Hopes of life on rocky planet take a beating

Gliese 581c Too Hot For Water: Experts

Experts looking for life in outer space might have to readjust their lens. Researchers had announced this year that they had spotted a small, rocky planet located just far enough from its star to sustain liquid water on its surface, and thus possibly support life. But now, a study says it’s neighbour may infact be a safer bet.
The scientists might have picked the right star for hosting a habitable world, but got the planet wrong. The world known as Gliese 581c is probably too hot to support liquid water or life, new computer models suggest, but conditions on its neighbor, Gliese 581d, might be just right.
Gliese 581c, discovered in April by a team led by Stephane Udry of the Geneva Observatory in Switzerland, is about 50% bigger than Earth and about five times more massive. It is located about 20.5 light-years away, and circles a dim red dwarf star called Gliese 581, reports LiveScience.
Of the more than 200 extrasolar planets, or “exoplanets”, discovered since 1995, Gliese 581c was the first found that resides within the habitable zone of its star, if only barely. The habitable, or “Goldilocks” zone is the region around a star where the temperature is neither too hot nor too cold, so water can exist on a planet’s surface in its liquid state. Water is a key ingredient for life as we know it.
But new simulations of the climate on Gliese 581c created by Werner von Bloh of the Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany and his team suggest the planet is no Earthly paradise, but rather a faraway Venus, where carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere create a runaway greenhouse effect that warms the planet well above 100 degrees Celsius, boiling away liquid water and with it any promise of life.
But the same greenhouse effect that squashes prospects for life on Gliese 581c raises the same hope for another planet in the system, a world of eight Earth-masses called Gliese 581d, which was also discovered by Udry’s team. “This planet is actually outside the habitable zone,” said Manfred Cuntz, an astronomer at the University of Texas at Arlington and a member of von Bloh’s team. “It appears at first sight too cold. However, based on the greenhouse effect, physical processes can occur which are heating up the planet to a temperature that allows for fluid water

Five Areas Of Penis That Are Most Receptive To Fine-Touch Are Taken Out By The Surgery: Study

FLIP SIDE

Circumcision removes most sensitive parts

Five Areas Of Penis That Are Most Receptive To Fine-Touch Are Taken Out By The Surgery: Study

Washington: A new study has found that what boys lose in the process of circumcision turns out to be the most sensitive parts of the penis.
Researchers prodding dozens of male penises with a fine-tipped tool have found that the five areas most receptive to finetouch are routinely removed by the surgery. The finding was detailed in the British Journal of Urology International.
Circumcision surgery involves the removal of the skin that covers the tip of the penis, called the foreskin. Infant male circumcision is the most common medical procedure in the United States, with an estimated 60% of male newborns undergoing the surgery.
Morris Sorrells of National Organization of Circumcision Information Resources Center and colleagues created a “penile sensitivity map” by measuring the sensitivity of 19 locations on the penises of 159 male volunteers. Of the participants, 91 were circumcised as infants and none had histories of penile or sexual dysfunction.
For circumcised penises, the most sensitive region was the circumcision scar on the underside of the penis, the researchers found. For uncircumcised penises, the areas most receptive to pressure were five regions normally removed during circumcision — all of which were more sensitive than the most sensitive part of the circumcised penis.
Circumcision is a procedure practiced in several countries for medical as well as cultural reasons. Most scientists agree that the surgery confers some protection against infection and the risk of contracting sexual diseases. Recent studies have also shown that circumcision can lower the risks of HIV infection by as much as 60% in sex between males and females.
But Robert Van Howe, a study team member at Michigan State University, thinks such claims are somewhat overblown. “The (health benefits) that have been consistently shown are very small, and there are less aggressive, less invasive, less expensive ways of dealing with the problems (circumcision) is supposed to address,” Van Howe said.
Other practices, such as choosing sexual partners wisely and using condoms consistently, are far more effective in protecting against diseases, he added.
Circumcision is opposed by some groups on the grounds that it is painful and not a life-saving procedure, and that it also makes sex less pleasurable by exposing and numbing the tip of the penis, called the glans. Some have gone so far as recommending foreskin restoration.
Some previous studies found that circumcision led to little, if any, decrease in penile sensitivity, but Sorrells and his colleagues say such findings are suspect because many are based on self-reports from men who were circumcised to correct medical problems.

Twin brother reduces sister’s fertility by 25%

London: Sheffield University researchers say that a woman who has a twin brother is likely to have 25% reduced fertility.
A study conducted by them, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, blames exposure to male hormone testosterone in the womb for this.
Lead researcher Dr Virpi Lummaa tells that both testosterone and the female hormone oestrogen can cross the womb, due to which the twin brother and sister are exposed to each other’s hormones. Since male and female foetuses have similar oestrogen levels, the female child is more likely to be affected, she says. With a view to determine the effects of testosterone on female fertility, the researchers studied Finnish medical records spanning 1734 to 1888. The pre-industrial population was chosen because advanced healthcare and assisted conception treatments like IVF could have skewed fertility data on modern Western societies.
It was observed that of 754 twins, females with a twin brother were 25% less likely to have children than females with a twin sister. The researchers also noted that women with a male twin were 15% less likely to marry.
The findings could have resulted because, says Lummaa, females exposed to a male twin had developed masculine traits, attitudes and behaviours that affected their decision to get married.
She says that exposure to high levels of testosterone in the womb increases the risk of diseases that compromise fertility, such as reproductive cancers. “As a consequence of a male twin’s influence on a female’s fertility, mothers who produce opposite sex twins have fewer grandchildren and hence lower evolutionary fitness,” the BBC quoted her as saying.
The researchers say that experiments on animals have shown evidence that testosterone may potentially damage female fertility. They, however, admitted that more research was needed to look at this mechanism in humans. ANI

