Scientists spot ‘alien’ invaders in Milky Way

Scientists have spotted ‘alien’ invaders in Milky Way, comprising as many as a quarter of the star clusters in our galaxy, many more than previously thought, says a new study.

The report also suggests that there may be as many as six dwarf galaxies yet to be discovered within the Milky Way, besides the two that were previously found.

“Some of the stars and star clusters you see when you look into space at night are aliens from another galaxy, just not the green-skinned type you find in a Hollywood movie,” says Terry Bridges, astronomer at Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada.

“These ‘alien’ star clusters (are ones) that have made their way into our galaxy over the last few billion years,” adds Bridges.

Previously, astronomers had suspected that some star clusters, each of which contains between 100,000 and a million stars, were foreign to our galaxy, but it was difficult to identify which ones.

Using mostly Hubble Space Telescope data, Bridges and Duncan Forbes, co-author, from Swinburne University of Technology, Australia, examined old star clusters within the Milky Way galaxy.

From the research they compiled the largest ever high-quality database to record the age and chemical properties of each of these clusters.

“We looked at all the data we could find. The best data are from the Hubble Telescope because it has the best imaging,” Bridges says. “We looked at the ages and the amounts of heavy elements in these clusters, which can be measured from their stars.”

The researchers’ work also suggests that the Milky Way may have swallowed up more dwarf galaxies than was previously thought, said a Queen’s varsity release.

They found that many of the foreign clusters originally existed within dwarf galaxies — ‘mini’ galaxies of up to 100 million stars that sit within our larger Milky Way.

The study is slated for publication in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

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Online social networks can help in disasters too

Online social networking sites could solve many problems plaguing information dissemination and communications when disaster strikes, according to a US report


In the wake of natural disasters such as the Haiti earthquake and terrorist activity, online services became increasingly prominent as useful tools to get the news out faster than traditional media, to provide timely information sources, etc.

But, are social networking tools such as Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and ad hoc sites set up in the wake of a major event really useful tools or are they simply riding a publicity wave?

According to Connie White of the Institute for Emergency Preparedness at Jacksonville State University in Alabama and colleagues there and at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, Newark, online social networks permit the establishment of global relationships that are domain related or can be based on some need shared by the participants.

They have investigated whether or not the social network paradigm can be used to enable individuals and organisations to collaborate in mutually beneficial ways, in all stages of emergency management: mitigation, preparedness, response and recovery.

There are already dozens of groups on two of the most popular social networking sites, Facebook and LinkedIn, that are allowing individuals involved in various aspects of emergency awareness and preparedness to connect, discuss, and share knowledge in specific fields, said a university release.

For instance, an emergency online network would need to be able to share documents and digital resources, allow members to communicate efficiently, provide a way to find specific experts in the field and beyond, share photos and video for status reports and locating missing persons, as well as allow the news media to be kept informed.

These findings were published in a recent issue of the International Journal of Emergency Management.

NASA ready to launch satellite to explore sun

NASA planned to launch a solar probe Wednesday to help unlock more secrets about the sun, whose massive storms affect earth’s weather and can pose danger to earth dwellers.

The Solar Dynamic Observatory (SDO) is the “crown jewel” of a fleet of NASA satellites planned to collect more details about what’s going on underneath and above the surface of the sun, said Michael Luther, a NASA official who is overseeing the programme, in a webcast briefing.

Called the Living With a Star programme, scientists said they hope to better predict the sun’s periodic release of billions of tons of matter that can endanger human life and health, corrode oil pipelines, disrupt communications and cause power surges.

After an earlier launch was delayed due to bad weather, a NASA meteorologist said high winds could also threaten Wednesday’s launch.

From Earth’s orbit, the SDO will collect data over five years and download 1.5 terabytes every day – the equivalent of 500,000 songs onto an iPod, said Elizabeth Citrin, project manager.

A special receiving centre on earth will manage the data.

“This is way cool,” said Madhulika Guhathakurta, lead programme scientist for Living With a Star, holding up an iPhone.

