fjord undergoes a seasonal cycle of stratification and deep water renewal, creating strong water column gradients that make it an ideal "living lab" to study microbial communities adapted and specialized to thrive under low oxygen conditions such as those found in OMZs. To chart the SUP05 metagenome, genetic material was recovered directly from environmental samples encompassing the entire microbial community of Saanich Inlet during different stages of water column stratification and deep-water renewal.

"To our surprise the most abundant organism in the oxygen-depleted waters was this SUP05 bug," said the paper's senior author Steven Hallam, Assistant Professor at the University of British Columbia. "We obtained enough DNA sequence coverage from the community of microbes to actually assemble a continuous stretch representing what we are calling the SUP05 metagenome -- it's a composite of the entire SUP05 population spanning the various environmental samples that we sequenced."

Susannah Tringe, a metagenomics scientist at the DOE JGI, said that the OMZs are sinks for an essential nutrient that marine organisms need to survive--nitrogen--as well as sources for the greenhouse gases methane and nitrous oxide. "By studying the genomes of the uncultivated microbes found in OMZs, we can better understand how they participate in global geochemical cycles such as the carbon and nitrogen cycles," she said.

Hallam described SUP05 as a paradoxical organism. "Based on genomic analysis and field observations, it provides important ecosystem services but it also produces byproducts that may have negative consequences with respect to climate change," he said. "Specifically, SUP05 removes toxic sulfides from the water, and fixes carbon dioxide but we also think it's producing nitrous oxide, which is a more potent greenhouse gas than either carbon dioxide or methane."

The researchers found that SUP05 is closely related to sulfur-eating gill symbionts of deep sea clams and mussels although unlike them, it utilizes nitrate rather than oxygen in its energy metabolism. A comparative analysis of SUP05 and symbiont genomes also revealed that 35 percent of the SUP05 genome is unique, involved in helping the bacteria adapt to changing environmental conditions such as the seasonal increase and decrease of oxygen levels in Saanich Inlet, and the shifting balance of the nitrate and sulfide levels that are its key energy resources.

"As habitat range expands due to global warming, blooming SUP05 populations have the potential to help offset rising carbon dioxide levels that ultimately lead to ocean acidification," Hallam said. He added that SUP05 and its relatives will become increasingly important agents as OMZ expansion and intensification continues to unfold, providing researchers with a biological indicator useful in monitoring the changing state of the global ocean.

The researchers plan to do further time course and metabolic monitoring studies in Saanich Inlet in conjunction with the Victoria Experimental Network Under the Sea (VENUS) cabled observatory program to better constrain the ecological roles of SUP05 and other, less abundant community members. Additionally, they hope to use the time-resolved studies in Saanich Inlet as a basis for comparison in the context of another CSP project of Hallam's that was approved earlier this year and focuses on an extensive OMZ in the eastern North Pacific Ocean.

"Just as cyanobacteria play an essential role in producing atmospheric oxygen; in future oceans this could be one of those organisms that play similarly integral roles, albeit with different ecological outcomes," Hallam said. An overview of the project can be viewed at: http://www.cmde.science.ubc.ca/hallam/index.php.

The project is part of the DOE JGI's Community Sequencing Program established in 2004 to take on large-scale genomics efforts in support of DOE mission areas, including characterizing the biological and environmental processes involved in carbon cycling.

Biofuel Displacing Food Crops May Have Bigger Carbon Impact Than Thought

A report examining the impact of a global biofuels program on greenhouse gas emissions during the 21st century has found that carbon loss stemming from the displacement of food crops and pastures for biofuels crops may be twice as much as the CO2 emissions from land dedicated to biofuels production. The study, led by Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) senior scientist Jerry Melillo, also predicts that increased fertilizer use for biofuels production will cause nitrous oxide emissions (N2O) to become more important than carbon losses, in terms of warming potential, by the end of the century.

Using a global modeling system that links economic and biogeochemistry data, Melillo, MBL research associate David Kicklighter, and their colleagues examined the effects of direct and indirect land-use on greenhouse gas emissions as the production of biofuels increases over this century. They report their findings in the October 22 issue of Science Express.

Direct land-use emissions are generated from land committed solely to bioenergy production. Indirect land-use emissions occur when biofuels production on cropland or pasture displaces agricultural activity to another location, causing additional land-use changes and a net increase in carbon loss.

No major countries currently include carbon emissions from biofuel-related land-use changes in their carbon loss accounting and there is concern about the practicality of including such losses in a system designed to reduce fossil-fuel emissions. Moreover, methods to assess indirect land-use emissions are controversial. All quantitative analyses to date have either ignored indirect emissions altogether, considered those associated from crop displacement from a limited area, confused indirect emissions with direct or general land-use emissions, or developed estimates based on a static framework of today's economy.

Using a modeling system that integrates global land-use change driven by multiple demands for land and that includes dynamic greenhouse-gas accounting, Melillo and his colleagues factored in a full suite of variables, including the potential of net carbon uptake from enhanced land management, N2O emissions from the increased use of fertilizer, environmental effects on carbon storage, and the economics of land conversion.

"Our analysis, which we think is the most comprehensive to date, shows that direct and indirect land-use changes associated with an aggressive global biofuels program have the potential to release large quantities of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere," says Melillo.

Melillo and his colleagues simulated two global land-use scenarios in the study. In Case 1, natural areas are converted to meet increased demand for biofuels production land. In Case 2, there is less willingness to convert land and existing managed land is used more intensely. Both scenarios are linked to a global climate policy that would control greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel sources to stabilize CO2 concentrations at 550 parts per million, a target often talked about in climate policy discussions. Under such a climate policy, fossil fuel use would become more expensive and the introduction of biofuels would accelerate, ultimately increasing the size of the biofuels industry and causing additional effects on land use, land prices, and food and forestry production and prices.

The model predicts that, in both scenarios, land devoted to biofuels will become greater than the total area currently devoted to crops by the end of the 21st century. Case 1 will result in more carbon loss than Case 2, especially at mid-century. In addition, indirect land use will be responsible for substantially greater carbon losses (up to twice as much) than direct land use.

"Large greenhouse gas emissions from these indirect land-use changes are unintended consequences of a global biofuels program; consequences that add to the climate-change problem rather than helping to solve it," says Melillo "As our analysis shows, these unintended consequences are largest when the clearing of forests is involved."

In their model, Melillo and his colleagues also simulated N2O emissions from the additional fertilizer that will be required to grow biofuel crops in the future. They found that over the century, N2O emissions will surpass CO2 in terms of warming potential. By 2100, Melillo and his team estimate that in both study scenarios, biofuels production will account for more than half of the total N2O emissions from fertilizer. "Best practices for the use of nitrogen fertilizer, such as synchronizing fertilizer application with plant demand, can reduce N2O emissions associated with biofuels production," the scientists say.

