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Issue no. 16, 2011 Published: May 04, 2011
Europe announces projects to connect researchers
Scientists turn 'bad fat' into 'good fat'
Solar power goes viral
Telescope will track space junk
Fleeting antimatter trapped for a quarter of an hour
Rice crops 'have single origin'
Scorpion venom - bad for bugs, good for pesticides

Europe announces projects to connect researchers
Three ambitious biological-sciences infrastructure projects costing a total of EUR 700m were given the go-ahead in Europe this week. Research facilities will be built to study ecosystems' responses to environmental change, link systems biologists across Europe and improve access to key research microbes. The projects are part of the updated European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI) Roadmap - a wish list of science facilities drawn up by a group of leading researchers. The first of the projects aims to help microbiologists, who are often unable to maintain the microbes they work on once their research is complete. As a result, other researchers can't carry out confirmation or follow-up studies because the original microbial material is gone, and it is difficult to re-isolate similar strains. The EU Microbial Resource Infrastructure project is set to ease this problem by updating and linking the 70 existing centres that house microbe collections in universities and research institutes across 26 EU countries. France is leading a second project, which will create a network linking Europe's key experimental, analytical and modelling facilities in terrestrial ecosystem science. The third project will connect systems biologists across Europe to improve access to existing experimental and modelling facilities and create data repositories.
Nature May 03, 2011	back to top

Scientists turn 'bad fat' into 'good fat'
Scientists say they have found a way to turn body fat into a better type of fat that burns off calories and weight. The US Johns Hopkins team made the breakthrough in rats but believe the same could be done in humans, offering the hope of a new way to treat obesity. Brown fat is abundant in babies, which they use as a power source to generate body heat, expending calories at the same time. But as we age our brown fat largely disappears and gets replaced by 'bad' white fat, which typically sits as a spare tyre around the waist. Experts have reasoned that stimulating the body to make more brown fat rather than white fat could be a helpful way to control weight and prevent obesity and its related health problems like type 2 diabetes. The Hopkins team designed an experiment to see if suppressing an appetite-stimulating protein called NPY would decrease body weight in rats. When they silenced NPY in the brains of the rodents they found their appetite and food intake decreased. Even when the rats were fed a very rich, high-fat diet they still managed to keep more weight off than rats who had fully functioning NPY. The scientists then checked the fat composition of the rats and found an interesting change had occurred. In the rats with silenced NPY expression, some of the bad white fat had been replaced with good brown fat. The researchers are hopeful that it may be possible to achieve the same effect in people by injecting brown fat stem cells under the skin to burn white fat and stimulate weight loss.
BBC News May 03, 2011	back to top

Solar power goes viral
Researchers at MIT have found a way to make significant improvements to the power-conversion efficiency of solar cells by enlisting the services of viruses to perform detailed assembly work at the microscopic level. The new research is based on findings that carbon nanotubes can enhance the efficiency of electron collection from a solar cell's surface. Previous attempts to use the nanotubes have been thwarted by two problems. First, the making of carbon nanotubes generally produces a mix of two types, some of which act as semiconductors (sometimes allowing an electric current to flow, sometimes not) or metals (which act like wires, allowing current to flow easily). The new research, for the first time, showed that the effects of these two types tend to be different, because the semiconducting nanotubes can enhance the performance of solar cells, but the metallic ones have the opposite effect. Second, nanotubes tend to clump together, which reduces their effectiveness. And that is where viruses come to the rescue. The team found that a genetically engineered version of a virus called M13, which normally infects bacteria, can be used to control the arrangement of the nanotubes on a surface, keeping the tubes separate so they cannot short out the circuits, and keeping the tubes apart so they do not clump. In tests, adding the virus-built structures enhanced the power conversion efficiency to 10.6% from 8%-almost a one-third improvement.
R&D Magazine / Nature Nanotechnology Apr 25, 2011	back to top

