Scientists enable rats to ‘talk’ through brain link

Telepathy just around the corner? Researchers have allowed rats thousands of miles apart to communicate with each other by connecting their brains through cables. Scientists wired the brains of two rats together and show that signals from one rat’s brain can help the second rat solve a problem it would otherwise have no clue how to solve.

The wired brain implants allowed sensory and motor signals to be sent from one rat to another, creating the first ever brain-to-brain interface, ‘BBC News’ reported. Scientists then tested whether the rat receiving the signal could correctly interpret the information.The team even linked the brains of rats that were thousands of miles apart as the ultimate test of their system.

Professor Miguel Nicolelis and his team at Duke University Medical Center in North Carolina built on their previous work with brain-machine interfaces. In earlier study, the researchers implanted electrodes in the part of the rat’s brain that processes tactile information and attached these to infrared sensors — effectively allowing the rat to “touch” infrared light.

During the latest study, the scientists wanted to test whether the systems they had developed could be used to establish a new artificial communication channel between animals.

“Until recently we used to record this brain activity and send it to a computer… and the (computer) tells us what the animal is going to do,” Nicolelis said. “So we reasoned, if we can do that with a computer, could another brain do that?” Nicolelis said.Placed in separate cages, the rats were able to solve puzzles with the aid of micro-electrodes one hundredth the diameter of a human hair implanted into their brains.

One rat was able to interpret the other’s actions and intentions even when they couldn’t see or hear each other. The study was published in the journal Scientific Reports.

Source: http://www.indianexpress.com/news/scientists-enable-rats-to-talk-through-brain-link/1081838/0#sthash.ZAPYlreB.dpuf

First space tourist planning historic trip to Mars in 2018

A multi-millionaire investment tycoon and space travel enthusiast is planning a privately funded 501-day round trip mission to Mars in 2018.

Inspiration Mars Foundation, a nonprofit organisation, led by millionaire Dennis Tito – the world’s first space tourist ¿ will hold a news conference next week to announce the mission, for a January 2018 launch.

“This ‘Mission for America’ will generate new knowledge, experience and momentum for the next great era of space exploration,” Inspiration Mars officials wrote in a media advisory.

Some people and media reports speculate that given the speakers’ backgrounds and the lofty goals articulated in the media advisory, Inspiration Mars is planning a manned mission to the Red Planet, ‘SPACE.com’ reported.

According to the NewSpace Journal, Tito’s paper discusses “a crewed free-return Mars mission that would fly by Mars, but not go into orbit around the planet or land on it. This 501-day mission would launch in January 2018, using a modified SpaceX Dragon spacecraft launched on a Falcon Heavy rocket.”

The Journal writes: “According to the paper, existing environmental control and life support system (ECLSS) technologies would allow such a spacecraft to support two people for the mission, although in Spartan condition.”

It added the mission would be privately financed and cheaper than previous estimates for manned Mars efforts, though no overall cost is given.

A 501-day mission would pose potentially serious physiological and psychological issues for astronauts, experts say.

Tito made history in 2001, plunking down a reported USD 20 million for an eight-day trip to the International Space Station (ISS) aboard a Russian Soyuz spacecraft.

Source: http://www.indianexpress.com/news/first-space-tourist-planning-historic-trip-to-mars-in-2018/1078136/

Milky Way grew by ‘cannibalising’ other smaller galaxies

Astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have uncovered tantalising evidence for the possible existence of a shell of stars that are a relic of the Milky Way’s past cannibalism of other galaxies.

Peering deep into the vast stellar halo that envelops our Milky Way galaxy, a team of astronomers led by Alis Deason, from UC Santa Cruz, used Hubble observations to precisely measure, for the first time ever, the sideways motions of a small sample of stars located far from the galaxy’s center.

Their unusual lateral motion is circumstantial evidence that the stars may be the remnants of a shredded galaxy that was gravitationally ripped apart by the Milky Way billions of years ago. These stars support the idea that the Milky Way grew through the accretion of smaller galaxies.