Finding The ASX200 For Marine Ecosystems

Researchers are building the environmental equivalent of the ASX200 as a means of monitoring the health of Australian marine ecosystems.

The state of an ecosystem can be understood by measuring the right ecological characteristics, just as the ASX200 index shows the state of the Australian stock market by following 200 selected stocks.

CSIRO Wealth from Oceans Flagship scientist Dr Keith Hayes, one of the leaders of the project, says the difficult part is selecting which characteristics to track.

"Ecosystems respond to multiple pressures and threats in complex ways," Dr Hayes says.

"Identifying reliable and robust indicators of change from among the many species and characteristics of the system is a challenging task."

In a pilot project undertaken for the Department of Environment, Water, Heritage & the Arts (DEWHA) last year, CSIRO identified indicators for five 'key ecological features' named by the Commonwealth Government for the South-West Marine Region off Western Australia's coast.

Key ecological features chosen for this study included the Perth Canyon and large ocean eddies.

The indicators were different for each feature, but they included things like numbers of sea birds, area of coral compared to algae, and phytoplankton size.

Such indicators will help provide a firm scientific basis to feed into State of the Environment reporting at regional, national and international scales.

"Indicators are an important topic in environmental circles right now as they help us make better decisions about managing the environment," Commonwealth Environment Research Facilities (CERF) Marine Biodiversity Hub director Professor Nic Bax says.

CSIRO's approach uses qualitative modelling, supported by asset and threat mapping, to understand the drivers and pressures on ecological features, and to predict how these features will respond to changes over the next five to 15 years.

"Having selected a suite of indicators, the next challenge is to measure them and test how they are predicted to change when subject to processes such as climate change, industrial development and fishing pressures," Dr Hayes says.

"We were really pleased with the results of the pilot project and have now embarked on a two-year program with DEWHA to develop a list of ecological indicators for the rest of Australia's marine territory."

This new project is in addition to the current CERF program.

The work will be presented at the Nationally Relevant Environmental Monitoring workshop in Canberra October 20 and 21, which is hosted by CSIRO and the Marine Biodiversity Hub.

The Marine Biodiversity Hub is funded through the CERF program, an Australian Government initiative supporting research with a strong public good focus.

Sage-grouse Populations In US Intermountain West May Be Threatened By Energy Development, Study Predicts

A study released October 14th in the current issue of the peer-reviewed journal PLoS ONE sheds new light on oil and gas development potential in the Intermountain West. Maps accompanying the study show the impacts to greater sage-grouse populations in relation to potential energy development. If business as usual continues and more forward-thinking development strategies are not considered, sage-grouse populations will decline an additional 7 to 19 percent, the study's authors predict.

 

Prepared by scientists from The Nature Conservancy, the National Audubon Society, and the University of Montana, the study created a tool to understand the cumulative impacts of energy development on species in the West. Agencies can use the study's findings to determine how best to pursue energy independence while maintaining quality habitat that is critical to imperiled sage-grouse populations as well as a host of other species, including iconic big game of the West.

"This study illustrates how impacts to sensitive species, in this example sage-grouse, can be used to forecast biological trade-offs of newly proposed or ongoing development plans," said study co-author Dr. Kevin Doherty, Senior Ecologist at the National Audubon Society. "A 7-19% impact to sage-grouse in their eastern range from just one of the host of issues causing their declines, highlights the need for scientifically credible conservation planning tools to balance natural resource development with wildlife conservation."

Sage-grouse populations are considered indicators of ecosystem health and have been closely monitored by state game and fish agencies over the past decade. The greater sage-grouse is currently a candidate for Endangered Species listing -- a result that would have far reaching implications for a wide range of industries in the region.

"Sage-grouse are useful in prioritizing conservation because their abundance is indicative of large and intact shrub-dominated grasslands, the most endangered ecosystem in North America," said study co-author, Dr. David Naugle, Associate Professor, University of Montana. "Challenges with sage-grouse are a harsh reminder that the value of small-scale conservation actions may be negated if large-scale cumulative impacts are ignored."

The new study and its detailed maps of the Intermountain West indicates that future oil and gas drilling could impact up to 9.1 million acres of sagebrush shrub lands and 2.7 million acres of grasslands -- key sage-grouse habitat.

Global demand for energy has increased by more than 50 percent in the last half century, and a similar increase is projected between 2007 and 2030. Much of our domestic demand will be served by new exploration in the western US -- making the health of wildlife in the West, such as sage-grouse, an issue of national importance.

"The Conservancy and the Audubon Society have been jointly working with state and federal agencies to proactively identify areas of high biological value that may impact oil and gas operations," said study lead author Holly Copeland, spatial ecologist, with the Nature Conservancy in Wyoming. "Linking wildlife impacts with predictive oil and gas models will provide tools to decision makers charged with meeting the challenge of maintain healthy wildlife populations while responsibly developing domestic energy resources."

This study was supported with funding from the Liz Claiborne Art Ortenberg Foundation (http://www.lcaof.org), The Nature Conservancy, National Audubon Society, and the University of Montana.

Female Choice Benefits Mothers More Than Offspring

The great diversity of male sexual traits, ranging from peacock's elaborate train to formidable genitalia of male seed beetles, is the result of female choice. But why do females choose among males? In a new study published October 22 in Current Biology, researchers from Uppsala University found no support for the theory that the female choice is connected to "good genes".

The great diversity of male sexual traits, ranging from peacock's elaborate train to formidable genitalia of male seed beetles, is the result of female choice. But why do females choose among males? Remarkably, there is no consensus among biologists over the key question why females choose among males. At the heart of this debate lie two distinct possibilities -- that female choosiness is beneficial to the females themselves or that female choice traits are favoured because of 'good genes' that males contribute to female's offspring.

Across animal kingdom, females often resist male advances and only a small fraction of mating attempts result in copulations. Mating is costly, and one straightforward explanation for female resistance is that non-resistant females will suffer a reduction in their fitness. However, by resisting mating attempts, females are selecting for most 'persistent' males. Could it be that offspring of such 'persistent' males have higher fitness? If yes, female resistance can be viewed as a way of selecting for males that provide their offspring with 'good genes'.

We manipulated female choosiness by altering female ability to reject unwanted males in Adzuki beetle. Female beetles are constantly harassed by ardent males and thwart male mating attempts by vigorously kicking the unwanted suitors with their hind legs. We fitted females with prongs that reduced male ability to impose copulations. Alternatively, we reduced females' ability to resist copulations by shortening their hind legs. Females with increased ability to reject male mating attempts had much higher fitness than females whose resistance was reduced. What about the 'good genes'?

- We found no support for the idea that increased female resistance to mating results in sons that are more successful in competition with other males, or in more fertile daughters. Hence, female resistance is mostly beneficial to the female herself, while inadvertent selection for male 'persistence' plays a minor role, says Alexei Maklakov, who led the study.