Telescope will track space junk
A ground-based telescope that can scan the skies faster than any other of its size could help to protect satellites from collisions with space debris and each other. The Space Surveillance Telescope (SST), developed by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), is to be used to protect US and international assets and commercial and international satellites in orbit around Earth. The telescope, which took nine years to build, has a wide field of view, is very sensitive and can scan the sky several times in one night. It can collect data faster for dimmer objects than existing telescopes in the Space Surveillance Network. With the increased information that it provides, officials will be able to better predict the path of debris and warn satellite operators of potential collisions. The telescope's superior data-collection capacity comes from its 3.5-meter aperture, which is more than three times the size of ground-based telescopes already in use. It also has a three-mirror system to bring images into sharp focus over a wide field. But the engineering advances brought problems: whereas traditional two-mirrored telescopes focus light onto a flat surface, the three-mirrored type focuses onto a curved one, which makes it difficult to manufacture matching detectors.
Nature Apr 22, 2011	back to top

Fleeting antimatter trapped for a quarter of an hour
The team working on the Antihydrogen Laser Physics Apparatus (ALPHA) at the CERN particle physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, have stored atoms of antihydrogen for 1000 seconds - roughly 10,000 times longer than before. This should help reveal if antimatter and matter are true mirror images. Antihydrogen atoms are annihilated by hydrogen. The ALPHA team want to keep antimatter intact long enough to study it, so last year they worked out how to hold a cloud of antihydrogen in a magnetic trap. Not for long, though: collisions with trace gases would have either annihilated the anti-atoms or given them the energy to escape, so the team opened the trap after 170 milliseconds and observed the resulting annihilations, verifying that antimatter had been made. Now they have repeated the experiment, this time waiting much longer before opening the trap. They also cooled the antiprotons used to create the antihydrogen much further, which lowered the energy of the antimatter, allowed more to be squeezed into the trap and raised the chance that some would last longer. Antimatter's life extension will permit experiments, such as checking whether antihydrogen occupies the same energy levels as hydrogen.
New Scientist May 03, 2011	back to top

Rice crops 'have single origin'
Scientists have shed new light on the origins of rice, one of the most important staple foods today. A study of the rice genome suggests that the crop was domesticated only once, rather than at multiple times in different places. The work published in PNAS journal proposes that rice was first cultivated in China some 9,000 years ago. Another theory proposes that the two major sub-species of rice - Oryza sativa japonica and O. sativa indica - were domesticated separately and in different parts of Asia. In the latest research, an international team re-examined this evolutionary history, by using genetic data. Using computer algorithms, the researchers came to the conclusion that japonica and indica had a single origin because they had a closer genetic relationship to one other than to any wild rice species found in China or India. They then used a so-called 'molecular clock' technique to put dates on the evolutionary story of rice. Depending on how the researchers calibrated their clock, the data point to an origin of domesticated rice around 8,200 years ago. The study indicates that the japonica and indica sub-species split apart from each other about 3,900 years ago. The team says this is consistent with archaeological evidence for rice domestication in China's Yangtze Valley about 8,000 to 9,000 years ago and the domestication of rice in India's Ganges region about 4,000 years ago. The single-origin model suggests that indica and japonica were both domesticated from the wild rice O. rufipogon.
BBC News May 03, 2011	back to top

Scorpion venom - bad for bugs, good for pesticides
Fables have long cast scorpions as bad-natured killers of hapless turtles that naively agree to ferry them across rivers. Michigan State University scientists, however, see them in a different light. The team studied the effects of scorpion venom with the hopes of finding new ways to protect plants from bugs. The results have revealed new ways in which the venom works. Past research identified scorpion toxin's usefulness in the development of insecticides. Its venom attacks various channels and receptors that control their prey's nervous and muscular systems. One major target of scorpion toxins is the voltage-gated sodium channel, a protein found in nerve and muscle cells used for rapid electrical signalling. The team were able to identify amino acid residues in insect sodium channels that make the channels more vulnerable to the venom from the Israeli desert scorpion. They also discovered that an important sodium channel voltage sensor can influence the potency of the scorpion toxin. Several classes of insecticides act on sodium channels, but insects become resistant to them over time. The researchers are studying how insects develop resistance and what alternatives can be created to control resistant pests.
PhysOrg / Journal of Biological Chemistry Apr 27, 2011	back to top