music is a set of unconscious arithmetics, so when we are listening to a song, we are actually counting involuntarily…the beauty of a song is actually based on its equations, hence a good song have a very interesting arithmetics…in truth, we enjoyed a song because we actually enjoyed summing the arithmetics…(physics & maths)
A tumor that could provide the key to making zombies
Annalee Newitz
— Today a group of medical researchers reported the discovery of something very intriguing in a type of pancreatic cancer called PanNET. Turns out PanNET is associated with mutations in two genes that help control a part of your DNA that determines whether you die.
Specifically, these genes can artificially lengthen the telomeres, caps on the ends of chromosomes that gradually erode as you grow older. Above, you can see PanNET cells - the glowing pink bits are the areas where the cancer is causing telomere extension. Usually, short telomeres are associated with disease and death. As a result, some scientists believe that keeping telomeres long could be one way to lengthen life (a few tests in mice seem to back this up). PanNET may have just given us two genetic tools to prolong life. The question is, what would a cancer-extended life be like?
Mutations in the genes ATRX and DAXX are responsible for the effect that’s intrigued Johns Hopkins Medical Institute researcher Christopher Heaphy and his team. In PanNET cancer, these genes shut down. As a result, the proteins that these genes manufacture no longer keep the telomeres in fighting trim. The telomeres grow wildly in a process called, perhaps unsurprisingly, “Alternative Lengthening of Telomeres.”
Unfortunately for people suffering PanNET, the extra long telomeres are what keep cancerous genes alive even when they are malfunctioning horribly. That’s why it’s probably more appropriate to call these cells undead rather than immortal. Yes, they’re alive, but they’re shambling along and trying to replicate and replace every other cell with a version of themselves.
The question is whether researchers like Heaphy could turn this undeath into something more like eternal life. Knowing which genes to shut down in order to allow telomeres to lengthen could be the first step in a process that ends with healthy cells that don’t age. The problem is, no one knows for sure whether short telomeres cause aging, or are just a result of some other age clock in the body we haven’t yet identified.
Read the full scientific article via Science
only you baby, only you have the power to touch me once and OWN me..but how can i let you know?? what’s my chance?
What i learn in history class just now? Greed, selfishness, self-centered, strategies..and the similarity between stupidity and bravery
Black string is a higher dimensional (D>4) generalization of a black hole in which the event horizon is topologically equivalent to S2 × S1 and spacetime is asymptotically Md−1 × S1.
me : it’s great….at least now we have the black hole represented by the string theory, imagine the schwardzchild theory, ugh too complex
Chart of ‘The Three Realities’ we live in
Three Realities
Diagram creative commons attribution licence M Alan Kazlev 2009
Water on the moon? yep it’s not in the textbook
The finding from a scientific team including Brown University comes from the first-ever measurements of water in lunar melt inclusions. Those measurements show that some parts of the lunar mantle have as much water as Earth’s upper mantle. Lunar melt inclusions are tiny globules of molten rock trapped within crystals that are found in volcanic glass deposits formed during explosive eruptions. The new finding, published this week inScience Express, shows lunar magma water contents 100 times higher than previous studies have suggested. The result is the culmination of years of investigation by the team searching for water and other volatiles in volcanic glasses returned by NASA Apollo missions in the late 1960s and early 1970s. In a paper in Nature in 2008, the same team led by Alberto Saal, associate professor of geological sciences at Brown, reported the first evidence for the presence of water and used models to estimate how much water was originally in the magmas before eruption. “The bottom line,” said Saal, an author on the ScienceExpress paper and the principal investigator on the research grants, “is that in 2008, we said the primitive water content in the lunar magmas should be similar to the water content in lavas coming from the Earth’s depleted upper mantle. Now, we have proven that is indeed the case.” The new finding got a critical assist from a Brown undergraduate student, Thomas Weinreich, who found the melt inclusions that allowed the team to measure the pre-eruption concentration of water in the magma and to estimate the amount of water in the Moon’s interior. In a classic needle-in-the-haystack effort, Weinreich searched through thousands of grains from the famous high-titanium “orange soil” discovered by astronaut Harrison Schmitt during the Apollo 17 mission before finding ten that included melt inclusions. “It just looks like a clear sample with some black specks in it,” said Weinreich, the second author on the paper. Compared with meteorites, Earth and the other inner planets of our solar system contain relatively low amounts of water and volatile elements, which were not abundant in the inner solar system during planet formation. The even lower quantities of these volatile elements found on the Moon has long been claimed as evidence that it must have formed following a high-temperature, catastrophic giant impact. But this new research shows that aspects of this theory must be reevaluated. “Water plays a critical role in determining the tectonic behavior of planetary surfaces, the melting point of planetary interiors and the location and eruptive style of planetary volcanoes,” said Erik Hauri, a geochemist with the Carnegie Institution of Washington and lead author of the study. “We can conceive of no sample type that would be more important to return to Earth than these volcanic glass samples ejected by explosive volcanism, which have been mapped not only on the moon but throughout the inner solar system.” The research team measured the water content in the inclusions using a state-of-the-art NanoSIMS 50L ion microprobe. “In contrast to most volcanic deposits, the melt inclusions are encased in crystals that prevent the escape of water and other volatiles during eruption. These samples provide the best window we have on the amount of water in the interior of the Moon,” said James Van Orman of Case Western Reserve University, a member of the science team. The study also puts a new twist on the origin of water ice detected in craters at the lunar poles by several recent NASA missions. The ice has been attributed to comet and meteor impacts, but it is possible some of this ice could have come from the water released by eruption of lunar magmas. Malcolm Rutherford, professor emeritus in geological sciences at Brown, also contributed to the paper. The NASA LASER and Cosmochemistry programs funded the research, with additional support provided by the NASA Lunar Science Institute (NLSI) and the NASA Astrobiology Institute.