Long Night Falls Over Saturn's Rings

As Saturn's rings orbit the planet, a section is typically in the planet's shadow, experiencing a brief night lasting from 6 to 14 hours. However, once approximately every 15 years, night falls over the entire visible ring system for about four days.

 

This happens during Saturn's equinox, when the sun is directly over Saturn's equator. At this time, the rings, which also orbit directly over the planet's equator, appear edge-on to the sun. During equinox, light from the sun hits the ring particles at very low angles, accenting their topography and giving us a three-dimensional view of the rings.

"The equinox is a very special geometry, where the sun is turned off as far as the rings themselves are concerned, and all energy comes from Saturn," said Dr. Michael Flasar of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.

During Saturn's latest equinox August 11, the rings reached a temperature of 382 degrees below zero Fahrenheit, the coldest yet observed, as seen by the Composite Infrared Spectrometer (CIRS) instrument on board the Cassini spacecraft in orbit around Saturn. CIRS was developed at NASA Goddard, and Flasar is the Principal Investigator for the instrument.

"The whole point of the CIRS observations of Saturn's rings, other than producing some cool pictures, is to learn something about the physical properties of the ring particles: their spin rates, how sluggish they are in storing and radiating heat (a diagnostic of size and composition), and their vertical distribution in the ring 'plane'," said Flasar.

Although the rings are thousands of miles wide, they are only about 30 feet thick. They are made of particles that are mostly water-ice. Scientists continue to debate the rings' origin and age. Some think they could be remnants of a shattered moon or captured comets, while others think they could have formed along with Saturn from the primordial disk of gas and dust that gave birth to our solar system.

"At first glance, Saturn's rings look broad and bland, but then we got close-up images from the Voyager flybys, and our reaction was: oh, my gosh, there's structure everywhere -- what's going on?" said Dr. Linda Spilker, of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Pasadena, Calif.

Researchers have discovered that while most of the ring particles are as small as dust and pebbles, there are a few chunks as big as mountains, and even some small moons several miles across embedded in the rings. Instead of orderly orbiting around Saturn, the particles clump together and drift apart, and the rings ripple and warp under the gravitational influence of Saturn's swarm of more than 60 moons.

"The closer we look at the rings, the more complex they get," says Spilker, Deputy Project Scientist for the CASSINI mission and a Co-Investigator on CIRS. She is leading the instrument team's investigation of the rings.

"Because Saturn's rings are so extended, going out to more than twice Saturn's radius (from the cloud tops), the furthest rings get less heat from Saturn than the innermost rings, so the ring temperatures at equinox tend to fall off with distance from Saturn's center," said Flasar.

However, the CIRS team discovered that the A-ring -- the outermost of the wide, bright rings -- did not cool off as much as expected during the equinox. This might give clues about its structure and evolution. "One possibility is that the gravitational influence of moons outside the A-ring is stirring up waves in it," said Spilker. "These waves could be much higher than the typical thickness of the rings. Since the waves rise above the ring plane, material in the waves would still be exposed to sunlight during the equinox, which would warm up the A-ring more than expected."

"But we have to carefully test this idea with computer models to see if it produces the temperatures we observed with CIRS," adds Spilker. "That's the challenge with CIRS. It's not like seeing a close-up picture of Mars, which can tell you something about its geology right away. We have to look at the CIRS data from different times and sun angles to see how the ring temperatures are changing, then make computer models to test our theories on what those temperatures say about the rings."

The effort to understand the rings could help us understand our origin. "Our solar system formed from a dusty disk, so by understanding the dynamics in a disk like Saturn's rings, we can gain insight into how Earth and the other planets in our solar system were made," said Spilker.

The equators of both Earth and Saturn are tilted compared to their orbit around the sun. This tilt makes the sun appear to rise higher and lower in the sky throughout the year as Earth progresses in its orbit, causing the seasons to change. Likewise, Saturn's tilt makes the sun appear higher and lower in the sky as Saturn moves in its orbit, which takes about 29.5 years to complete.

Saturn experiences two equinoxes per orbit, just as Earth does, when the planet's equator lines up edge-on to its orbital plane, causing the sun to appear directly over the equator. For a viewer on Saturn, the sun would seem to move from south to north around the time of the August 11 equinox.

Technically, the equinox is the instant when the sun appears directly over the equator, but Saturn's situation gives the rings an extended twilight. Saturn is about 10 times farther from the sun than Earth. Since Saturn is farther from the Sun's gravitational pull, it moves relatively slowly in its orbit compared to Earth, which makes it take longer for the sun to noticeably appear higher or lower in the sky. Also, even as far away as Saturn, the sun is large enough to appear as a disk, not a point, according to Spilker.

So, before the August 11 equinox, a viewer embedded in Saturn's rings would have seen sunlight fade as the top edge of the solar disk appeared to touch the rings first. This would be followed by darkness around the equinox as the solar disk slowly crossed the ring plane. Full sunlight would have returned when the sun's bottom edge rose above the ring plane, about four days from when the sunlight first began to fade.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project among NASA and the European and Italian Space Agencies. NASA JPL manages the mission for the Science Mission Directorate at NASA Headquarters in Washington. JPL also designed, developed and assembled the Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras. The imaging team is based at the Space Science Institute, Boulder, Colo. The CIRS team is based at NASA Goddard. CIRS was built by Goddard, with significant hardware contributions from England and France.

Galaxy Cluster Smashes Distance Record

The most distant galaxy cluster yet has been discovered by combining data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and optical and infrared telescopes. The cluster is located about 10.2 billion light years away, and is observed as it was when the Universe was only about a quarter of its present age.

The galaxy cluster, known as JKCS041, beats the previous record holder by about a billion light years. Galaxy clusters are the largest gravitationally bound objects in the Universe. Finding such a large structure at this very early epoch can reveal important information about how the Universe evolved at this crucial stage.

JKCS041 is found at the cusp of when scientists think galaxy clusters can exist in the early Universe based on how long it should take for them to assemble. Therefore, studying its characteristics -- such as composition, mass, and temperature -- will reveal more about how the Universe took shape.

"This object is close to the distance limit expected for a galaxy cluster," said Stefano Andreon of the National Institute for Astrophysics (INAF) in Milan, Italy. "We don't think gravity can work fast enough to make galaxy clusters much earlier."

Distant galaxy clusters are often detected first with optical and infrared observations that reveal their component galaxies dominated by old, red stars. JKCS041 was originally detected in 2006 in a survey from the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope (UKIRT). The distance to the cluster was then determined from optical and infrared observations from UKIRT, the Canada-France-Hawaii telescope in Hawaii and NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope. Infrared observations are important because the optical light from the galaxies at large distances is shifted into infrared wavelengths because of the expansion of the universe.

