The Science Experiment

Welcome to the Science Experiment, a blog dedicated to the spread of the best science news. Links are collected from a variety of news outlets.

[blogbiology]

ISON is visible in the night sky, but it may not survive

Comet ISON, officially known as C/2012 S1, is heading toward a close encounter with the sun. While it may not survive its journey through our solar system, its presence in the sky is phenomenal. What's the best part? You don't even need a telescope to view it.

My Storify breakdown of comet ISON's journey----what it is and when to see it. 

[blogbiology]

ISON comet could be visible on its journey to the sun

By: Paepin Goff

The Daily Texan 

"At this moment, the comet ISON is barreling through the solar system on its path toward a close encounter with the sun. In the amount of time it takes to read this sentence, the comet will have traveled more than 338 miles."

Full text here

[blogbiology]

Do We Live in the Matrix?

Tests could reveal whether we are part of a giant computer simulation — but the real question is if we want to know...

By Zeeya Merali|Thursday, November 14, 2013

"As fanciful as it sounds, some philosophers have long argued that we’re actually more likely to be artificial intelligences trapped in a fake universe than we are organic minds in the “real” one. "

Full text here

[blogbiology]

How did Mars die?

By 

Rebecca Boyle

MAVEN will try to decipher the history of Mars' atmosphere and how it was lost.

"As of Nov. 14, everything looks good and launch is a 60 percent “go” — at this point, the only hiccup will probably be the weather, which might be cloudy and rainy. The team only has 20 days it can try to launch, and two-hour daily windows open for the first time at 1:28 p.m. eastern time Nov. 18. Timing is so crucial that MAVEN’s team got a special exception to keep working during the 17-day government shutdown last month."

Full text here

[blogbiology]

Multicolored Sun

Image courtesy SDO/NASA

The sun is more than meets the eye, and researchers should know. They've equipped telescopes on Earth and in space with instruments that view the sun in at least ten different wavelengths of light, some of which are represented in this collage compiled by NASA and released January 22. (See more pictures of the sun.)

Full article here via National Geographic http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/01/pictures/130128-best-space-pictures-232-mercury-mars-space-science/?source=hp_dl1_news_space_pics_20130129#close-modal

[blogbiology]

Book Excerpt: George Johnson Explores the Latest Discoveries about Cancer 

Things are rarely as simple as they seem, and what appears to be complex may be no more than ripples on the surface of a fathomless ocean. The mechanics of malignancy—a single cell acquiring mutation upon mutation until it spirals down the rabbit hole of cancer—was neatly described by two scientists, Douglas Hanahan and Robert A. Weinberg, in a sweeping synthesis published in 2000 called “The Hallmarks of Cancer.”

Full text here via Scientific American: http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=book-excerpt-george-johnson-explores-the-latest-discoveries-about-cancer

[blogbiology]

Changing View on Viruses: Not So Small After All

By Carl Zimmer

There was a time not that long ago when it was easy to tell the difference between viruses and the rest of life. Most obviously, viruses were tiny and genetically simple. The influenza virus, for example, measures about 100 nanometers across, and has just 13 genes.

Those two standards, it’s now clear, belong in the trash. Over the past decade, scientists have discovered a vast menagerie of viruses that are far bigger, and which carry enormous arsenals of genes. French researchers are now reporting the discovery of the biggest virus yet. The pandoravirus, as they’ve dubbed it, is 1,000 times bigger than the flu virus by volume and has nearly 200 times as many genes — 2,556 all told.

Link to Article

[blogbiology]

Link to Article

The microbe Escherichia coli has just 4,100 protein-coding genes. Scientists have found, by systematically shutting those genes off one at a time, that only 302 are absolutely essential to its survival.

By CARL ZIMMER

In the pageant of life, we are genetically bloated. The human genome contains around 20,000 protein-coding genes. Many other species get by with a lot less. The gut microbe Escherichia coli, for example, has just 4,100 genes.

Scientists have long wondered how much further life can be stripped down and still remain alive. Is there a genetic essence of life? The answer seems to be that the true essence of life is not some handful of genes, but coexistence.