While various elements of the sun have been studied over the years, the SDO will be the first to present a “comprehensive view” of all the elements, she said.

“This is the whole picture,” she said. It will show “what happens on the sun and what happens to us here.”

Shuttle Endeavour blasts off

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Obama proposing NASA cuts

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Anthony Atala on growing organs

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India building antenna for satellite phone services National/Technology

India is building a dedicated high-beam, antenna to provide satellite phone services, a senior space scientist said Monday.

“We are in the process of building a high-beam antenna to be deployed on board a satellite for providing satellite phone (satphone) services using S-band transponder. We can connect handheld devices when it is launched in a year or so,” former Indian space agency chairman G. Madhavan Nair told reporters here.

The state-run Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has already designed the huge antenna that will be mounted on the spacecraft for dedicated satphone services.

“Currently, some foreign satellites are being used for satphone services in the country. Development work is going on to synthesize the antenna. It will be deployed in one of the communication satellites with S-band transponder,” Nair said on the margins of a summit on the Indian semiconductor industry.

Telecom revolution in the past decade has led to a phenomenal growth of mobile services in India using GPRS (general packet radio service) CDMA (code division multiple access) technologies.

As the world’s fastest growing telecom market, India already has about 500 million mobile users for a billion-plus population.

INMARSAT (International Maritime Satellite Organisation) operates a constellation of geo-stationary satellites designed to extend phone, fax and data communications the world over through handheld devices.

Asked about the weaponization of space by countries like China, which had developed an anti-satellite weapon, Nair said space-based assets built by India were used for only national development.

“Though we have to ensure the security of our satellites, our declared policy is to use the space assets for peaceful purposes. I don’t thing that the government has changed its policy,” Nair said after inaugurating the two-day semicon summit, organised by the Indian Semiconductor Association (ISA).

NASA’s new mission to unlock secret of solar storms

NASA is sending a new mission in the space to observe the surface of the sun so as to unlock the secret of solar storms and other chaotic activities.

The Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), scheduled to be launched Feb 9, will spend five years in the space to observe how sunlight is generated. It will try to trace causes of extreme solar activities, such as sun spots, solar winds and flares.

By understanding how such solar phenomena are created, they hope to be able to produce reliable forecasts of “space weather” and provide advance warnings of any threat, The Sunday Times reported.

Orbiting the earth at a distance of 22,300 miles, the observatory will measure fluctuations in the sun’s ultraviolet output, map magnetic fields and photograph its surface.

The “giant microscope” mission, will capture for the first time every nuance of the sun’s exterior. The images relayed to earth will be 10 times clearer than high-definition television, experts claims.

“It is Nasa’s first weather mission and it aims to characterise everything on the sun that can impact on the earth and near earth, said Barbara Thompson, project scientist.

“We know things happen on the sun which affect spacecraft, communications and radio signals. If we can understand the underlying causes of what is happening then we can turn this information into forecasts,” Thomson said.

NASA estimates that the SDO will transmit as much as 50 times more scientific data than any other mission in the space agency’s history. The agency has set up a pair of dedicated radio antennae near Las Cruces, New Mexico to process the data.

The UK-based Science and Technology Facilities Council is supplying some of the equipment for the observatory.

Understanding the impact of the sun’s magnetic fields was key to the mission, Professor Richard Harrison of the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire said.

“The idea is to image different layers of the sun’s atmosphere all the way down to the surface and measure magnetic fields,” he said.

“The bottom line is that you are trying to understand how this atmosphere works. We can already see phenomena like the flares. The question is how does the magnetic field form to allow this sort of thing to happen.”

Obama may abandon NASA’s moon mission plan

NASA’s plan to send another mission to the moon by 2020 may take a U-turn as US President Barack Obama is expected to propose the closure of the space agency’s programme in his new budget to be presented before the Congress Monday.

With the release of President Obama’s budget request, NASA will finally get the new marching orders, and there won’t be anything in there about flying to the moon, The Washington Post reported.