The Chandra data were the final -- but crucial -- piece of evidence as they showed that JKCS041 was, indeed, a genuine galaxy cluster. The extended X-ray emission seen by Chandra shows that hot gas has been detected between the galaxies, as expected for a true galaxy cluster rather than one that has been caught in the act of forming.

Also, without the X-ray observations, the possibility remained that this object could have been a blend of different groups of galaxies along the line of sight, or a filament, a long stream of galaxies and gas, viewed front on. The mass and temperature of the hot gas detected estimated from the Chandra observations rule out both of those alternatives.

The extent and shape of the X-ray emission, along with the lack of a central radio source argue against the possibility that the X-ray emission is caused by scattering of cosmic microwave background light by particles emitting radio waves.

It is not yet possible, with the detection of just one extremely distant galaxy cluster, to test cosmological models, but searches are underway to find other galaxy clusters at extreme distances.

"This discovery is exciting because it is like finding a Tyrannosaurus Rex fossil that is much older than any other known," said co-author Ben Maughan, from the University of Bristol in the United Kingdom. "One fossil might just fit in with our understanding of dinosaurs, but if you found many more, you would have to start rethinking how dinosaurs evolved. The same is true for galaxy clusters and our understanding of cosmology."

The previous record holder for a galaxy cluster was 9.2 billion light years away, XMMXCS J2215.9-1738, discovered by ESA's XMM-Newton in 2006. This broke the previous distance record by only about 0.1 billion light years, while JKCS041 surpasses XMMXCS J2215.9 by about ten times that.

"What's exciting about this discovery is the astrophysics that can be done with detailed follow-up studies," said Andreon.

Among the questions scientists hope to address by further studying JKCS041 are: What is the build-up of elements (such as iron) like in such a young object? Are there signs that the cluster is still forming? Do the temperature and X-ray brightness of such a distant cluster relate to its mass in the same simple way as they do for nearby clusters?

The paper describing the results on JKCS041 from Andreon and his colleagues will appear in an upcoming issue of the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics. NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., manages the Chandra program for NASA's Science Mission Directorate in Washington, DC. The Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory controls Chandra's science and flight operations from Cambridge, Mass

Astronomers Find Organic Molecules Around Gas Planet

 Peering far beyond our solar system, NASA researchers have detected the basic chemistry for life in a second hot gas planet, advancing astronomers toward the goal of being able to characterize planets where life could exist. The planet is not habitable but it has the same chemistry that, if found around a rocky planet in the future, could indicate the presence of life.

"It's the second planet outside our solar system in which water, methane and carbon dioxide have been found, which are potentially important for biological processes in habitable planets," said researcher Mark Swain of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. "Detecting organic compounds in two exoplanets now raises the possibility that it will become commonplace to find planets with molecules that may be tied to life."

Swain and his co-investigators used data from two of NASA's orbiting Great Observatories, the Hubble Space Telescope and Spitzer Space Telescope, to study HD 209458b, a hot, gaseous giant planet bigger than Jupiter that orbits a sun-like star about 150 light years away in the constellation Pegasus. The new finding follows their breakthrough discovery in December 2008 of carbon dioxide around another hot, Jupiter-size planet, HD 189733b. Earlier Hubble and Spitzer observations of that planet had also revealed water vapor and methane.

The detections were made through spectroscopy, which splits light into its components to reveal the distinctive spectral signatures of different chemicals. Data from Hubble's near-infrared camera and multi-object spectrometer revealed the presence of the molecules, and data from Spitzer's photometer and infrared spectrometer measured their amounts.

"This demonstrates that we can detect the molecules that matter for life processes," said Swain. Astronomers can now begin comparing the two planetary atmospheres for differences and similarities. For example, the relative amounts of water and carbon dioxide in the two planets is similar, but HD 209458b shows a greater abundance of methane than HD 189733b. "The high methane abundance is telling us something," said Swain. "It could mean there was something special about the formation of this planet."

Other large, hot Jupiter-type planets can be characterized and compared using existing instruments, Swain said. This work will lay the groundwork for the type of analysis astronomers eventually will need to perform in shortlisting any promising rocky Earth-like planets where the signatures of organic chemicals might indicate the presence of life.

Rocky worlds are expected to be found by NASA's Kepler mission, which launched earlier this year, but astronomers believe we are a decade or so away from being able to detect any chemical signs of life on such a body.

If and when such Earth-like planets are found in the future, "the detection of organic compounds will not necessarily mean there's life on a planet, because there are other ways to generate such molecules," Swain said. "If we detect organic chemicals on a rocky, Earth-like planet, we will want to understand enough about the planet to rule out non-life processes that could have led to those chemicals being there."

"These objects are too far away to send probes to, so the only way we're ever going to learn anything about them is to point telescopes at them. Spectroscopy provides a powerful tool to determine their chemistry and dynamics."

You can follow the history of planet hunting from science fiction to science fact with NASA's PlanetQuest Historic Timeline at http://planetquest.jpl.nasa.gov/timeline/ .

This interactive web feature, developed by JPL, conveys the story of exoplanet exploration through a rich tapestry of words and images spanning thousands of years, beginning with the musings of ancient philosophers and continuing through the current era of space-based observations by NASA's Spitzer and Kepler missions. The timeline highlights milestones in culture, technology and science, and includes a planet counter that tracks the pace of exoplanet discoveries over time.

More information about exoplanets and NASA's planet-finding program is at http://planetquest.jpl.nasa.gov .

The Hubble Space Telescope is a project of international cooperation between NASA and the European Space Agency and is managed by NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. The Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Md., conducts Hubble science operations. The institute is operated for NASA by the Association of Universities for research in Astronomy, Inc., Washington, D.C.

JPL manages the Spitzer Space Telescope mission for NASA. Science operations are conducted at the Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.

Tool-making Human Ancestors Inhabited Grassland Environments Two Million Years Ago

In an article published in the open-access, peer-reviewed journal PLoS ONE on October 21, 2009, Dr Thomas Plummer of Queens College at the City University of New York, Dr Richard Potts of the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Natural History and colleagues report the oldest archeological evidence of early human activities in a grassland environment, dating to 2 million years ago. The article highlights new research and its implications concerning the environments in which human ancestors evolved.

Scientists as far back as Charles Darwin have thought that adaptation to grassland environments profoundly influenced the course of human evolution. This idea has remained well-entrenched, even with recent recognition that hominin origins took place in a woodland environment and that the adaptive landscape in Africa fluctuated dramatically in response to short-term climatic shifts.

During the critical time period between 3 and 1.5 million years ago, the origin of lithic technology and archeological sites, the evolution of Homo and Paranthropus, selection for endurance running, and novel thermoregulatory adaptations to hot, dry environments in H. erectus have all been linked to increasingly open environments in Africa.

