Hey!
As promised, I've got some pretty interesting news today! :)
First, you've probably already heard about element 117, and its recent, albeit brief, appearance in a Russian cyclotron. Researchers fired calcium ions for 150 days at a target made of berkelium, finally producing SIX atoms of 117. They existed for less than a second before decaying. Now...what to call it? Some amazing suggestions (from #namefornewelement on Twitter) include:
- Yomommium
- Nonsensium
- Omnomnomium
- Newishium
- Holycrapium
- Internetium
- Surprisium
- Pandemonium
- Fatassium
- DeLoreum
- Noobium
- Steve
- Wowthatsheavyum
- MasterChiefium
- Unobtainium
- Oneseventeenium
- Wootonium
- Porkchopsium
That's...amazing. :)
Next, the first multicellular organisms able to survive completely without oxygen have been found in the sediment of the Mediterranean. These three species of Loricifera are smaller than a millimeter and, oddly enough, have no mitochondria. In pretty much every other animal cell, mitochondria are responsible for converting nutrients to energy. These critters, however, use structures called hydrogenosomes to convert their food to energy without ever needing to use oxygen. Since their rather extreme environment resembles ancient Earth before widespread oxygen, it's possible these little guys might be a peek into the past.
Also, the Venus Express orbiter has found new infrared evidence that suggests Venus maaay in fact have active volcanoes. Of course by active, they mean within the past 250,000 years for most of them. Since Venus sports fewer scars by asteroids than expected, it had been theorized before that either a massive volcanic event covered most of the surface at once a long time ago, or ongoing volcanoes have filled in various craters here and there over time. This finding suggests the recent, active volcanoes option, which has interesting implications for the evolution of Earth, which is similar in many ways to Venus.
Back on Earth, a group of ecologists are planning to collect information on 160,000 species of life all over the planet to form a "barometer of life." They selected the species involved in order to best represent all ecosystems, and the plan is to update it every five years with new information from hundreds of cooperating experts and scientists. It's basically a census, but for animals, plants, and other. The project is hoping to provide better and more complete information to aid in gauging the "health" of the planet, determining risks to biodiversity and the environment by companies and human activities, drawing attention to the environment and its inhabitants, and directing spending. The project itself will cost an estimated 60 million USD, and will run an annual cost of around $5 million after that.
Last today, a few articles recently came out detailing advancements in Autism research. For those of you who know me well, you already know how big of a deal Autism spectrum disorders are for me, so this is really exciting! First, a program at Canisius College involving 5 weeks of "summer camp" programs for children affected by high functioning autism, Asperger's, and PDD-NOS paired with parent education has shown marked improvement in the emotional behaviors of participants. Compared with control groups, children in the program showed better social skills, emotional recognition, and conversational skills. The program is working on improving to a level where it can be distributed to communities. Second, it's been shown in separate experiments that oxytocin may be able to improve facial expression and emotion recognition in autistic individuals. The study was done on a small group of ADS-affected adolescents; the experimental group was given an oxytocin nasal spray and the control group a placebo spray. The experimental group showed clear improvement in recognizing emotions and facial expressions, but they say more testing will be needed to back up these results before we can be sure. Lastly, methods have been discovered involving DNA tagging, or methylation, to both diagnose autism disorders via blood tests or other DNA samples (rather than brain testing), and to potentially reverse its effects. There wasn't much to the article, but I really look forward to hearing more! :)
That's it for today, see you this weekend!
-Miss Mouse
References and Links:
Element 117
Multicellular Organisms Sans Oxygen
Volcanic Venus
Barometer of Life
Autism
