Science & Light

Subject: ARTIFICIAL LIFE LIKELY IN 3 TO 10 YEARS
Date: Mon, August 20, 2007 10:27 pm

ARTIFICIAL LIFE LIKELY IN 3 TO 10 YEARS
By Seth Borenstein
Associated Press
August 19, 2007  
                  
http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=D8R4H0Q00&show_article=1

WASHINGTON - Around the world, a handful of scientists are trying to create
life from scratch and they’re getting closer.

Experts expect an announcement within three to 10 years from someone in the
now little-known field of “wet artificial life.”

“It’s going to be a big deal and everybody’s going to know about it,” said
Mark Bedau, chief operating officer of ProtoLife of Venice, Italy, one of
those in the race. “We’re talking about a technology that could change our
world in pretty fundamental ways — in fact, in ways that are impossible to
predict.”

That first cell of synthetic life — made from the basic chemicals in DNA –
may not seem like much to non-scientists. For one thing, you’ll have to look
in a microscope to see it.

“Creating protocells has the potential to shed new light on our place in the
universe,” Bedau said. “This will remove one of the few fundamental
mysteries about creation in the universe and our role.”

And several scientists believe man-made life forms will one day offer the
potential for solving a variety of problems, from fighting diseases to
locking up greenhouse gases to eating toxic waste.

Bedau figures there are three major hurdles to creating synthetic life:

- A container, or membrane, for the cell to keep bad molecules out, allow
good ones, and the ability to multiply.

- A genetic system that controls the functions of the cell, enabling it to
reproduce and mutate in response to environmental changes.

- A metabolism that extracts raw materials from the environment as food and
then changes it into energy.

One of the leaders in the field, Jack Szostak at Harvard Medical School,
predicts that within the next six months, scientists will report evidence
that the first step — creating a cell membrane — is “not a big problem.”
Scientists are using fatty acids in that effort.

Szostak is also optimistic about the next step — getting nucleotides, the
building blocks of DNA, to form a working genetic system.

His idea is that once the container is made, if scientists add nucleotides
in the right proportions, then Darwinian evolution could simply take over.

“We aren’t smart enough to design things, we just let evolution do the hard
work and then we figure out what happened,” Szostak said.

In Gainesville, Fla., Steve Benner, a biological chemist at the Foundation
for Applied Molecular Evolution is attacking that problem by going outside
of natural genetics. Normal DNA consists of four bases — adenine, cytosine,
guanine and thymine (known as A,C,G,T) — molecules that spell out the
genetic code in pairs. Benner is trying to add eight new bases to the
genetic alphabet.

Bedau said there are legitimate worries about creating life that could “run
amok,” but there are ways of addressing it, and it will be a very long time
before that is a problem.

“When these things are created, they’re going to be so weak, it’ll be a huge
achievement if you can keep them alive for an hour in the lab,” he said.
“But them getting out and taking over, never in our imagination could this
happen.”

Subject: SCIENTISTS PUZZLE OVER ENORMOUS VOID
Date: Mon, August 27, 2007 10:44 am

“…a huge hole devoid of nearly all matter roughly 6-10 billion light-years from Earth,” 

 

SCIENTISTS PUZZLE OVER ENORMOUS VOID
By Roger Highfield
The Telegraph
August 24, 2007

See the original article here:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2007/08/24/scihole124
.xml

Astronomers are scratching their heads over a puzzling non-discovery, an
enormous hole in the universe measuring nearly a billion light-years across.

There really is nothing to the void, which is empty of both normal matter
such as stars, galaxies, and gas, and the mysterious, unseen “dark matter”
that astronomers detect by its gravitational pull.

While earlier studies have shown holes in the large-scale fabric of the
cosmos, this new discovery dwarfs them all.

“Not only has no one ever found a void this big, but we never even expected
to find one this size,” said Lawrence Rudnick of the University of
Minnesota.

“This is 1,000 times the volume of what we sort of expected to see in terms
of a typical void,” he said.

“It’s not clear that we have the right word yet … This is too much of a
surprise.”

Rudnick, along with Shea Brown and Liliya Williams, also of the University
of Minnesota, reported their findings in a paper accepted for publication in
the Astrophysical Journal.

Astronomers have known for years that, on large scales, the universe has
voids largely empty of matter.

However, most of these voids are much smaller than the new one. “What we’ve
found is not normal,” Williams said.

The astronomers drew their conclusion by studying data from the VLA Sky
Survey, a project that imaged the entire sky visible to the Very Large Array
(VLA) radio telescope, part of the National Science Foundation’s National
Radio Astronomy Observatory.