[blogbiology]

Here is Panicum miliaceum, French Millet, which is a C4 plant. This leaf exhibits Kranz anatomy very well.

  The University of Sydney

[blogbiology]

C3 grass called Thyridolepus mitchelliana. Although the mesophyll is somewhat radiate in places which might confuse you into thinking that this is C4, you can see that the lateral cell count is more than four, making it a C3 grass. Also the bundle sheath cells contain very few chloroplasts

The University of Sydney

[blogbiology]

Abbott Nature Photography

John is Curator of Entomology at the University of Texas at Austin and Kendra is a Professor at St. Edwards University in Austin. John has focused on dragonflies and damselflies throughout much of...

John & Kendra Abbott Nature Photography

[blogbiology]

AUSTIN, Texas – Fish can hide in the open ocean by manipulating how light reflects off their skin, according to researchers at The University of Texas at Austin. The discovery could someday lead to the development of new camouflage materials for use in the ocean, and it overturns 40 years of conventional wisdom about fish camouflage.

By:Daniel Oppenheimer

http://web5.cns.utexas.edu/news/2013/06/fish-camouflage/

[blogbiology]

SALMONELLA Salmonella invades an immune cellImage: NIAID

Sweet ‘n Sour: A Common Sugar May Help Pathogens Conquer the Human Gut

Fucose may help Salmonella defeat the gut’s natural microbiota

By Dina Fine Maron

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=sweet-n-sour-common-sugar 

"When fighting battles in the gut, pathogens that cause food poisoning may have a secret weapon. Natural ubiquitous sugar may help invading bacteria defeat the body’s natural microbiota.

Emerging work looking at the role of one common sugar in the body, fucose (not to be confused with fructose), suggests that it may play an essential handmaiden role for certain harmful bacteria. A new study from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) in Richland, Wash., for example, finds that during Salmonella infection the pathogen may use fucose to fortify itself and find its way through a host’s body."

[blogbiology]

e!Science News

The photo shows a lung cancer cell during cell division – taken with a scanning electron microscope.

Bacterial DNA may integrate into human genome more readily in tumor tissue

Bacterial DNA may integrate into the human genome more readily in tumors than in normal human tissue, according to a new study from the University of Maryland School of Medicine’s Institute for Genome Sciences. Researchers analyzed genomic sequencing data available from the Human Genome Project, the 1,000 Genomes Project and The Cancer Genome Atlas (TCGA). They considered the phenomenon of lateral gene transfer (LGT), the transmission of genetic material between organisms in the absence of sex. Scientists have already shown that bacteria can transfer DNA to the genome of an animal. The researchers at the University of Maryland Institute for Genome Sciences found evidence that lateral gene transfer is possible from bacteria to the cells of the human body, known as human somatic cells. They found the bacterial DNA was more likely to integrate in the genome in tumor samples than in normal, healthy somatic cells. The phenomenon might play a role in cancer and other diseases associated with DNA damage.

The paper was published in PLOS Computational Biology on June 20.

[blogbiology]

Human epithelial cell in mitosis, fluorescently labeled for alpha tubulin, gamma tubulin and DNA

  Mr. Joshua Nordberg and Mr. Christopher English

University of Massachusetts Medical School,

Worcester, MA, USA

Technique: Fluorescence, deconvolution, 100x Objective

[blogbiology]

Harvard University selected XVIVO to develop an animation that would take their cellular biology students on a journey through the microscopic world of a cell, illustrating mechanisms that allow a white blood cell to sense its surroundings and respond to an external stimulus. This award winning piece was the first topic in a series of animations XVIVO is creating for Harvard's educational website BioVisions at Harvard.

http://www.xvivo.net http://multimedia.mcb.harvard.edu/

[blogbiology]

Cells usually exist as a complex population with limited number of shapes. Credit: Zheng Yin, Stephen T.C. Wong, Chris Bakal et al;

"(Phys.org) —A crucial step toward skin cancer may be changes in the genes that control cell shape, report a team of scientists from The Methodist Hospital Research Institute, the Institute of Cancer Research, London, and Harvard Medical School in an upcoming issue of Nature Cell Biology."

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-06-cell-metastasis.html#jCp