“Hubble’s unique capabilities are allowing astronomers to uncover clues to the galaxy’s remote past,” said coauthor Roeland van der Marel of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore.

“The more distant regions of the galaxy have evolved more slowly than the inner sections. Objects in the outer regions still bear the signatures of events that happened long ago,” Marel said in a statement.

They also offer a new opportunity for measuring the “hidden” mass of our galaxy, which is in the form of dark matter — an invisible form of matter that does not emit or reflect radiation.

“Our ability now to measure the motions of these stars opens up a whole new territory we haven’t explored yet,” Deason said.

Deason and her team plucked the outer halo stars out of seven years’ worth of archival Hubble telescope observations of our neighbouring Andromeda galaxy.

In those observations, Hubble peered through the Milky Way’s halo to study the Andromeda stars, which are more than 20 times farther away.

The Milky Way’s halo stars were in the foreground and considered as clutter for the study of Andromeda. But to Deason’s study they were pure gold.

The observations offered a unique opportunity to look at the motion of Milky Way halo stars.

“We knew these stars were there, because for the Andromeda study we had to separate the stars in Andromeda from the stars in the Milky Way,” said co-author Puragra Guhathakurta, professor of astronomy and astrophysics at UC Santa Cruz.

Researchers said finding the stars was meticulous work. Each Hubble image contained more than 100,000 stars.

“We had to somehow find those few stars that actually belonged to the Milky Way halo. It was like finding needles in a haystack,” Marel said.

Source: http://www.indianexpress.com/news/milky-way-grew-by-cannibalising-other-smaller-galaxies/1078215/0

Scientists discover water on Moon’s oldest rocks

Researchers have detected traces of water within the crystalline structure of one of the oldest rocks obtained from the Apollo missions on Moon. The new findings indicate that the early Moon was wet and that water there was not substantially lost during the Moon’s formation.

The lunar highlands are thought to represent the original crust, crystallised from a magma ocean on a mostly molten early Moon, according to a University of Michigan study.Researchers used Infrared spectroscopy to analyse the water content in grain of plagioclase feldspar from lunar anorthosites – highland rocks composed of more than 90 per cent plagioclase. The bright-coloured highlands rocks are thought to have formed early in the Moon’s history when plagioclase crystallised from a magma ocean and floated to the surface. The infrared spectroscopy work detected about 6 parts per million of water in the lunar anorthosites. “The surprise discovery of this work is that in lunar rocks, even in nominally water-free minerals such as plagioclase feldspar, the water content can be detected.

“It’s not ‘liquid’ water that was measured during these studies but hydroxyl groups distributed within the mineral grain,” researcher Youxue Zhang said in a statement.

“We are able to detect those hydroxyl groups in the crystalline structure of the Apollo samples,” said study’s first author Hejiu Hui from the University of Notre Dame.

The hydroxyl groups the team detected are evidence that the lunar interior contained significant water during the Moon’s early molten state, before the crust solidified, and may have played a key role in the development of lunar basalts.The results also contradict the predominant lunar formation theory that the Moon was formed from debris generated during a giant impact between Earth and another planetary body, approximately the size of Mars.”Because these are some of the oldest rocks from the Moon, the water is inferred to have been in the Moon when it formed,” Zhang said.”That is somewhat difficult to explain with the current popular moon-formation model, in which the Moon formed by collecting the hot ejecta as the result of a super-giant impact of a martian-size body with the proto-Earth.

“Under that model, the hot ejecta should have been degassed almost completely, eliminating all water,” Zhang said.

Source: http://www.indianexpress.com/news/scientists-discover-water-on-moons-oldest-rocks/1075845/0

Meteor shower hits Russia, 500 injured by blasts

A meteor streaked across the sky above Russia’s Ural Mountains today morning, causing sharp explosions and injuring more than 400 people, many of them hurt by broken glass. “There was panic. People had no idea what was happening. Everyone was going around to people’s houses to check if they were OK,” said Sergey Hametov, a resident of Chelyabinsk, about 1500 kilometers east of Moscow, the biggest city in the affected region.

