2 Japanese subs sunk after World War II found

U.S. researchers said Thursday that they have located the remains of two high-tech Japanese submarines that were scuttled by the U.S. Navy off Hawaii in 1946 to prevent the technology from falling into the hands of the Soviet Union at the beginning of the Cold War.

One of the craft was the largest non-nuclear sub ever built and had the ability to circle the globe 1 1/2 times without refueling. Called the I-14, the behemoth was 400 feet long and 40 feet high and carried a crew of 144. It was designed to launch two folding-wing bombers on kamikaze missions against U.S. cities such as New York and Washington, D.C., although changes in tactics, and the end of the war, prevented such attacks.

The second, which also never entered the war, was an attack submarine called the I-201 whose design foreshadowed the sleek submarines of today. It was thought to be more than twice as fast as any U.S. subs used in the war.

“In their time, they were very revolutionary,” said retired Col. Robert D. Hackett, a military historian with CombinedFleet.com, an online collection of information about the Imperial Japanese Navy. He was not involved in the new find. “We were quite interested in the technology.” …

via 2 Japanese subs sunk after World War II found — latimes.com.

Mini ice age took hold of Europe in months

JUST months – that’s how long it took for Europe to be engulfed by an ice age. The scenario, which comes straight out of Hollywood blockbuster The Day After Tomorrow, was revealed by the most precise record of the climate from palaeohistory ever generated.

Around 12,800 years ago the northern hemisphere was hit by the Younger Dryas mini ice age, or “Big Freeze”. It was triggered by the slowdown of the Gulf Stream, led to the decline of the Clovis culture in North America, and lasted around 1300 years.

Until now, it was thought that the mini ice age took a decade or so to take hold, on the evidence provided by Greenland ice cores. Not so, say William Patterson of the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Canada, and his colleagues.

The group studied a mud core from an ancient lake, Lough Monreagh, in western Ireland. Using a scalpel they sliced off layers 0.5 to 1 millimetre thick, each representing up to three months of time. No other measurements from the period have approached this level of detail.

Carbon isotopes in each slice revealed how productive the lake was and oxygen isotopes gave a picture of temperature and rainfall. They show that at the start of the Big Freeze, temperatures plummeted and lake productivity stopped within months, or a year at most. “It would be like taking Ireland today and moving it up to Svalbard” in the Arctic, says Patterson, who presented the findings at the BOREAS conference in Rovaniemi, Finland, on 31 October.

“This is significantly shorter than what has been suggested before, but it is plausible,” says Derek Vance of the University of Bristol, UK. Hans Renssen, a climate researcher at Vrije University in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, says recent findings from Greenland ice cores indicate the Younger Dryas event may have happened in one to three years. Patterson’s results confirm this was a very sudden change, he says.

via Mini ice age took hold of Europe in months – environment – 11 November 2009 – New Scientist.

Signature of consciousness captured in brain scans

A telltale signature of consciousness has been detected that takes us a step closer to disentangling the brain activity underlying conscious and unconscious brain processes.

It turns out that there is a similar pattern of neural activity each time we become conscious of the same picture, but not if we process information from the image unconsciously. These contrasting patterns of activity can now be detected via brain scans, and could one day help determine if patients with brain damage are conscious. They might even be used to probe consciousness in animals.

“It's very exciting work,” says neuroscientist Raphaël Gaillard of the University of Cambridge, who was not involved in the work. “The use of a reproducibility measure to disentangle conscious and non-conscious processes is genuinely new.” Gaillard has previously shown that coordinated activity across the entire brain is one of the signatures of consciousness .

Consistent signals

So far, efforts to find a brain signature of consciousness have focused on the intensity of neural activity, how long it lasts, and whether signals tend to be synchronised across different regions of the brain.

“We were looking for something other than the intensity and duration of the neural activity that characterises conscious neural processing,” says Aaron Schurger of Princeton University in New Jersey, who led the new work.

He and his colleagues hypothesised that when the brain is presented with the same sensory input – a picture, say – time after time, then conscious awareness of the picture should produce similar neural activity each time.

Conversely, if the sensory input did not enter conscious awareness, it should produce different brain activity each time because there would be other subconscious processes going on at the same time.

via Signature of consciousness captured in brain scans – life – 12 November 2009 – New Scientist.

Marvelous view … and a mystery

The OSIRIS camera on the European Space Agency's Rosetta spacecraft captured

this view of Earth from 393,000 miles (633,000 kilometers) away on Thursday.

Europe’s Rosetta spacecraft is making its final flyby past Earth on its way to an asteroid and a comet – a close encounter that should yield beautiful pictures of our home planet, and perhaps the answer to a cosmic mystery as well.