However, ecosystems in which grassland prevails have not been documented in the geological record of Pliocene hominin evolution, so it has been unclear whether open habitats were even available to hominins, and, if so, whether hominins utilized them. In their new study, Plummer and colleagues provide the first documentation of both at the 2-million-year-old Oldowan archeological site of Kanjera South, Kenya, which has yielded both Oldowan artifacts and well-preserved faunal remains, allowing researchers to reconstruct past ecosystems.

The researchers report chemical analyses of ancient soils and mammalian teeth, as well as other faunal data, from the ~2.0-million-year-old archeological sites at Kanjera South, located in western Kenya. The principal collaborating institutions of the Kanjera project are QueensCollege of the City University of New York, the Smithsonian Institution's Human Origins Program, and the NationalMuseums of Kenya. The findings demonstrate that the recently excavated archeological sites that preserve Oldowan tools, the oldest-known type of stone technology, were located in a grassland-dominated ecosystem during the crucial time period.

The study documents what was previously speculated based on indirect evidence -- that grassland-dominated ecosystems did, in fact, exist during the Plio-Pleistocene (ca. 2.5-1.5 million years ago) and that early human tool-makers were active in open settings. Other recent research shows that the Kanjera hominins obtained meat and bone marrow from a variety of animals and that they carried stone raw materials over surprisingly long distances in this grassland setting. A comparison with other Oldowan sites shows that by 2.0 million years ago, hominins, almost certainly of the genus Homo, lived in a wide range of habitats in East Africa, from open grassland to woodland and dry forest.

Plummer and colleagues conclude that early Homo was flexible in its habitat use and that the ability to find resources in both open and wooded habitats was a key part of its adaptation. This strongly contrasts with the habitat usage of older species of Australopithecus and appears to signify an important shift in early humans' use of the landscape.

Funding from the L. S. B. Leakey Foundation, the Leverhulme Trust, the National Geographic Society, the National Science Foundation, the Professional Staff Congress-City University of New York Research Award Program, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Kanjera field and laboratory research is gratefully acknowledged. Logistical support was provided by the Human Origins Program of the Smithsonian Institution. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

The New Biology of Biometrics

The field of biometric security is moving beyond mere fingerprint readers and producing more sophisticated devices that are more difficult to dupe. Providers are moving with hardware that senses bloodflow beneath a handprint and software tools that analyze not only the password a user types in, but also how he or she typed it.

To a lot of computer users, the concept of biometric authentication is limited to thumb drive reader devices, eye scanners and voice pattern recognition. Such technologies still face stiff competition in most enterprise circles, where passwords and user tokens seemingly work well enough and are quicker and cheaper to deploy.

Existing security strategies that grant access only after the presentation of a user's recognized physical traits are changing. Updated versions of fingerprint, voice and eye scanners are gaining popularity with IT managers. Newer biometric authentication layers are tightening the security blanket for computer and data access. These innovative devices are making it more difficult for impostors to spoof their way into data they shouldn't be able to access.

Historically, authentication security involved a combination of passwords, PINs, signatures and keys. First-generation biometric authentication devices added more choices to the mix. Now these choices are again changing. New strategies for personal identification are providing stronger security to computers and sensitive data.

For instance, next-gen fingerprint readers can detect the presence of blood coursing through the tissues to eliminate the threat of a severed finger passing muster. Fujitsu Computer Products of America announced on Sept. 9 a mouse with a built-in palm reader that it claims cannot be duped.

"I expect to see even better speed and imaging performance from future [fingerprint] readers. In addition, newer technologies such as IR [infrared] imagers are able to detect thermal signatures of either finger veins, palm or hand veins as well as facial prints. These technologies are starting to appear, but their price points are not where fingerprint sensors are so they are still early in the development cycle. Whether these will become as mainstream as fingerprint biometrics is still unknown, but these technologies look promising," David Ting, CTO of Imprivata, told TechNewsWorld.


Worth the Upgrade?

Next-gen of biometric authentication devices may offer greater security, but that may not be the most pressing issue for potential enterprise adopters. Are enterprises better off upgrading to the newest versions of biometric solutions? Perhaps they would be better off taking a hands-off approach to these newer biometric-based security strategies.

Basic fingerprint readers are becoming so reliable and inexpensive that the level of improved access control they offer is already better. Introducing more costly devices may not be cost effective, Ting suggested.

From a technology perspective, enterprises are starting to see widespread adoption of fingerprint biometrics. A driving factor for this acceptance is the device's long history of sensor development, image processing and a large population statistics, he said.

"The devices on mobile devices are starting to benefit from evolution rather than revolutionary changes as they become more usable (to fingerprint and environmental conditions), durable and faster. This, coupled with the reduction in footprint, power consumption and cost, have resulted rapid adoption for mobile and desktop users, as evidenced by the number of users today who are buying them for their notebooks," he explained.

Lagging Desire

For a variety of reasons, the security industry has not seen widespread requests for voice or facial recognition, even as microphones and digital cameras become standard equipment on notebooks. Factors like variables in the operating environment and how they affect the recognition rates certainly play a large role in this.

"We see companies using technology from the business space and applying it to their own partners. There is no silver bullet with getting security from biometrics. Companies that use biometrics in isolation are finding out that they are getting spoofed. They have to use multiple strategies in concert," Matt Shanahan, SVP of AdmitOne Security, told TechNewsWorld.

When deciding whether to buy into new biometric security devices, IT managers should consider the risk factor they face, he said. They should ask themselves, what are the most concerning threats and what should they do about them?

Two Possibilities


Collusion and corporate social engineering are two typical ploys hackers use to break through security barriers. Biometric devices need to identify the right user, not just a user that appears to be right. However, the devices don't always reach this goal.

"The rise of new threats is causing people to rethink biometrics. Then they have to decide if they should rely on physical, which is more intrusive, or behavioral, which is less intrusive," said Shanahan.

In many cases, advancements made in software-based behavioral biometrics can be 95 percent effective, he added. With physical biometrics, users need new hardware on their PCs, and the upgrades can be expensive.

Behavioral Biometrics

With behavioral biometrics in place on the network end, no external devices are needed. AdmitOne's biometric product captures the typing cadence of the approved users, so whatever keyboard they use, their typing behavior will not change.

In addition, behavioral biometrics provides for multiple levels. For instance, banks using behavioral biometrics first require customers to get the password right. For that same customer to do a transaction online, he or she will have to re-enter the password or answer pre-set security questions.

Another layer can be applied by using risk-based methods. Customers will have to answer different levels of challenges depending on their interactive behavior on line. With risk-based strategies, the degree of strength needed is determined by the amount of risk assessment the access requires, said Shanahan.

All Things Considered

AdmitOne's behavior biometric software relies on multiple sets of factors. For instance, it determines if the log-on attempt comes from the same IP (Internet protocol) address as it usually comes from. A log-on attempt coming from a different geographic region is given special consideration.

