Here comes Comet Lulin, a backward-flying lulu passing Earth only once, at its closest Monday

An odd, greenish backward-flying comet is zipping by Earth this month, as it takes its only trip toward the sun from the farthest edges of the solar system.

The comet is called Lulin, and there’s a chance it can be seen with the naked eye — far from city lights, astronomers say. But you’ll most likely need a telescope, or at least binoculars, to spot it. The best opportunity is just before dawn one-third of the way up the southern sky. It should be near Saturn and two bright stars, Spica and Regula.

On Monday at 10:43 p.m. EST, it will be 38 million miles from Earth, the closest it will ever get, according to Donald Yeomans, manager of NASA’s Near Earth Object program.

The story behind the comet is more intriguing than its appearance — the greenish tinge may be hard for many to discern. The color comes from a type of carbon and cyanogen, a poisonous gas.

Lulin was discovered by a Chinese teenager two years ago. It still has many of its original gases — gases that are usually stripped away as comets near the sun. Unlike most comets viewable from Earth, this one hasn’t been this close to the sun before, Yeomans said.

While all the planets and most of the other objects in the solar system circle the sun counterclockwise, Lulin circles clockwise, said NASA astronomer Stephen Edberg. And thanks to an optical illusion, from Earth it appears as if the comet’s tail is in the front as the comet approaches Earth and the sun.

“It essentially is going backwards through the solar system,” he said.

It came from the outskirts of the solar system, 18 trillion miles away. Once it’s made the journey around the sun, Lulin will gain enough speed to escape the solar system, Edberg said.

via Here comes Comet Lulin, a backward-flying lulu passing Earth only once, at its closest Monday – Los Angeles Times.

LIGHT PILLAR PICTURES: Mysterious Sky Shows Explained

Light pillars scrape the night sky over Victor, Idaho, on January 26. Typically seen in polar regions, the vertical columns of light have been appearing along with frigid temperatures at lower latitudes this winter.

Light pillars appear when artificial light (shown in diagram above) or natural light bounces off the facets of flat ice crystals wafting relatively close to the ground.

When the light source is close to the ground, the light pillar appears above the floating crystals. When the light comes from the sun or moon, the light pillar can appear beneath them, too, as the light refracts  through the crystals. …

via LIGHT PILLAR PICTURES: Mysterious Sky Shows Explained.

Doomsday seed vault’s stores are growing

An armed guard stands outside the entrance to the ‘doomsday’ seed vault, in February 2008, near Longyabyen.

The stores of seeds in the vault are reportedly growing as researchers rush to preserve 100,000 crop varieties from potential extinction.

The stores of seeds in a “doomsday” vault in the Norwegian Arctic are growing as researchers rush to preserve 100,000 crop varieties from potential extinction.

The imperiled seeds are going to be critical for protecting the global food supply against devastating crop losses as a result of climate change, said Cary Fowler, executive director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust.

“These resources stand between us and catastrophic starvation,” Fowler said. “You can’t imagine a solution to climate change without crop diversity.”

That’s because the crops currently being used by farmers will not be able to evolve quickly enough on their own to adjust to predicted drought, rising temperatures and new pests and diseases, he said.

One recent study found that corn yields in Africa will fall by 30 percent by 2030 unless heat-resistant varieties are developed, Fowler noted.

“Evolution is in our control,” he said in an interview. “It’s in our seed bank. You take traits form different varieties and make new ones.”

That process currently takes about 10 years. But Fowler said his organization is hoping to speed up the development of new varieties by cataloguing the genetic traits of the seeds that it stores.

Their gene bank — dug into a mountainside near Longyearbyen, in the Svalbard islands in the far north of Norway — will be made public to help spur research, which Fowler says is woefully inadequate.

“Six people in the world are breeding bananas. Ditto for yams, a major crop in Africa,” Fowler said ahead of a presentation Sunday to the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

via Doomsday seed vault’s stores are growing.

Blame industrial animal operations for disease outbreaks among humans

In 2006, spinach was pulled off store shelves for a month because some of it contained E. coli.

In 2008, the problem products were tomatoes, which health officials thought were behind a huge salmonella outbreak that sickened hundreds of Americans. And now peanuts are under scrutiny.