Their careful study of the data revealed a remarkable drop in the number of
galaxies in a region of sky in the constellation Eridanus.

“We already knew there was something different about this spot in the sky,”
Rudnick said.

The region had been dubbed the “WMAP Cold Spot,” because it stood out in a
map of the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation made by the Wilkinson
Microwave Anisotopy Probe (WMAP) satellite, launched by Nasa in 2001.

The microwave background, faint radio waves that are the remnant radiation
from the Big Bang, is the earliest “baby picture” available of the universe
and the WMAP satellite measured temperature differences that are only
millionths of a degree.

The cold region in Eridanus was discovered in 2004.

Astronomers wondered if the chilly region was intrinsic to the microwave
background, and thus indicated some structure in the infant cosmos, or
whether it could be caused by something more nearby through which the
background radiation had to pass on its way to Earth.

Finding the dearth of galaxies in that region by studying data resolved that
question.

“Although our surprising results need independent confirmation, the slightly
colder temperature of the CMB in this region appears to be caused by a huge
hole devoid of nearly all matter roughly 6-10 billion light-years from
Earth,” Rudnick said.

The lack of matter causes a cooler temperature in the Big Bang’s remnant
radiation seen from Earth because particles of light radiation — photons –
lose a small amount of energy as they travel through such a region,
appearing cooler.

The hole could also be a statistical freak of nature, but that’s probably
less likely than a giant void, said James Condon, an astronomer at the
National Radio Astronomy Observatory.

“It looks like something to be taken seriously,” added Brent Tully, a
University of Hawaii astronomer.

Subject: ‘WE HAVE BROKEN SPEED OF LIGHT’
Date: Wed, August 22, 2007 10:27 pm

‘WE HAVE BROKEN SPEED OF LIGHT’
By Nic Fleming
The Telegraph
August 16, 2007

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml?xml=/earth/2007/08/16/scispeed11
6.xml

A pair of German physicists claim to have broken the speed of light — an
achievement that would undermine our entire understanding of space and time.

According to Einstein’s special theory of relativity, it would require an
infinite amount of energy to propel an object at more than 186,000 miles per
second.

However, Dr Gunter Nimtz and Dr Alfons Stahlhofen, of the University of
Koblenz, say they may have breached a key tenet of that theory.

The pair say they have conducted an experiment in which microwave photons –
energetic packets of light — travelled “instantaneously” between a pair of
prisms that had been moved up to 3ft apart.

Being able to travel faster than the speed of light would lead to a wide
variety of bizarre consequences.

For instance, an astronaut moving faster than it would theoretically arrive
at a destination before leaving.

The scientists were investigating a phenomenon called quantum tunnelling,
which allows sub-atomic particles to break apparently unbreakable laws.

Dr Nimtz told New Scientist magazine: “For the time being, this is the only
violation of special relativity that I know of.”

Subject: Total Lunar Eclipse–Full Coverage
From: SpaceWeather.com <swlist@spaceweather.com>
Date: Mon, August 27, 2007 7:26 am

Space Weather News for Aug. 27, 2007
http://spaceweather.com

LUNAR ECLIPSE–FULL COVERAGE: On Tuesday, Aug. 28th, the full Moon will enter Earth’s shadow for a 90-minute total eclipse. People on the Pacific side of Earth will have the best view as the Moon turns a dreamy shade of sunset red. Favored areas include the Americas (especially western North America), Hawaii, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, east Asia and Antarctica. The show begins Tuesday morning around 2 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time (0900 UT).

Although the dominant color of a lunar eclipse is red, sometimes another hue appears–turquoise. Earth’s shadow has a turquoise-colored fringe caused by our planet’s ozone layer, and this can be seen for a few beautiful moments at the onset of totality. Today’s edition of spaceweather.com shows you what the turquoise fringe looks like and explains how to catch it.

Also, amateur astronomers are encouraged to assist NASA during the eclipse by scanning the darkened Moon for explosions caused by Helion meteoroid impacts. Typical flashes reach 6th magnitude–easy targets for mid-sized backyard telescopes equipped with digital video cameras. The eclipse is a great time to look for these “lunar meteors.” Observing tips and more information are available at http://spaceweather.com.

Full coverage of the eclipse, including maps, animations, timetables and links to live webcasts, begins now on http://spaceweather.com .

If you would like to subscribe, click here: http://spaceweather.com/services/