Rosetta was launched five years ago and has already made two gravitational flybys past Earth, plus one past Mars. Friday's flyby represents the final boost, slingshotting the probe past the asteroid Lutetia for a quick look next year, and then pushing it along to the main event at Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko in 2014.

When Rosetta arrives at its destination, it will send a small lander down to the comet's 2.4-mile-wide (4-kilometer-wide) icy nucleus and spend two years in orbit, studying Churyumov-Gerasimenko as it approaches the sun. Rosetta's 11 scientific instruments will record how the comet is transformed by the sun's warmth.

Time for more marvels

Rosetta has been snapping marvelous pictures of the sights it has encountered over the past five years, ranging from our round blue planet, the moon and a 3-D Mars to the asteroid Steins, a diamond-shaped space rock topped by a monster crater.

via Marvelous view … and a mystery – Cosmic Log – msnbc.com.

Two Earth-sized bodies with oxygen rich atmospheres found — but they’re stars not planets

Astrophysicists at the University of Warwick and Kiel University have discovered two earth sized bodies with oxygen rich atmospheres – however there is a bit of a disappointing snag for anyone looking for a potential home for alien life, or even a future home for ourselves, as they are not planets but are actually two unusual white dwarf stars.

The two white dwarf stars SDSS 0922+2928 and SDSS 1102+2054 are 400 and 220 light years from Earth. They are both the remnants of massive stars that are at the end of their stellar evolution having consumed all the material they had available for nuclear fusion.

Theoretical models suggest that massive stars (around 7 – 10 times the mass of our own Sun) will consume all of their hydrogen, helium and carbon, and end their lives either as white dwarfs with very oxygen-rich cores, or undergo a supernova and collapse into neutron stars. Finding such oxygen-rich white dwarfs would be an important confirmation of the models.

Unfortunately, almost all white dwarfs have hydrogen and/or helium envelopes that, while low in mass, are sufficiently thick to shield the core from direct view. However should such a core lose its remaining hydrogen envelope, astrophysicists could then detect an extremely oxygen-rich spectrum from the surface of the white dwarf.

Searching within an astronomical data set of the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), the University of Warwick and Kiel University astrophysicists did indeed discover two white dwarfs with large atmospheric oxygen abundances.

via Two Earth-sized bodies with oxygen rich atmospheres found — but they’re stars not planets.

Cut-price genome readings point to tests for all

The cost of reading the human genome — the DNA sequence — has been more than halved by a new approach.

Complete Genomics, a company in California, has “sequenced” three human genomes using chemicals that cost an average of $4,400 (£2,600) a time, offering a cheap and powerful service to scientists investigating the links between DNA and health. The company intends to offer a $5,000 service next year.

The advance, details of which are published in the journal Science, indicates that genome sequences will soon become affordable to the NHS and health insurers.

Patients’ genomes could be used to assess their inherited risk of diseases, and genetic profiles used to prescribe drugs.

Rade Drmanac, the company’s chief scientific officer, said: “What we’re doing is building an engine for medical genomics. The primary focus is to understand the genetic basis of disease. In the next five years, we will need to sequence a million genomes, and we need to make that more affordable. Then the knowledge that is generated can be applied to healthcare and personal genomics.”

Reading the human genetic code cost $10 million two years ago and $1 million last year.

via Cut-price genome readings point to tests for all – Times Online.

Would you do it if you had a spare $5,000?

Star Trek-like Replicator? Electron Beam Device Makes Metal Parts, One Layer At A Time

A group of engineers working on a novel manufacturing technique at NASAs Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va., have come up with a new twist on the popular old saying about dreaming and doing: “If you ca’n slice it, we can build it.”

That’s because layers mean everything to the environmentally-friendly construction process called Electron Beam Freeform Fabrication, or EBF3, and its operation sounds like something straight out of science fiction.

“You start with a drawing of the part you want to build, you push a button, and out comes the part,” said Karen Taminger, the technology lead for the Virginia-based research project that is part of NASA’s Fundamental Aeronautics Program.

She admits that, on the surface, EBF3 reminds many people of a Star Trek replicator in which, for example, Captain Picard announces out loud, “Tea, Earl Grey, hot.” Then there is a brief hum, a flash of light and the stimulating drink appears from a nook in the wall.

In reality, EBF3 works in a vacuum chamber, where an electron beam is focused on a constantly feeding source of metal, which is melted and then applied as called for by a drawing — one layer at a time — on top of a rotating surface until the part is complete.