"The assessment of risk combines the observable factors with the requested responses. This makes for a reliable pattern of use. Depending on the behavioral assessment, additional levels can be applied, such as calling out to the customer's cell phone. Using these strategies, 99 percent of people won't be challenged at higher levels," Shanahan said.

Palm Science

One innovative physical biometrics device to come down the pike is Fujitsu's mouse and palm reader duo. Its design places the user's hand grip in direct contact with the palm reader embedded into the mouse.

"The palm of hand area is two inches by two inches and is an intricate, data-rich structure. We can capture, classify and identify patterns with infrared lights. This technology looks below the skin's surface at vein patterns. It looks like a bunch of squiggly worms," Jerry Byrnes, manager of biometrics and strategy planning for Fujitsu, told TechNewsWorld.

The technology produces a false rejection rate of 0.0007 percent. The false acceptance rate is 0.01 percent, he said.

"We use a liveness test. It needs to sense flowing blood. The device can't be spoofed," Byrnes ventured.

Different Strokes

The use of different types of biometric devices is meant to address different needs. Some industries will be served better than others by these next-gen biometric technologies.

For instance, vascular biometrics using vein patterns may be an attractive option for some sectors, but the hardware deployment may not be conducive or even possible for all enterprises, noted Byrnes.

Fujitsu's palm and mouse device is already well established in the Japanese banking industry, among others. But the market in the U.S. is much different. There's generally less concern over security, in part because the insurance business in the U.S. covers damages from security breaches.

"One of the biggest and first adopters in the U.S. is the healthcare industry. Compliance rules are driving biometrics acceptance and development. Corporate officials literally have jail hanging over their heads. Our method is well accepted. Another area of adoption [for next-gen biometrics devices] is patient ID and authorization," Byrnes said.

Third-Party Trend

Rather than looking for applications that provide all their own biometric capabilities, users are looking to external providers to support biometric verification for all applications, according to Imprivata's Ting. For example, his company's ProveID application programming interface, which accesses OneSign biometric authentication, is being used by multiple healthcare and financial applications to offload the responsibility for all the workflow, credential storage and device management necessary to support biometrics.

"We expect this trend to continue as more applications are required to comply with having biometric support. This is a win/win for both customers and application providers," said Ting.

The end user doesn't want multiple proprietary devices for individual applications or the need to individually learn to use and enroll with different systems. Similarly, app providers generally don't want to constantly wrestle with the complexities of different authentication technologies, he added.

Most of the biometric technology provided by laptop computer vendors is based on device-centric methods. This means the reference biometric data sets are typically locally stored on the specific device used during enrollment, rather than stored and processed centrally as one would for enterprise use, Ting explained.

"Imprivata has long held the opinion that all reference biometric data need to be stored and managed centrally to offer the maximum flexibility and security for the end users," said Ting.

The OneSign server securely stores the reference fingerprint biometric for all users and supports fingerprint lookup across a distributed environment. This model is more operationally correct within healthcare, government, financial services and utility applications.

Nex-gen enterprise biometric solutions will evolve toward being able to work both with centralized, distributed as well as mobile devices, such as smartcards or contractless smartcards, according to Ting. Another aspect for enterprise-based solutions is the ability to be interoperable across different devices.

This will make it possible for the end user to work with different sensor technologies on different platforms without having to enroll with multiple systems. This need will become more significant as first-generation scanners get replaced by newer ones, predicted Ting.

Rocky Extrasolar Planet Too Close to Its Sun for Comfort

The existence of a rocky planet outside our solar system is encouraging news for astronomers searching for signs of life elsewhere in the universe. Although Corot-7b is too hot to be habitable -- it's been nicknamed "the lava planet" -- its discovery relatively close to Earth suggests there may be rocky planets better suited for life farther out.

Astronomers have finally found a place outside our solar system where there's a firm place to stand -- if only it weren't so broiling hot.

As scientists search the skies for life elsewhere, they have found more than 300 planets outside our solar system. However, all are of them are gas balls or can't be proven to be solid. Now, a team of European astronomers has confirmed the first discovery of a rocky extrasolar planet.

Scientists have long figured that if life begins on a planet, it needs a solid surface to rest on, so finding one elsewhere is a big deal.


'Lava Planet'

"We basically live on a rock ourselves," said co-discoverer Artie Hatzes, director of the Thuringer observatory in Germany. "It's as close to something like the Earth that we've found so far. It's just a little too close to its sun."

So close that its surface temperature is more than 3,600 degrees Fahrenheit, too toasty to sustain life. It circles its star in just 20 hours, zipping around at 466,000 mph. By comparison, Mercury, the planet nearest our sun, completes its solar orbit in 88 days.

"It's hot -- they're calling it 'the lava planet,'" Hatzes said.

Near Neighbor

This is a major discovery in the search for life elsewhere in the universe, said outside expert Alan Boss of the Carnegie Institution.

It was the main buzz of a conference on finding an Earth-like planet outside our solar system, held in Barcelona, Spain, where the discovery was presented Wednesday morning. The find is also being published in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics.

The planet is called "Corot-7b." It was first discovered earlier this year. European scientists then observed it dozens of times, measuring its density to prove that it is rocky like Earth.

It's in our general neighborhood, circling a star in the winter sky about 500 light-years away. Each light-year is about 6 trillion miles.

Better Digs Farther Away?

Four planets in our solar system are rocky: Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars.

Corot-7b is about as close to Earth in size as any other planet found outside our solar system. Its radius is only one-and-a-half times bigger than Earth's, and it has a mass about five times Earth's.

Now that another rocky planet has been found so close to its own star, it gives scientists more confidence that they'll find more Earth-like planets farther away, where the conditions could be more favorable to life, Boss said.

"The evidence is becoming overwhelming that we live in a crowded universe," Boss said.

New Mesozoic Mammal: Discovery Illuminates Mammalian Ear Evolution While Dinosaurs Ruled

An international team of paleontologists has discovered a new species of mammal that lived 123 million years ago in what is now the Liaoning Province in northeastern China. The newly discovered animal, Maotherium asiaticus, comes from famous fossil-rich beds of the Yixian Formation.

This new remarkably well preserved fossil, as reported in the October 9 issue of the journal Science, offers an important insight into how the mammalian middle ear evolved. The discoveries of such exquisite dinosaur-age mammals from China provide developmental biologists and paleontologists with evidence of how developmental mechanisms have impacted the morphological (body-structure) evolution of the earliest mammals and sheds light on how complex structures can arise in evolution because of changes in developmental pathways.

"What is most surprising, and thus scientifically interesting, is this animal's ear," says Dr. Zhe-Xi Luo, curator of vertebrate paleontology and associate director of science and research at Carnegie Museum of Natural History. "Mammals have highly sensitive hearing, far better than the hearing capacity of all other vertebrates, and hearing is fundamental to the mammalian way of life. The mammalian ear evolution is important for understanding the origins of key mammalian adaptations."