“We saw a big burst of light then went outside to see what it was and we heard a really loud thundering sound,” he said. Fragments of the meteor fell in a thinly populated area of the Chelyabinsk region, the Emergency Ministry said in a statement. Interior Ministry spokesman Vadim Kolesnikov said more than 400 people had sought medical treatment after the blasts, and at least three had been hospitalized in serious condition.

Many of the injuries were from glass broken by the explosions. Kolsenikov also said about 600 square meters of a roof at a zinc factory had collapsed. Reports conflicted on what exactly happened in the clear skies. A spokeswoman for the Emergency Ministry, Irina Rossius, told The Associated Press that there was a meteor shower, but another ministry spokeswoman, Elena Smirnikh, was quoted by the Interfax news agency as saying it was a single meteorite.

Amateur video broadcast on Russian television showed an object speeding across the sky about 9:20 am local time (0320 GMT), leaving a thick white contrail and an intense flash. Russian news reports noted that the meteor hit less than a day before the asteroid 2012 DA14 is to make the closest recorded pass of an asteroid — about 28,000 kilometers. There was no immediate demonstrable connection.

Source: http://www.indianexpress.com/news/meteor-shower-hits-russia-500-injured-by-blasts/1074796/

Ice ages wiped out Australian plant diversity: study

Part of Australia’s rich plant diversity was wiped out by the ice ages, proving that extinction, instead of evolution, influences biodiversity, scientists say. Researchers led by the University of Melbourne and University of Tasmania found that plant diversity in South East Australia was as rich as some of the most diverse places in the world, and that most of these species went extinct during the ice ages, probably about one million years ago.

Dr Sniderman of the University of Melbourne’s School of Earth Sciences said the findings show extinction is just as important to diversity of organisms as evolution. “Traditionally scientists believed some places have more species than others because species evolved more rapidly in these places. We have overthrown this theory, which emphasises evolution, by showing that extinction may be more important,” he said.

The study compared two regions of Southern Australia and South Africa. “South-western Australia has a huge diversity of tough-leaved shrubs and trees such as eucalyptus, Banksia, Grevilleas and Acacias, making it one of the most biodiverse places on earth,” Sniderman said in a statement. “The southern tip of South Africa is even richer, with astonishing numbers of similar kinds of plants like proteas and ericas,” he said.

For the study, researchers analysed plant fossils that accumulated in an ancient lake in South Eastern Australia. They found the region had at least as many tough-leaved plants 1.5 million years ago as Western Australia and South Africa do today.

“As Australia dried out over the past several million years, rainforest plants largely disappeared from most of the continent,” said Sniderman. “It has been thought that this drying trend allowed Australia’s characteristic tough-leaved plants to expand and became more diverse. We have shown that the climate variability of the ice ages not only drove rainforest plants to extinction but also a remarkable number of tough-leaved, shrubby plants,” he said.

Dr Greg Jordan of the School of Plant Sciences at the University of Tasmania said not only has the study overturned current thought on the role of extinction in plant diversity, it has implications for understanding how Australian plant diversity will deal with current and future climate change.

“The species that went extinct in SE Australia during the ice ages were likely to be the ones most sensitive to rapid climate change, meaning that the species that now grow in eastern Australia may be more capable of tolerating rapid changes than predicted by current science,” he said.

The study was published in the journal National Academy of Sciences.

Source:http://www.indianexpress.com/news/ice-ages-wiped-out-australian-plant-diversity-study/1073604/0

Asteroid to make close pass by Earth on Feb. 15; no impact seen

A small asteroid will pass closer to Earth next week than the TV satellites that ring the planet, but there is no chance of an impact, NASA said Thursday.