While the options for using EBF3 are more limited than what science fiction allows, the potential for the process is no less out of this world, with promising relevance in aviation, spaceflight — even the medical community, Taminger said.

via Star Trek-like Replicator? Electron Beam Device Makes Metal Parts, One Layer At A Time.

Deep-sea fish captured on camera

The deepest living fish ever spotted in the southern hemisphere have been caught on camera.

The bizarre-looking pink creatures were photographed at a depth of 7,560m (24,800ft), swimming in the Kermadec Trench off the coast of New Zealand.

An international team has been studying this area using a submersible, built to withstand immense pressures.

Last year, the same team recorded another fish at 7,700m (25,300ft) – the deepest ever filmed.

These were found in the Japan Trench, which is in the Pacific, north of the equator.

Both expeditions form part of the Hadeep project, which aims to expand our knowledge of life in the oceanic trenches, the deepest parts of the ocean floor.

Quite a catch

The deep-sea fish seen near New Zealand look remarkably similar to last year’s find: they are pale pink in colour, with bulbous bodies and long tails. But they are in fact a different species. m

… The fish were photographed using a camera-laden, deep-sea submersible, which was connected to a ship and controlled from its surface. The probe was loaded with rotting fish, designed to lure deep-sea creatures, allowing them to be caught on camera and studied.

via BBC NEWS | Science & Environment | Deep-sea fish captured on camera.

Video here.

More Proof of Global Warming: Record highs far outpace record lows across US

Spurred by a warming climate, daily record high temperatures occurred twice as often as record lows over the last decade across the continental United States, new research shows.

The ratio of record highs to lows is likely to increase dramatically in coming decades if emissions of greenhouse gases continue to climb.

Results of the research, by authors at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo., Climate Central, The Weather Channel, and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), has been accepted for publication in the American Geophysical Union journal Geophysical Research Letters.

“Climate change is making itself felt in terms of day-to-day weather in the United States,” says NCAR scientist Gerald Meehl, the lead author. “The ways these records are being broken show how our climate is already shifting.” The research was funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), NCAR’s sponsor, the U.S. Department of Energy, and Climate Central.

“This intriguing study provides new evidence of climate change,” says Steve Nelson, NSF program director for NCAR. “And it’s change that’s affecting our daily lives.”

If temperatures were not warming, the number of record daily highs and lows being set each year would be approximately even.

Instead, for the period from January 1, 2000, to September 30, 2009, the continental United States set 291,237 record highs and 142,420 record lows, as the country experienced unusually mild winter weather and intense summer heat waves. A record daily high means that temperatures were warmer on a given day than on that same date throughout a weather station's history.

The authors used a quality control process to ensure the reliability of data from thousands of weather stations across the country, while looking at data over the past six decades to capture longer-term trends.

This decade’s warming was more pronounced in the western United States, where the ratio was more than two to one, than in the eastern United States, where the ratio was about one-and-a-half to one.

The study also found that the two-to-one ratio across the country as a whole could be attributed more to a comparatively small number of record lows than to a large number of record highs.

via Record highs far outpace record lows across US.

Deniers: Give it up. You were wrong.

Cornell researchers identify a weak link in cancer cell armor

The seeming invincibility of cancerous tumors may be crumbling, thanks to a promising new gene therapy that eliminates the ability of certain cells to repair themselves. Researchers at the Cornell University College of Veterinary Medicine have discovered that inactivation of a DNA repair gene called Hus1 efficiently kills cells lacking p53 — a gene mutated in the majority of human cancers.

Using a mouse model, senior author Robert Weiss, associate professor of molecular genetics, first author and graduate student Stephanie Yazinski and colleagues explored how cells respond when both genes are inhibited. When they inactivated the Hus1 gene in healthy mammary gland tissues, the researchers report, it caused genome damage and cell death. And when they studied the effects of Hus1 inactivation in p53-deficient cells, which are highly resistant to cell death, they discovered that the ability of Hus1 inactivation to kill cells was even greater.

The study is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (Nov. 9).

“Our work contributes to an important new understanding of cancer cells and their weaknesses,” Weiss said. “The mutations that allow cancer cells to divide uncontrollably also make the cancer cells more dependent on certain cellular processes. We were able to exploit one such dependency of p53-deficient cells and could efficiently kill these cells by inhibiting Hus1.”

Weiss and his team have new experiments under way. “We’ve proven the power of inhibiting both pathways in normal tissue,” said Weiss. “Now we want to extend our knowledge to cancerous tissue and determine if the loss of Hus1 will impact the ability of cancers with p53 mutations to take hold and grow.”

via Cornell researchers identify a weak link in cancer cell armor.