Month: October 2017

Nobel Prize goes to researchers who figured out how our cells tell time

Enlarge (credit: Emmett Anderson ) Today, the Nobel Prize committee has honored three US biologists for their role in unravelling one of biology’s earliest mysteries: how organisms tell time. Microbes, plants, and animals all run on a 24-hour cycle, one that’s flexible enough to gradually reset itself, although it can take a few days after transcontinental travel. The biological systems responsible for maintaining this circadian clock require a lot of proteins that undergo complex interactions, and the new laureates are being honored for their use of genetics to start unraveling this complexity. A long-standing problem The first description of an organism’s internal clock dates all the way back to 1729, when a French astronomer (!?!?) decided to mess with a plant that opened and closed its leaves on a 24-hour cycle. He found that the cycle didn’t depend on daylight but would continue even when the plant was kept in the dark nonstop. It would take nearly 250 years to move from this observation to any sort of biological handle on the system. The change, as it has been so many times, was brought about using the fruit fly Drosophila . A genetic screen in the 1960s identified three different mutations that altered flies’ circadian clock: one that lengthened its 24-hour period, one that shortened it, and one that left it erratic. Mapping these revealed that all of them affected the same gene. From there, however, the field had to wait 20 years for us to develop the technology to clone the gene responsible for these changes, named period . Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Read the original post:
Nobel Prize goes to researchers who figured out how our cells tell time

Russia Suspected In GPS-Spoofing Attacks On Ships

How did a 37-ton tanker suddenly vanish from GPS off the coast of Russia? AmiMoJo shares a report from Wired: The ship’s systems located it 25 to 30 miles away — at Gelendzhik airport… The Atria wasn’t the only ship affected by the problem… At the time, Atria’s AIS system showed around 20 to 25 large boats were also marooned at Gelendzhik airport. Worried about the situation, captain Le Meur radioed the ships. The responses all confirmed the same thing: something, or someone, was meddling with the their GPS… After trawling through AIS data from recent years, evidence of spoofing becomes clear. GPS data has placed ships at three different airports and there have been other interesting anomalies. “We would find very large oil tankers who could travel at the maximum speed at 15 knots, ” said a former director for Marine Transportation Systems at the U.S. Coast Guard. “Their AIS, which is powered by GPS, would be saying they had sped up to 60 to 65 knots for an hour and then suddenly stopped. They had done that several times”… “It looks like a sophisticated attack, by somebody who knew what they were doing and were just testing the system…” says Lukasz Bonenberg from the University of Nottingham’s Geospatial Institute. “You basically need to have atomic level clocks.” The U.S. Maritime Administration confirms 20 ships have been affected — all traveling in the Black Sea — though a U.S. Coast Guard representative “refused to comment on the incident, saying any GPS disruption that warranted further investigation would be passed onto the Department of Defence.” But the captain of the 37-ton tanker already has his own suspicions. “It looks like the Russians define an area where they don’t want the GPS to apply.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Continue reading here:
Russia Suspected In GPS-Spoofing Attacks On Ships

Laser Light Forges Graphene Into the Third Dimension

Big Hairy Ian quotes New Atlas: The wonder material graphene gets many of its handy quirks from the fact that it exists in two dimensions, as a sheet of carbon only one atom thick. But to actually make use of it in practical applications, it usually needs to be converted into a 3D form. Now, researchers have developed a new and relatively simple way to do just that, using lasers to ‘forge’ a three-dimensional pyramid out of graphene… By focusing a laser onto a fine point on a 2D graphene lattice, the graphene at that spot is irradiated and bulges outwards. A variety of three-dimensional shapes can be made by writing patterns with the laser spot, with the height of the shape controlled by adjusting the irradiation dose at each particular point. The team illustrated that technique by deforming a sheet of graphene into a 3D pyramid, standing 60 nm high. That sounds pretty tiny, but it’s 200 times taller than the graphene sheet itself. “The beauty of the technique is that it’s fast and easy to use, ” says one of the researchers. “It doesn’t require any additional chemicals or processing.” Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Excerpt from:
Laser Light Forges Graphene Into the Third Dimension

Ancient Papyrus Finally Solves Egypt’s ‘Great Pyramid’ Mystery

schwit1 was the first Slashdot reader to bring us the news. Newsweek reports: Archaeologists believe they have found the key to unlocking a mystery almost as old as the Great Pyramid itself: Who built the structure and how were they able to transport two-ton blocks of stone to the ancient wonder more than 4, 500 years ago…? Experts had long established that the stones from the pyramid’s chambers were transported from as far away as Luxor, more than 500 miles to the south of Giza, the location of the Great Pyramid, but had never agreed how they got there. However, the diary of an overseer, uncovered in the seaport of Wadi al-Jafr, appears to answer the age-old question, showing the ancient Egyptians harnessed the power of the Nile to transport the giant blocks of stone. According to a new British documentary Egypt’s Great Pyramid: The New Evidence, which aired on the U.K.’s Channel 4 on Sunday, the Great Pyramid, also known as the Pyramid of Khufu, was built using an intricate system of waterways which allowed thousands of workers to pull the massive stones, floated on boats, into place with ropes. Along with the papyrus diary of the overseer, known as Merer, the archaeologists uncovered a ceremonial boat and a system of waterworks. The ancient text described how Merer’s team dug huge canals to channel the water of the Nile to the pyramid. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

More:
Ancient Papyrus Finally Solves Egypt’s ‘Great Pyramid’ Mystery

New evidence would push life back to at least 3.95 billion years ago

Enlarge / Four billion years old? You don’t look a day over 2 billion! (credit: Tashiro et al/Nature ) You could be forgiven for thinking that the remnants of the Earth’s first life don’t want to be found. Between geology and happenstance, the earliest life has certainly covered its tracks well. While paleontologists studying dinosaurs can sometimes bring an unambiguously gigantic femur home, those who study the origins of life are usually left arguing over the significance of microscopic motes of rock. A new discovery in northernmost Labrador, made by a team led by Takayuki Tashiro of the University of Tokyo, fits into that latter category. But don’t let its abstract smallness of the evidence dull your excitement. The researchers argue they have uncovered evidence that there was life on Earth more than 3.95 billion years ago—on a planet that isn’t much more than 4.5 billion years old itself. Counting carbon Some of the evidence for early life is in the form of fossilized microorganisms. It can be difficult to rule out bacterium-shaped mineral bits that can form in other ways, but research published earlier this year identified microscopic structures that seem to fit the bill in 3.7 billion-year-old rocks that were once part of seafloor hydrothermal vents. Read 10 remaining paragraphs | Comments

See the original post:
New evidence would push life back to at least 3.95 billion years ago