NetSci 08: Ome improvement
You wait ages for a new ome to come along, and then you hear two in the same talk.
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Nature Newsblog
Nature Newsblog
In The Field
All the action from the world’s hottest science events as it happens, brought to you by Nature News.
NOTE: The newsblog as it existed from January 2006 to August 2007 is no more. If you want to comment on a News story, you can now do so at the foot of the story itself. If you are hunting for older comments you'll find them archived here.
June 26, 2008
June 25, 2008
NetSci 08: Groovy
This is the first conference I've been to that makes me feel old. That's not because I'm getting older while grad students stay the same age. It's because much of the research deals with phenomena – Facebook! MySpace! iPhones! – that until now I've been more than happy to let pass me by. I'm used to feeling baffled in conference presentations, but not fusty; it's like being at a symposium on High School Musical.
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Phoenix landing: getting stuck in
After getting the scoop of a lifetime last week – finding ice – Phoenix is now ready to start doing some experiments of the chemical kind (press release).
This is the first ever chemistry experiment to be done on polar Martian soil. But I don’t think Phoenix will be using pipettes and test tubes, or even a Bunsen burner.
Phoenix’s lab is called MECA (microscopy, electrochemistry and conductivity analyzer) and will be able to test the Martian soil’s acidity and salt content, and the instrument can also check out the different isotopes of elements present, and work out if there are any organics there.
So far, Phoenix has been digging and baking – but this foray into chemistry is a pretty exciting step forward in working out what it is really like up there.
Photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona/Texas A&M University
June 20, 2008
Phoenix landing: Ice at last!
From the editors: Mars Phoenix scientists have finally confirmed finding ice at the landing site (watch the chunks sublimating in the lower left of the trench in the animated image below). Read our full story here. And for more on a new study about how volcanism and ice may have shaped Mars's northern regions, try this news story.
June 16, 2008
Phoenix landing: Chunk o' ice
The Phoenix mission scientists just won't call it ice. It's getting almost hilarious the way they assiduously avoid the term. On a conference call today, Ray Arvidson, the robotic arm lead scientist, talked about some of the features of a deep 5 to 7 centimeter trench. The trench combines "Goldilocks" and "Dodo" -- two shallower test trenches. You can see the ledge of exposed "light-toned" (as they call it) material in the upper part of the trench. You can also see a little tiny nugget of something -- don't say that word -- sitting just to the left of center in the trench.
So the team is going to watch what happens to these two features over time. The chunk, being small and exposed, would be expected to sublime and disappear over time. And the ledge, if it was an extension of the cold, thick ice table below, might actually be expected to accumulate frost. We'll see.
Bill Boyton, lede for the TEGA instrument, said the baking is going well -- they've performed two step-wise bakes, up to 175 degrees Celsius, without detecting anything other than carbon dioxide. In the next few days, he'll amp that oven up to 1000 degrees Celsius. That's when things will really start cooking.
June 13, 2008
On board the Amundsen: Goodbye and adieu
Spending one week on board the CCGS Amundsen has been a humbling, inspiring, and altogether amazing experience for me. As I said before, it has been a great privilege, too – not even Nature’s science reporters often get to see spots as grandiose and pristine as the Canadian Arctic.
Change comes faster to this unique environment than most of us would have thought ten or twenty years ago. With climate change and global warming proceeding at an unexpected pace, it seems doubtful now if we can preserve even to the next generation the Arctic as we knew it.
It is important that scientists bring this unconvenient truth to the attention of decision-makers and to the world’s public. It is equally important that scientists understand the complexity of changes in the Arctic and what they may bring about. Without this detailed knowledge any strategy of mitigation or adaptation will all too easily fail.
From everything I have seen during my short stay, from the commitment, enthusiasm and hard work of everybody I have met here, I have no doubt that the CFL study will very substantially add to this knowledge. My week on board the Amundsen has certainly widened my own understanding of this fragile environment.
Many thanks to David Barber, Dan Leitch, the Canadian Coast Guard, all CFL scientists, and the amazing Amundsen crew, for having made this possible.