Thanks to their intricate middle ear structure, mammals (including humans) have more sensitive hearing, discerning a wider range of sounds than other vertebrates. This sensitive hearing was a crucial adaptation, allowing mammals to be active in the darkness of the night and to survive in the dinosaur-dominated Mesozoic.

Mammalian hearing adaptation is made possible by a sophisticated middle ear of three tiny bones, known as the hammer (malleus), the anvil (incus), and the stirrup (stapes), plus a bony ring for the eardrum (tympanic membrane). These mammal middle ear bones evolved from the bones of the jaw hinge in their reptilian relatives. Paleontologists have long attempted to understand the evolutionary pathway via which these precursor jawbones became separated from the jaw and moved into the middle ear of modern mammals.

To evolutionary biologists, an understanding of how the sophisticated and highly sensitive mammalian ear evolved may illuminate how a new and complex structure transforms through evolution. According to the Chinese and American scientists who studied this new mammal, the middle ear bones of Maotherium are partly similar to those of modern mammals; but Maotherium's middle ear has an unusual connection to the lower jaw that is unlike that of adult modern mammals. This middle ear connection, also known as the ossified Meckel's cartilage, resembles the embryonic condition of living mammals and the primitive middle ear of pre-mammalian ancestors.

Because Maotherium asiaticus is preserved three-dimensionally, paleontologists were able to reconstruct how the middle ear attached to the jaw. This can be a new evolutionary feature. Or, it can be interpreted as having a "secondarily reversal to the ancestral condition," meaning that the adaptation is the caused by changes in development. (See graphics of mammalian ear evolution, as represented by Maotherium).

Modern developmental biology has shown that developmental genes and their gene network can trigger the development of unusual middle ear structures, such as "re-appearance" of the Meckel's cartilage in modern mice. The middle ear morphology in fossil mammal Maotherium of the Cretaceous (145-65 million years ago) is very similar to the mutant morphology in the middle ear of the mice with mutant genes. The scientific team studying the fossil suggests that the unusual middle ear structure, such as the ossified Meckel's cartilage, is actually the manifestation of developmental gene mutations in the deep times of Mesozoic mammal evolution.

Maotherium asiaticus is a symmetrodont, meaning that it has teeth with symmetrically arranged cusps specialized for feeding on insects and worms. It lived on the ground and had a body 15 cm (5 inches) long and weighing approximately 70 to 80 grams (.15 to .17 lbs). By studying all features in this exquisitely preserved fossil, researchers believe Maotherium to be more closely related to marsupials and placentals than to monotremes—primitive egg-laying mammals of Australia and New Guinea such as the platypus.

The article in Science is authored by Dr. Qiang Ji of Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences (Beijing), Dr. Zhe-Xi Luo (Carnegie Museum of Natural History) and Mr. Xinliang Zhang (Henan Provincial Geological Museum), along with other collaborators.

The researchers received support from National Science Foundation (USA), National Natural Science Foundation (China), Ministry of Science and Technology (China), and National Geographic Society.

Norwegian Wood For The Ages: 'Mummified' Pine Trees Found

Norway’s wet climate seems perfect for encouraging organic matter to rot – particularly in Sogndal, located on Norway’s southwestern coastline, in one of the most humid, mild areas of the country. In fact, with an average of 1541 millimetres of rain yearly and relatively mild winters, Sogndal should be an environment where decomposition happens fast. Not so.

“We were gathering samples of dead trees to reconstruct summer temperatures in western Norway, when our dendrochronological dating showed the wood to be much older than expected”, says Terje Thun, an associate professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology’s (NTNU) Museum of Natural History and Archaeology. Thun conducted the work with his colleague Helene Løvstrand Svarva.

From a time before the Black Death

“We were astounded to find fresh wood in trees that started to grow in the late 1200s and had died almost 500 years ago, which is much older than we originally expected. Somehow they have kept from decomposing for several centuries in this humid climate”, Thun says. “This is quite extraordinary - I would go as far as to call it sensational.”

Thun says that when a pine tree dies, it secretes a great deal of resin, which deters the microorganisms needed for decomposition. “Nevertheless, preventing the natural breakdown of the wood for centuries is quite a feat”, he says. Thun is one on Norway’s leading dendrochronology experts. Dendrochronology is the dating of trees.

Used in mummification

Resin was one of the ingredients used in Ancient Egypt for mummification, so its conservation abilities have been known for millennia. However, that trees could “self-mummify” in such a humid climate for centuries was new to the NTNU scientists.

“Many of the trunks we dated turned out to have seeded in the early 1200s, and had lived for more than 100 years at the time of the Black Death around 1350”, Thun says. “That means that the dead wood has ‘survived’ in nature for more 800 years without breaking down.”

It seems there truly is something good about Norwegian wood.

Growing Geodesic Carbon Nanodomes

 

Researchers analyzing the assembly of graphene (sheets of carbon only one atom thick) on a surface of iridium have found that the sheets grow by first forming tiny carbon domes. The discovery offers new insight into the growth of graphene layers and points the way to possible methods for assembling components of graphene-based computer circuits.

 

Paolo Lacovig, Monica Pozzo, Dario Alfè, Paolo Vilmercati, Alessandro Baraldi, and Silvano Lizzit at institutions in Italy, the UK and USA report their discovery in a paper appearing October 12 in the journal Physical Review Letters.

The researchers' spectroscopic study suggests that graphene grows in the form of tiny islands built of concentric rings of carbon atoms. The islands are strongly bonded to the iridium surface at their perimeters, but are not bonded to the iridium at their centers, which causes them to bulge upward in the middle to form minuscule geodesic domes. By adjusting the conditions as the carbon is deposited on the iridium, the researchers could vary the size of the carbon domes from a few nanometers to hundreds of nanometers across.

Investigating the formation of graphene nanodomes helps physicists to understand and control the production of graphene sheets. In combination with methods for adjusting the conductivity of graphene and related materials, physicists hope to replace electronics made of silicon and metal with tiny, efficient carbon-based chips.

Jorge Sofo and Renee Diehl (Penn State University) highlight the graphene nanodome research in a Viewpoint in the October 12 issue of Physics.

Human-like Vision Lets Robots Navigate Naturally

A robotic vision system that mimics key visual functions of the human brain promises to let robots manoeuvre quickly and safely through cluttered environments, and to help guide the visually impaired.

It’s something any toddler can do – cross a cluttered room to find a toy.

It's also one of those seemingly trivial skills that have proved to be extremely hard for computers to master. Analysing shifting and often-ambiguous visual data to detect objects and separate their movement from one’s own has turned out to be an intensely challenging artificial intelligence problem.

Three years ago, researchers at the European-funded research consortium Decisions in Motion (http://www.decisionsinmotion.org/) decided to look to nature for insights into this challenge.