The celestial visitor, known as 2012 DA14, was discovered last year by a group of amateur astronomers in Spain. The asteroid is about the size of an Olympic swimming pool at 150 feet (46 m) in diameter and is projected to come as close as 17,100 miles (27,520 km) from Earth during its Feb. 15 approach.

That would make it the closest encounter since scientists began routinely monitoring asteroids about 15 years ago.

Television, weather and communications satellites fly about 500 miles (800 km) higher. The moon is 14 times farther away.

Even so, “no Earth impact is possible,” astronomer Donald Yeomans, with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., told reporters during a conference call.

The time of the asteroid’s closest approach will be 2:24 p.m. EST (1924 GMT), daylight in the United States, but dark in Eastern Europe, Asia and Australia where professional and amateur astronomers will be standing by with telescopes and binoculars to catch a view.

DA14 will soar through the sky at about 8 miles (13 km) per second. At that speed, an object of similar size on a collision course with Earth would strike with the force of about 2.4 million tons of dynamite. The last time that happened was in 1908 when an asteroid or comet exploded over Siberia, leveling 80 million trees over 830 square miles (2,150 sq km).

“Although they wouldn’t (cause) a global catastrophe if they impact the Earth, they still do a lot of regional destruction,” said Lindley Johnson, who oversees the Near-Earth Object Observations Program at NASA headquarters in Washington DC.

NASA has been on a mission to find and track all near-Earth objects that are .62 miles (1 km) in diameter or larger. The effort is intended to give scientists and engineers as much time as possible to learn if an asteroid or comet is on a collision course with Earth, in hopes sending up a spacecraft or taking other measures to avert catastrophe.

About 66 million years ago, a 6-mile diameter (10 km) object smashed into what is now the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico leading to the demise of the dinosaurs as well as most plant and animal life on Earth.

The planet is regularly pelted with objects from space, adding up to about 100 tons of material per day, Yeomans said.

“Basketball-sized objects come in daily. Volkswagen-sized objects come in every couple of weeks. As you get to larger and larger sizes the number of objects out there is less and less, so the frequency of hits goes down,” Yeomans said.

Something the size of DA14 can be expected to strike Earth about every 1,200 years.

“For objects of this size, this is the closest predicted encounter that we’re aware of,” Yeomans said.

Source:http://www.indianexpress.com/news/asteroid-to-make-close-pass-by-earth-on-feb.-15–no-impact-seen/1071390/0

Planets that could support life are ‘in our own backyard’

Earth-like planets could be just a stone’s throw from our Milky Way galaxy and may even harbour life more advanced than on Earth, astronomers believe.

Six per cent of red dwarf stars have habitable, Earth-sized planets, astronomers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA), who used publicly available data from NASA’s Kepler space telescope, have found.

Since red dwarfs are the most common stars in our galaxy, the closest Earth-like planet could be just 13 light-years away, researchers said.

“We thought we would have to search vast distances to find an Earth-like planet. Now we realise another Earth is probably in our own backyard, waiting to be spotted,” said Harvard astronomer and lead researcher Courtney Dressing.

Red dwarf stars are smaller, cooler, and fainter than our Sun. An average red dwarf is only one-third as large and one-thousandth as bright as the Sun. From Earth, no red dwarf is visible to the naked eye.

Despite their dimness, these stars are good places to look for Earth-like planets. Red dwarfs make up three out of every four stars in our galaxy for a total of at least 75 billion.

The signal of a transiting planet is larger since the star itself is smaller, so an Earth-sized world blocks more of the star’s disk. And since a planet has to orbit a cool star closer in order to be in the habitable zone, it’s more likely to transit from our point of view.

Dressing culled the Kepler catalogue of 158,000 target stars to identify all the red dwarfs. She then re-analysed those stars to calculate more accurate sizes and temperatures. She found that almost all of those stars were smaller and cooler than previously thought.