The US administration has planed to kill the Constellation programme of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) that called for the re-launch of a space shuttle to the moon by 2020. The budget is a death knell for the Ares 1 rocket, NASA’s planned successor to the space shuttle.

According to an official, Obama’s budget will call for spending $6 billion over five years to develop a commercial spacecraft that could ferry astronauts to low earth orbit.

“The President is committed to a robust 21st century space program, and his budget will reflect that dedication to NASA. NASA is vital not only to spaceflight, but also for critical scientific and technological advancements,” White House spokesman Nick Shapiro said Sunday.

“The expertise at NASA is essential to developing innovative new opportunities, industries, and jobs. The President’s budget will take steps in that direction,” he was quoted as saying.

The Obama administration believes that new funding for the commercial programme would create up to 1,700 jobs, which could help offset the expected loss of 7,000 jobs in Florida when the space shuttle is retired next year.

Could waste be a source of our energy requirements?

Scientists are trying to find answers to one of the most challenging problems existing today — generating energy without worsening climate change or harming food output.

Researchers are investigating biofuels generated from waste, which is perceived by many as the ‘green alternative’ to using fossil fuels.

Biofuels seem to be the perfect solution because they are not net producers of harmful by-products, but they can tempt farmers into growing energy crops at the cost of badly-needed food, particularly in poorer countries.

Looking for an answer to the ‘food-fuel conflict’ is at the heart of research led by Komang Ralebitso-Senior, who teaches molecular biology at Teesside University.

Her team of six researchers based at the TU Institute is looking at whether biofuel production could use waste materials, viz domestic refuse and sewage sludge, instead of energy crops to generate biogas.

The biogas could then be used directly or to produce alternative energy sources such as electricity.

“We’re carrying out laboratory investigations to optimise the production of biogas through a process known as anaerobic (without oxygen) digestion. This uses naturally- occurring micro-organisms to break down waste in closed vessels,” she says.

Ralebitso-Senior believes that, although anaerobic digestion is an established process already being used by some waste-to-energy companies, its full potential has not yet been realised in solving many of the problems associated with growing biofuel crops.

“We can produce most biofuels using crops — but the big issue is whether the land could be used for food instead. The loss of agricultural crops is a major concern.

“We call this the food-fuel conflict as the economic returns of growing crops for fuel are often higher and with more farmers choosing this option, foodstuffs inevitably become more expensive.”

“Using anaerobic digestion is an alternative method which has considerable potential, but we still do not understand a lot about how it works,” she says,” according to a university release.

“That is what we are investigating in the laboratory, seeking ways in which we can optimise and, therefore, exploit the process effectively,” she adds.

Researchers crack key HIV riddle after decade

Researchers have cracked a key riddle that has foxed scientists for decades, potentially opening the way to better treatment of HIV, says a new study.

Imperial College London and Harvard University researchers have grown a crystal that reveals the structure of an enzyme called integrase, which is found in retroviruses like HIV.

When HIV infects someone, it uses integrase to paste a copy of its genetic information into their DNA.

Prior to the new study, funded by the Medical Research Council and the US National Institutes of Health, many researchers had tried and failed to work out the 3-D structure of integrase bound to viral DNA.

New antiretroviral drugs for HIV work by blocking integrase, but scientists did not understand exactly how these drugs were working or how to improve them.

Researchers can only determine the structure of this kind of molecular machinery by obtaining high quality crystals.

For the new study, researchers grew a crystal using a version of integrase borrowed from a little-known retrovirus called Prototype Foamy Virus (PFV). Based on their knowledge of PFV integrase and its function, they were confident that it was very similar to its HIV counterpart.

Over the course of four years, the researchers carried out over 40,000 trials, out of which they were able to grow just seven kinds of crystals. Only one of these was of sufficient quality to allow determination of the 3-D structure.

Peter Cherepanov, who led the study at the Department of Medicine at Imperial College, said: “It is a truly amazing story. When we started out, we knew that the project was very difficult, and that many tricks had already been tried and given up by others long ago.”

“Therefore, we went back to square one and started by looking for a better model of HIV integrase, which could be more amenable for crystallisation,” said Cherepanov, according to an Imperial College release.