Quirin Schiermeier
June 12, 2008
On board the Amundsen: how sea ice could affect permafrost
Spending time on board a research ship inevitably blurs the separation line between reporting and doing science, even though most of the time the 'science' part of it is limited to dragging a sled-load of gear out onto the ice or, at best, pulling up a sampling net from a dive hole.
But today I have perhaps contributed to science a little bit more than usual, if only by passing on information. Yesterday evening I handed Dave Barber, the chief scientist of the Circumpolar Flaw Lead study, a paper coming out on Friday in the journal Geophysical Research Letters (which my ever-alert colleagues had sent me). The paper describes how, in a model, Arctic sea ice loss leads to strongly accelerated permafrost thawing on land. Dave promised he would read it.
When I entered his office this morning, he was brimming with enthusiasm. "Very interesting stuff," he said. "We should really start looking for what's going on in the Canadian permafrost. A model study like this could direct an observational study. Actually, I think I'd like to do this myself."
The paper, written by a team led by David Lawrence of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado, suggests that if massive sea ice loss, such as occurred last summer, will happen ever more often, Arctic land warming could triple in the near future. This would have an effect on the rate of permafrost melting up to 1,500 kilometres inland on the continents surrounding the Arctic Ocean.
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On board the Amundsen: More photos on Flickr
From the editors: We've posted a Flickr set of some images Quirin (yep, that's him in this photo) took aboard the Amundsen, available here.
ISSCR 2008: It’s “Shinyamania”
I cornered Harvard’s George Daley shortly after this afternoon’s opening symposium at the International Society for Stem Cell Research meeting in Philadelphia, and asked him for some stats and trends at the meeting. He’s the current president of ISSCR. There are 24,000 2,400 pre-registered attendees, he told me. That’s only 24 2.4 times the size of the last meeting I attended. As for trends: “There’s certainly a bit of Shinya-mania,” Daley said. He was referring to the focus on induced pluripotent stem cells (iPS cells), adult human cells reprogrammed to a stem cell-like state thanks to a couple of transcription factors by a Japanese group led by Shinya Yamanaka.
**Note updated numbers. It was a big meeting, but not that big! 24,000 would be getting into society for neuroscience range!
Daley wasn’t kidding. Cruising the poster session this evening, I was intrigued by the dense clump of bodies congregating around a handful of posters in one corner of the exhibit hall. All of them had to do with using variations on the so-called “Yamanaka factors.” Yamanaka used four, but there was a poster talking about using just two (Oct4 and Klf4) on adult neural stem cells with high efficiency. The work, presented by Vania Broccoli of San Raffaele Scientific Institute was drawing a crowd. Next to him Mali Prashant of Johns Hopkins was presenting data on reprogramming using non-integrating lentiviral vectors. John Dimos from Harvard was presenting work on developing models of the neurodegenerative diseases spinal muscular atrophy (SMA) and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) respectively in embryonic stem cells (retrieved from discarded embryos that had been diagnosed as carrying SMA associated mutations), and – you guessed it – induced pluripotent stem cells derived from the cells of adults with ALS. According to the poster, the SMA cells have a distinct phenotype with low numbers of motor neurons compared to other ES cell cultures that can be rescued genetically. The ALS cells are still being worked on. Dimos' PI, Kevin Eggan, has been trying to do the same work modeling ALS through stem cell cloning, essentially dropping a nucleus into an egg and deriving embryonic stem cells from the resulting embryo. But eggs have been scarce.
June 11, 2008
Phoenix landing: Shake 'n' bake
After five days of shaking, TEGA will finally get around to some baking. Last Friday, the robotic arm dropped some soil onto the screen door of one of the ovens for TEGA, Phoenix's main chemical analysis instrument. But the soil was apparently too clumpy. Mission scientists sent commands to vibrate the instrument, which resulted in some material getting through the screen (see the animated gif here). But somehow it wasn't getting into the oven. Today, something finally gave -- was it the weather? was it the vibrating? -- and the oven is now full. Now they've got to worry about contamination.
For future TEGA tests, the team is experimenting with a new “sprinkle” test. Instead of burying the TEGA door in one big dump, the team may angle the scoop, and then run the ice rasp at its back – vibrating the scoop enough to send a fine stream of soil particles over the edge.