Since the size of a transiting planet is determined relative to the star size, based on how much of the star’s disk the planet covers, shrinking the star shrinks the planet. And a cooler star will have a tighter habitable zone.

Dressing identified 95 planetary candidates orbiting red dwarf stars. This implied that at least 60 per cent of such stars have planets smaller than Neptune. However, most weren’t quite the right size or temperature to be considered truly Earth-like.

Three planetary candidates were both warm and approximately Earth-sized. Statistically, this means that six per cent of all red dwarf stars should have an Earth-like planet.

“We now know the rate of occurrence of habitable planets around the most common stars in our galaxy,” said co-author David Charbonneau.

“That rate implies that it will be significantly easier to search for life beyond the solar system than we previously thought,” Charbonneau said in a statement.

Our Sun is surrounded by a swarm of red dwarf stars. About 75 per cent of the closest stars are red dwarfs. Since 6 per cent of those should host habitable planets, the closest Earth-like world is likely to be just 13 light-years away.

The study was published in The Astrophysical Journal.

Source: http://www.indianexpress.com/news/planets-that-could-support-life-are-in-our-own-backyard/1070855/0

Working less, playing more key ‘to save planet’: Study

Americans should work less, play more to save the planet, a new study has suggested.

According to a Washington think tank, this is a basic formula to cut down on global warming.

The Center for Economic and Policy Research’s new report said that the shift from a U.S. work model to a more “European” one, which includes shorter work weeks and more vacation time, could cut as much as half of the expected global temperature rise by 2100.

The study claims that scaling back on work hours could bring down greenhouse gases, Fox News reports.

Rosnick, who wrote the study, said that assuming that 40-to-60 percent of potential global warming is already locked in, about one-quarter to one-half of the warming that is not already locked in could be cut by scaling back hours.

The report outlined how worldwide energy patterns could be dependent on which model developing countries choose to copy in the coming years.

If they choose to follow the U.S. model, they would apparently consume 30 percent more energy than they do now, the report added.

Source: http://www.indianexpress.com/news/working-less-playing-more-key-to-save-planet-study/1070228/

Plants are altruistic too

Dogs caring for orphaned kittens or chimps sharing food are all examples of animal altruism. Now, a study led by the University of Colorado Boulder suggests some plants are altruistic too.

The researchers looked at corn, in which each fertilized seed contained two “siblings” — an embryo and a corresponding bit of tissue known as endosperm that feeds the embryo as the seed grows, CU-Boulder Professor Pamela Diggle said.

They compared the growth and behavior of the embryos and endosperm in seeds sharing the same mother and father with the growth and behavior of embryos and endosperm that had genetically different parents.

“The results indicated embryos with the same mother and father as the endosperm in their seed weighed significantly more than embryos with the same mother but a different father,” Diggle, a faculty member in CU-Boulder’s ecology and evolutionary biology department said.

“We found that endosperm that does not share the same father as the embryo does not hand over as much food — it appears to be acting less cooperatively,” she said.

Diggle said that it is fairly clear from previous research that plants can preferentially withhold nutrients from inferior offspring when resources are limited.

“One of the most fundamental laws of nature is that if you are going to be an altruist, give it up to your closest relatives,” co author Professor William “Ned” Friedman, a professor at Harvard University who helped conduct research on the project while a faculty member at CU-Boulder said.

“Altruism only evolves if the benefactor is a close relative of the beneficiary. When the endosperm gives all of its food to the embryo and then dies, it doesn’t get more altruistic than that,” he added.

The team took advantage of an extremely rare phenomenon in plants called “hetero-fertilization,” in which two different fathers sire individual corn kernels, Diggle, currently a visiting professor at Harvard said.

The manipulation of corn plant genes that has been going on for millennia — resulting in the production of multicolored “Indian corn” cobs of various colors like red, purple, blue and yellow — helped the researchers in assessing the parentage of the kernels, she said.

The findings are published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Source: http://www.indianexpress.com/news/plants-are-altruistic-too/1068365/0