“Despite initially painstakingly slow progress and very many failed attempts, we did not give up and our effort was finally rewarded,” he added.

The study was published in Nature.

Healthy adults can manage with less sleep with age

Healthy adults can manage with reduced sleep as they age and also feel less drowsy than their younger counterparts rebutting the concept that it’s normal for older people to feel drowsy during the day, a study has revealed.

Results show that during eight hours in bed, total sleep time decreased significantly and progressively with age.

Older adults slept about 20 minutes less than middle-aged adults, who slept 23 minutes less than young adults.

“Our findings reaffirm the theory that it is not normal for older people to be sleepy during the daytime,” said principal investigator Derk-Jan Dijk, professor of sleep and physiology at the University of Surrey, Britain.

“Whether you are young or old, if you are sleepy during the day you either don’t get enough sleep or you may suffer from a sleep disorder,” added Dijk.

The number of awakenings and the amount of time spent awake after initial sleep onset increased significantly with age, and the amount of time spent in deep, slow-wave sleep decreased across age groups.

Yet even with these decreases in sleep time, intensity and continuity, older adults displayed less subjective and objective daytime sleep propensity than younger adults.

Furthermore, two additional nights involving experimental disruption of slow-wave sleep led to a similar response in all age groups.

Daytime sleep propensity increased, and slow-wave sleep rebounded during a night of recovery sleep, said a Surrey release.

According to the study authors, this suggests that the lack of increased daytime sleepiness in the presence of an age-related deterioration in sleep quality cannot be attributed to unresponsiveness to variations in homeostatic sleep pressure.

The study was conducted at the Clinical Research Centre of the University of Surrey and involved 110 healthy adults without sleep disorders or sleep complaints — of them 44 were young (20 to 30 years), 35 were middle-aged (40 to 55 years) and 31 were older adults (66 to 83 years).

Browse: Home / Science and Tech / Obesity in 20s can cause heart attack in 40s Obesity in 20s can cause heart attack in 40s

Obese people who have type 2 diabetes in their 20s are likely to be at higher risk of a heart attack or stroke in their 40s, if they do not change their lifestyle, warn health experts.

“If your blood pressure (BP) is 136/88 and you’re a man with a waist over 40 (inches) or a woman with a waist over 35 (inches), it spells trouble,” said Dale J. Hamilton, diabetes clinical services chief at The Methodist Hospital in Houston.

“These are two of the five symptoms of metabolic syndrome, a problem that can lead to type 2 diabetes. All you need is three to begin seeing increased atherosclerosis.”

High triglyceride levels over 150, insulin resistance and a low LDL (good cholesterol) are factors of metabolic syndrome, along with high BP and central obesity. This condition afflicts 47 million Americans, says American Heart Association.

Many of them will end up with type 2 diabetes, which can eventually lead to coronary artery disease and stroke. “Small changes every day can help curb big problems later on,” said Hamilton.

“Losing five to 10 pounds will help lower blood pressure. Reducing saturated fats, carbohydrates, and eating about two-thirds the amount you eat now will help you lose weight around the middle. Walk 45 minutes a day instead of 30,” added Hamilton.

Some experts believe replacing sugar with high fructose corn syrup in processed foods in the US and Canada in the 1990s has played a role in the rise of type 2 diabetes cases.

High fructose corn syrup is made by changing the sugar in corn starch to fructose, another form of sugar. It has become popular because it extends the shelf life of processed foods and is cheaper than sugar. It has also become a popular ingredient in many sodas and fruit-flavoured drinks.

“The problem with high fructose corn syrup is that it promotes central obesity,” Hamilton said, according to a Methodist Hospital release.

“Another problem with it is that it fools your body into thinking you are hungry. I don’t think you need to eliminate it from your diet, you just need to be aware of how much of it you are consuming on a daily basis because too much can lead to serious weight gain.”

Keep in mind, he said, type 2 diabetes symptoms often go untreated because there are few or no symptoms until it is too late.