Antarctic researchers find life in subglacial lake
Quirin Schiermeier reveals in the News Blog that Lake Whillans, a small body of water huddled in eternal darkness beneath 800-metre-thick Antarctic ice, seems to harbour life:
Researchers with the US Antarctic expedition team WISSARD who accessed the lake on 28 January report that they have found microbes in samples of lake water and sediment — but what kind of known or novel organisms those might be has yet to be determined.
The bottom of subglacial Lake Whillans{credit}ALBERTO BEHAR, JPL/ASU{/credit}
If the reported preliminary findings hold up, it is the first time that life has been discovered in a subglacial lake.
How the bacteria produce and metabolize energy in an environment probably deprived of oxygen and nutrients is unclear. Team members speculate that the organisms might live on energy extracted from minerals in surrounding rocks — a survival strategy also used by certain bacteria found in gold mines.
Antarctica’s hidden lakes, sealed for probably millions of years, mark one of the utmost frontiers for life on Earth. Many scientists think the lakes and what dwells in them will provide hints about which forms of life might exist on other planets or moons — for example on Jupiter’s moon Europa, which is thought to host a large sub-surface ocean.
You can find out more about this discovery in Quirin’s post.
Crowdsourced coders
Computer coders are helping scientists to deal with the deluge of data pouring out of research labs. Ewen Callaway elaborates in the News Blog:
IMAGE VIA SLWORKING2 UNDER CREATIVE COMMONS
A contest to write software to analyse immune-system genes garnered more than 100 entries, including many that vastly outperformed existing programs.
The US$6,000 contest was launched by researchers at Harvard Medical School and Harvard Business School, both in Boston, Massachusetts. TopCoder.com, a community of more than 400,000 coders who compete in programming competitions, hosted the contest. The results are described in a letter published today in Nature Biotechnology.
The challenge was to analyse the genes involved in the production of antibodies and immune-system sentinels called T-cell receptors. These genes are formed from dozens of modular DNA segments located throughout the genome, and they can be mixed and matched to yield trillions of unique proteins, each capable of recognizing a different pathogen or foreign molecule.
The post also considers the limits associated with crowdsourcing and the problems dealing with personal data.
The need to overhaul Arab education
GRAPHEAST
Mohammed Yahia explains in the House of Wisdom blog how Arab states have consistently rated extremely low in TIMSS global math and science test, and that the latest results released for 2011 are no exception:
TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study) is a standardised test for young pupils to measure how good education is in each country. Unfortunately, Arab states remain well below the average mark, a reflection of the poor and aging education systems in most of the countries of the region.
While Qatari and Emirati students have made some good progress, most of the other countries remain stagnant, making the end of the list. In fact, in fourth-grade math, the 10 lowest-performing states were all Arab ones (keeping in mind that there are only 10 Arab states on the test in the first place.)
Continue to the post to find out how the US State Department and the Arab League Educational, Cultural and Scientific Organization (ALESCO) are working together to improve the situation.
Scientific publishing 2.0
This week’s Soapbox Science guest post is by science journalist Adrian Giordani. He considers the future of scientific publishing and how this could change as we develop new ways of dealing with the increasing amounts of data:
Today, data-intensive science turns raw data into information and then knowledge. This represents the vision of the late and influential computer scientist, Jim Gray, who divided the evolution of science into four paradigms. One thousand years ago, science was experimental in nature, a few hundred years ago it became theoretical, a few decades ago it moved to a computational discipline, and today it’s data driven. Researchers are reliant on e-science tools to enable collaboration, federation, analysis, and exploration to address the data deluge, currently equal to about 1.2 zettabytes each year. If 11 ounces of coffee equalled one gigabyte, a zettabyte would be the same volume as the Great Wall of China.
So much data is produced that the journal Neuroscience stopped accepting supplementary files along with research manuscripts to enable them to better handle the peer review process. In an attempt to address the challenges presented by so much data, some are combing software, databases and infrastructures to transform the way scientific publishing is done, which has been little changed for centuries.
You can hear more of Adrian’s thoughts in his post and feel free to share your own opinions.
Science Online North Carolina
Last week, two of the nature.com Communities team, Lou Woodley (nature.com’s Communities Specialist) and Laura Wheeler (nature.com’s Communities Coordinator), hosted a pre-conference workshops on: Monitoring & Analyzing one’s Effectiveness on Social Media at Science Online North Carolina.
The purpose of the workshop was to consider the ways you can set goals for your social media efforts, as well as hands-on demos of some useful tools to determine whether you’re achieving those goals. We tweeted on the #scioimpact and you can check out the event Storify which captures the most useful comments.
We also have set up a collaborative Google Doc with links to useful social media articles; make sure you add your own!
Regular editorials
A reminder of some regular content features that run across the nature.com blogs. Firstly, there is Soapbox Science, our guest blog hosted by the nature.com Communities team. It is intended to provide a forum for the discussion of science topics and features a guest blog every Wednesday at 10am GMT.
Next, the Nature Jobs blog is hosting Windback Wednesdays, a way for you to access careers advice and articles you may have missed the first time around. Every Wednesday, Naturejobs will link to blog posts and other content from their archive that provides helpful information for scientists:
Make sure you follow @NatureJobs on twitter for the latest advice.
Shankar Das in his lab at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, Boston.
Finally, the Indigenus blog, managed by Nature India, every Wednesday run a series called, ‘Away from home.’ Here they feature guest submissions from Indian postdocs who are working in labs abroad. The series will look at their experiences, offering advice for those in similar situations. The latest post features Shankar Das, a postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Pharmacology at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, USA:
The culture shock
Coming from erstwhile Calcutta, it was a culture shock for me. I took time to adjust to western culture. Everything seemed quite different and to me the “opposite of what we had learned” – left hand driving, Fahrenheit and Pounds instead of Celsius and Kilogram, electrical switches that would turn on when pushed up (which is “turn off” in India).
It was definitely an emotional ordeal leaving my country and family behind. However, I was lucky in getting friends who were ready to help me. They became like relatives.
You can join in the online conversation using the #postdochat hashtag.
Cooking up a twitter storm. Or: What not to do about the gender divide in science
This week, SciLogs blogger, Suzi Gage is talking about an article that appeared on the Guardian website about girls and science. Its headline claimed to explain ‘why the gender gap exists and what to do about it’:
Talk of girls using the left, or language side of the brain, being more responsive to colour, and needing to read instructions aloud are ridiculous, but at times the article is sexist (learn science through cooking? Women learn best when science is applied to domestic scenarios?) or actively gives bad advice (learn by rote if you don’t understand? Play with Lego, but only to follow the instructions?!). I sincerely hope there are no parents of young girls reading this who think these are good ideas.
We need to learn, and teach, that our limits are 'the sky', same as for everyone.
Do you have any thoughts on this article? Feel free to join in the growing discussion.