As a physician, I am profoundly troubled by this situation. Salmonella, E. coli, campylobacter — national outbreaks of foodborne illnesses are coming fast and furious, and federal officials seem to be scrambling just to warn consumers, let alone head off these problems at the source. Perhaps that’s because regulators aren’t focusing on the underlying problem.

Salmonella and E. coli are intestinal bacteria. But spinach has no intestine. Neither do tomatoes. And neither do peanuts.

When produce becomes tainted, it’s usually because feces from an infected animal contaminated the fertilizer or irrigation water used in the fields. As a recent Pew Commission Report on industrial farm animal production noted, untreated animal waste harboring pathogens contaminates air, water, soil and crops. Farm animal waste was the identified cause of the 2006 spinach E. coli outbreak, according to an investigation by the FDA.

The government must acknowledge that the original source of this salmonella outbreak is not peanuts — it’s our out-of-control factory farming system.

Americans now eat more than 1 million animals per hour, and as demand for cheap meat grows, thousands more factory farms, feedlots and other agribusiness operations are popping up across the country. A single factory farm often houses hundreds of thousands of animals and produces as much waste as a small city. In fact, factory farm runoff is the biggest water pollution problem in the United States. And the animal waste in this runoff contains pathogens that can be 10 to 100 times more concentrated than in human waste.

… I hope policymakers will take immediate action in protecting our food supply and investigate animal agriculture as the original source of this salmonella outbreak. But while we’re waiting, consumers can help curtail factory farm pollution by simply opting for meatless meals. If more of us followed a plant-based diet, the number of animals on farms would decrease. This health change would help reduce everyone’s risk of foodborne illness. It wouldn’t hurt our cholesterol levels either.

Editor’s Note: Barnard is a medical doctor, nutrition researcher and president of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine.

via Blame industrial animal operations for disease outbreaks among humans | Agweek | Midwest farm news and ranch news.

Peanuts have no intestines.

Scientists May Have New Way to Fight the Flu

A new scientific discovery could someday lead to medications to fight the flu as well as a vaccine that would not have to be changed every year because it could target a broad range of flu strains.

“We identified new human antibodies that inactivate influenza, not just bird flu, but any of the seasonal influenza viruses that affect us in the winter,” said researcher Dr. Wayne A. Marasco, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute.

The antibodies recognize a new part of the influenza virus and inactivate the virus by a new mechanism, Marasco said, “so it’s really a new target, new mechanism, new human antibodies.”

Antibodies can be used as drugs, he noted, adding that drugs derived from antibodies are commonplace in treatment for such cancers as colon, breast and lymphoma.

Drugs developed from the newly identified antibodies could, in combination with other treatments, prevent or treat certain avian and seasonal flu strains and could also lead to the development of a long-lasting flu vaccine, the researchers said.

“These flu antibodies can be developed into fully human antibody drugs that could be used in the clinic,” Marasco said. Such drugs would be used in the same way antiviral medications, such as Tamiflu, are used today.

Antivirals generally are given to prevent a virus after exposure or to treat a virus once it develops. This year, however, the commonly circulating H1 strains of the influenza virus are resistant to Tamiflu.

Resistance develops because a drug targets the large head of the flu virus, but the virus is able to quickly mutate, making it resistant to medications and vaccines, Marasco explained. That’s why there is a new seasonal flu vaccine every year, he said.

But the newly identified antibodies attack the stem of the virus, which is more resistant to change and “does not change amongst the various influenza viruses,” he said.

“These antibodies do not replace the flu vaccine,” Marasco said. “But the exciting part is, this gives us a new approach to vaccine development. This is a new area that is highly conserved, and the viruses do not appear to easily undergo change in their genetic code to escape the antibodies directed against them.”

If a vaccine could be developed to target this area in the virus, he said, it might offer long-term protection. …

“If you have an antibody that is effective against several viruses, it could be theoretically used as a passive immunization,” Palese said. “If one could also make a vaccine, one would have a universal vaccine.” …

The antibodies are effective against about half of currently known flu strains, but the approach could be used to find additional antibodies that could work against the others, he said. … – usnews

A universal vaccine would be nice.