In a rare collaboration, neuro- and cognitive scientists studied how the visual systems of advanced mammals, primates and people work, while computer scientists and roboticists incorporated their findings into neural networks and mobile robots.

The approach paid off. Decisions in Motion has already built and demonstrated a robot that can zip across a crowded room guided only by what it “sees” through its twin video cameras, and are hard at work on a head-mounted system to help visually impaired people get around.

“Until now, the algorithms that have been used are quite slow and their decisions are not reliable enough to be useful,” says project coordinator Mark Greenlee. “Our approach allowed us to build algorithms that can do this on the fly, that can make all these decisions within a few milliseconds using conventional hardware.”

How do we see movement?

The Decisions in Motion researchers used a wide variety of techniques to learn more about how the brain processes visual information, especially information about movement.

These included recording individual neurons and groups of neurons firing in response to movement signals, functional magnetic resonance imaging to track the moment-by-moment interactions between different brain areas as people performed visual tasks, and neuropsychological studies of people with visual processing problems.

The researchers hoped to learn more about how the visual system scans the environment, detects objects, discerns movement, distinguishes between the independent movement of objects and the organism’s own movements, and plans and controls motion towards a goal.

One of their most interesting discoveries was that the primate brain does not just detect and track a moving object; it actually predicts where the object will go.

“When an object moves through a scene, you get a wave of activity as the brain anticipates its trajectory,” says Greenlee. “It’s like feedback signals flowing from the higher areas in the visual cortex back to neurons in the primary visual cortex to give them a sense of what’s coming.”

Greenlee compares what an individual visual neuron sees to looking at the world through a peephole. Researchers have known for a long time that high-level processing is needed to build a coherent picture out of a myriad of those tiny glimpses. What's new is the importance of strong anticipatory feedback for perceiving and processing motion.

“This proved to be quite critical for the Decisions in Motion project,” Greenlee says. “It solves what is called the ‘aperture problem’, the problem of the neurons in the primary visual cortex looking through those little peepholes.”

Building a better robotic brain

Armed with a better understanding of how the human brain deals with movement, the project’s computer scientists and roboticists went to work. Using off-the-shelf hardware, they built a neural network with three levels mimicking the brain’s primary, mid-level, and higher-level visual subsystems.

They used what they had learned about the flow of information between brain regions to control the flow of information within the robotic “brain”.

“It’s basically a neural network with certain biological characteristics,” says Greenlee. “The connectivity is dictated by the numbers we have from our physiological studies.”

The computerised brain controls the behaviour of a wheeled robotic platform supporting a moveable head and eyes, in real time. It directs the head and eyes where to look, tracks its own movement, identifies objects, determines if they are moving independently, and directs the platform to speed up, slow down and turn left or right.

Greenlee and his colleagues were intrigued when the robot found its way to its first target – a teddy bear – just like a person would, speeding by objects that were at a safe distance, but passing nearby obstacles at a slower pace.

”That was very exciting,” Greenlee says. “We didn’t program it in – it popped out of the algorithm.”

In addition to improved guidance systems for robots, the consortium envisions a lightweight system that could be worn like eyeglasses by visually or cognitively impaired people to boost their mobility. One of the consortium partners, Cambridge Research Systems, is developing a commercial version of this, called VisGuide.

Decisions in Motion received funding from the ICT strand of the EU’s Sixth Framework Programme for research. The project’s work was featured in a video by the New Scientist in February this year.

Asteroid Is Actually A Protoplanet, Study Of First High-resolution Images Of Pallas Confirms

Britney E. Schmidt, a UCLA doctoral student in the department of Earth and space sciences, wasn't sure what she'd glean from images of the asteroid Pallas taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. But she hoped to settle at least one burning question: Was Pallas, the second-largest asteroid, actually in that gray area between an asteroid and a small planet?

The answer, she found, was yes. Pallas, like its sister asteroids Ceres and Vesta, was that rare thing: an intact protoplanet.

"It was incredibly exciting to have this new perspective on an object that is really interesting and hadn't been observed by Hubble at high resolution," Schmidt said of the first high-resolution images of Pallas, which is believed to have been intact since its formation, most likely within a few million years of the birth of our solar system.

"We were trying to understand not only the object, but how the solar system formed," Schmidt said. "We think of these large asteroids not only as the building blocks of planets but as a chance to look at planet formation frozen in time."

The research appears Oct. 9 in the journal Science.

"To have the chance to use Hubble at all, and to see those images come back and understand automatically this could change what we think about this object — that was incredibly exciting to me," Schmidt said.

Pallas, which is named for the Greek goddess Pallas Athena, lies in the main asteroid belt between the orbits of Jupiter and Mars. Schmidt likens it to the size of Arizona, her home state. The massive body is unique, she said, partly because "its orbit is so much different from other asteroids. It's highly inclined."

Hubble had tried to snap pictures of the round-shaped body before but came up short. So when the space telescope took images again in September 2007, Schmidt and her colleagues had several goals.

"We wanted to learn about Pallas itself — what its shape is like, what its surface is like, does it have large impact craters, does it have significant topography," she said.

With the Hubble images, Schmidt and her colleagues were able to take new measurements of Pallas' size and shape. They were able to see that its surface has areas of dark and light, indicating that the water-rich body might have undergone an internal change in the same way planets do.

Pallas wasn't just a big rock made of hydrated silicate and ice, they found.

"That's what makes it more like a planet — the color variation and the round shape are very important as far as understanding, is this a dynamic object or has it been exactly the same since it's been formed?" Schmidt said. "We think it's probably a dynamic object."

For the first time, Schmidt and her colleagues also saw a large impact site on Pallas. They were unable to determine if it was a crater, but the depression did suggest something else important: that it could have led to Pallas' small family of asteroids orbiting in space.

"It's interesting, because there are very few large, intact asteroids left," Schmidt said. "There were probably many more. Most have been broken up completely. It's an interesting chance to almost look into the object, at the layer underneath. It's helping to unravel one of the big questions that we have about Pallas, why does it have this family?"

Schmidt's co-authors include Peter C. Thomas, a senior researcher at Cornell University; James Bauer, a researcher with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory; J.Y. Li, a postdoctoral student at the University of Maryland; Schmidt's Ph.D. adviser, UCLA professor of geophysics and space physics Christopher T. Russell; Andrew Rivkin, a researcher at Johns Hopkins University; Joel William Parker, a researcher at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado; Lucy McFadden, a faculty member at the University of Maryland; S. Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute; Max Mutchler, a researcher at the Space Telescope Sciences Institute; and Chris Radcliffe, a digital artist in Santa Monica.

"When people think of asteroids, they think of 'Star Wars' or of tiny little rocks floating through space," Schmidt said. "But some of these have been really physically dynamic. Around 5 million years after the formation of the solar system, Pallas was probably doing something kind of interesting."