Of Schemes and Memes Blog

Best of nature.com blogs, SciLogs.com and Scitable: 1 – 7 June

How To Grow A Garden On Mars

This week’s Soapbox Science post is by Louisa Preston, a Postdoctoral Research Associate at The Open University and TED Fellow. She explains why growing a garden on Mars may not be just science fiction:

Sketch of an ‘AstroGardening’ robot within a theoretical garden on Mars. Credit: Vanessa Harden.

A number of space agencies are focusing on space architecture and designing buildings for human habitation on the Moon and Mars. But what interests me, is the possibility and design of Space Agriculture or ‘AstroGardening’, particularly on Mars. If we want to live on another planet we will need, amongst many important things, food and water. Not shipped to us from Earth (it would cost $80,000 to transport 4 litres of water to the Moon, let alone Mars) but sustainably grown so that the first settlers and then future generations can live off the land. This means we need gardens, and lots of them!

What does the future hold for gardens on Mars? How can robots help? Find out more in Louisa’s post.

Yale immunologist wins new €4 million award

Reporting in the Spoonful of Medicine BlogElie Dolgin reveals the winner of the 4 million ($5.1 million) Else Kröner-Fresenius Award, a new prize handed out by the German non-profit Else Kröner-Fresenius-Stiftung (EKFS):

BRIAN ACH/HHMI

That accolade was given to immunologist Ruslan Medzhitov, a Russian-born scientist at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, who co-discovered and characterized mammalian Toll-like receptors (TLRs) in the 1990s. These pattern recognition molecules are now recognized as integral parts of the innate immune system that fight off microbial infections and detect associated damage. Many drug companies are actively targeting these receptors in the hopes of treating cancer, sepsis and inflammatory disease.

More on Ruslan Medzhitov’s work and how he was overlooked for the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, in Elie’s post. 

Mathematics prize ups the ante to $1 million

Andrew Beal, a banker and mathematics enthusiast

Onto another monetary prize as Davide Castelvecchi reports in the News Blog how a billionaire businessman from Dallas, Texas, has sweetened the pot for a number-theory prize which has remained unclaimed for 16 years:

After putting up US$5,000 in 1997 for a solution to the Beal conjecture and then upping it to $100,000 in 2000, Andrew Beal has now raised the stakes yet again to $1 million, the American Mathematical Society (AMS) announced today.

That puts the Beal Prize on equal footing with the Clay Mathematics Institute’s million-dollar Millennium Prizes, announced in 2000, which address seven extraordinarily difficult problems in mathematics. Only one of those problems has been solved to date, but the man who solved declined to accept the prize.

Learn more about the Beal conjecture in Davide’s post.

Boosting agriculture in Africa

Mohammed Yahia reveals in the House of Wisdom Blog that African farmers face a myriad of problems which limit their yields, economic growth potential and development:

PHOTODISC

IDRC partnered with The Globe and Mail on Monday to hold a Twitter live discussion with Calestous Juma, director of the Science, Technology and Globalization Project at Harvard’s Kennedy School, and Kevin Tiessen, a soil scientist with the Canadian International Food Security Research Fund, to discuss Africa’s agricultural future.

Several African science journalists, including myself, took part in the excellent discussion – which was also open to receiving questions from the public. The discussion was quite lively, with dozens of questions coming in and Juma covering several interesting topics on the potential of science to help in the development of Africa’s agricultural sector.

Continue to Mohammed’s post as he highlights some of the points he found most interesting from the Twitter discussion.

Turning insect viruses into cancer therapies

In her latest post, SciLogs blogger Stephanie Swift teaches us more about gene therapy and how we can utilise insect viruses:

Happily, German scientists discovered in 1995 that an insect virus, baculovirus (shown below), is able to enter, but not replicate in, human cells. So there is no possibility of unintended illness, and since humans aren’t typically exposed to insect viruses, they don’t come under immediate memory immune attack.

Find out in Stephanie’s post how she and a team of researchers have put baculovirus through its paces to determine its utility as a gene therapy vehicle for prostate cancer.

Commercial access to suborbital space still on the horizon

Alexandra Witze explains in the News Blog that as commercial suborbital flights remain ever so slightly in the future, it leaves researchers twiddling their thumbs as they wait for their rides to be ready:

VIRGIN GALACTIC

So what’s taking so long? Mostly funding problems. NASA has provided much of the seed money to get commercial spaceflight going, because the agency sees it as a way to access space more cheaply and competitively in the future. But in a Skype talk at the conference, deputy administrator Lori Garver ticked off some of the ways that NASA has fallen shy of its own goals. Three years ago she promised meeting attendees US$15 million annually; congressional belt-tightening reduced that to about $10 million.

US Institute of Medicine lays out gun-research agenda

This week, the Institute of Medicine (IOM), a branch of the National Academies, recommended a gun-research agenda:

The report suggests a study to determine whether specific safety technologies, such as iris scans and gun-activating magnetic-stripe badges, actually reduce gun injuries and fatalities — and, if they are effective, why they work. And it calls for a look at whether there is a relationship between long-term exposure to media violence and subsequent firearm-related violence. Existing studies on media and video games veer to the short term, it notes, and few of them are specific to gun violence.

The breadth and depth of the unanswered questions point glaringly to how little is known on a huge range of issues, as Nature recently noted in this profile of firearms researcher Garen Wintemute. But funding for studies on even a fraction of the questions the IOM proposes is likely to be limited in a very tight government budget environment.

Will this type of research prevent future massacres such as the massacre of 20 schoolchildren and six educators in Newtown, Connecticut? US President Barack Obama hopes this will help to address the US epidemic of gun crime. Share your thoughts in the comment thread. 

The Importance of Nothing

Jar of Nothing: Heshmista

Scitable blogger James Keen, attempts to explain what “nothing” means and how this type of research has helped us to understand nature’s deepest secrets about why we exist:

But how? Surely this makes no sense? Well this seemingly empty space, contrary to what we would intuitively expect, is teeming with what physicists call quantum fluctuations, little packets of energy that appear and disappear very quickly. This is perfectly allowed by the laws of physics, with the Uncertainty Principle telling us it is possible to borrow energy from nothing as long as it is ‘paid back’ quickly enough. This concept, strange though it seems, is fundamental. This theory of quantum mechanics explains physical phenomena at the microscopic scale, and is the most accurate and powerful description we have of our Universe.

Continue to James’s post to find out more.

Planning your exams (cartoon)

Finally, in Viktor Poór’s latest cartoon, he explains that planning the dates of your exams to fit the exam period, is part science, part art. But any failed exam can ruin it:

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