Burial sites reveal human sacrifice:

Investigations of prehistoric burial sites in Europe show that the region’s population may have practiced ritual human sacrifice. The large number of multiple-burial sites, some containing skeletons of dwarfs and deformed children accompanied by ornate grave goods, suggests that human sacrifice was a custom in Europe between 28,000 and 10,000 years ago, says biologist Vincenzo Formicola of the University of Pisa in Italy. Three multipleburial graves in Russia, the Czech Republic and Italy are the focus of his findings

Human-emitted nitrogen helps in forest growth

Small doses of human-spewed nitrogen — emitted by cars, factories and farm chemicals — can help forests grow more and absorb climate-warming carbon dioxide, researchers reported on Wednesday. But a little nitrogen goes a long way and too much can be damaging, said Beverly Law, a professor of forest science at Oregon State University and co-author of a study on the phenomenon in the journal Nature. “It’s not, ‘if a little is good, a lot is better,’” Law said. “It can reach a point where there is saturation of the effect of increased growth.” Law stressed that the level of nitrogen that can actually nourish a forest and help it suck up the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide is about 10% of what is annually applied to farmlands.

Now, click great photos even in bad light

Advanced Sensor Will Be Incorporated In Mass-Market Cameras & Cellphones From Next Year

Rochester, New York: A year from now, capturing a crisp, clear image of a candlelit birthday party could be a piece of cake — even with a camera phone. Eastman Kodak said on Thursday that it has developed a colour-filter technology that at least doubles the sensitivity to light of the image sensor in every digital camera, enabling shutterbugs to take better pictures in poor light.
“Low light can mean trying to get a good image indoors of your kid blowing out the birthday candles. It can mean you want to take a photograph on a street corner in Paris at midnight,” said Chris McNiffe, general manager of the photography company’s image sensor business. “We’re talking about a 2-to-4-times improvement in (light) sensitivity.”
Analyst Chris Chute doesn’t doubt that the new filter system, intended to supplant an industry-standard filter pattern designed by Kodak scientist Bryce Bayer in 1976, represents a breakthrough in boosting photo quality — especially when light conditions are not ideal.
“It’s often the most simple concepts that can have the most profound impact,” said Chute of IDC, a market research firm near Boston. “This could be revolutionary in terms of just changing that very simple filter on top of the sensor and basically allowing companies to use it in all different kinds of cameras.”
Kodak expects to provide samples of its new technology to a variety of camera manufacturers in the first quarter of 2008. The technology is likely to be incorporated first in mass-market point-and-shoot cameras and camera-equipped mobile phones beginning sometime next year.
“Typically new features like this would be more likely to show up in highend products and then trickle down,” said analyst Steve Hoffenberg of Lyra Research Inc. “But I think the biggest potential benefit of this may come in the camera phone environment. Camera phones are using smaller sensors to begin with and smaller sensors generally mean smaller pixels, which means lower sensitivity.”
When the shutter opens on a digital camera, an image is projected onto the sensor, which converts light into an electric charge. Most sensors use the Bayer mask: Half of the millions of cells on a checkerboard grid are filtered to collect green light and a quarter each are filtered to let through red and blue light. A computer chip then reconstructs a full colour signal for each pixel in the final image.
The new method, which has been under development for more than five years, adds “panchromatic” cells that are sensitive to all wavelengths of visible light and collect a larger amount of light striking the sensor. Tailoring software algorithms to this unique new pattern enables faster shutter speeds, which reduces blurring when capturing a moving subject, McNiffe said.
“The potential (for its success) is always there, but it’s a wait-and-see thing,” he said. REUTERS

Ancient Rome brought to life, digitally

Virtual Model Shows The City At Its Peak Under Emperor Constantine

Rome: Tourists puzzled by the jumble of buildings in classical and modern Rome can now find their bearings by visiting a virtual model of the imperial capital in what is being billed as the world’s biggest computer simulation of an ancient city.
“Rome Reborn” was unveiled on Monday in a first release showing the city at its peak in 320 AD, under the Emperor Constantine when it had grown to a million inhabitants. Brainchild of the University of Virginia’s Bernard Frischer, Rome Reborn (romereborn.virginia.edu) will eventually show its evolution from Bronze Age hut settlements to the Sack of Rome in 5th century AD and the devastating Gothic Wars.
Reproduced for tourists on satellite-guided handsets and 3-D orientation movies in a theatre to be opened near the Colosseum, Frischer says his model “will prepare them for their visit to the Colosseum, the Forum, the imperial palaces on the Palatine, so that they can understand the ruins a lot better”.
“We can take people under the Colosseum and show them how the elevators worked to bring the animals up from underground chambers for the animal hunts they held,” he said, referring to the great Roman amphitheatre inaugurated by Titus in 80 AD.
Frischer’s model is sourced from ancient maps and building catalogues detailing “apartment buildings, private houses, inns, storage facilities, bakeries and even brothels”, plus digital images of the vast “Plastico di Roma Antica” model built from plaster of Paris in 1936-74. The “reverse modeling” enables scholars to populate ancient monuments with virtual reality figures for experiments on practical details like ventilation, capacity or acoustics. REUTERS

Experts find way to detect skin cancer sans biopsy

CANCER WATCH

American Scientists Are Using Lasers Pulsing At A Thousand-Trillionth Of A Second For Diagnosis

Kounteya Sinha | TNN

New Delhi: Detecting skin cancer could soon become non-invasive. A technique developed by American scientists uses lasers pulsing at a thousand-trillionth of a second to diagnose skin cancers.
If proved 100% effective, this will be another option to biopsy — the present day standard procedure used by physicians in which a small piece of the affected area in the patient’s body is cut out for laboratory testing with a microscope.
Though in early days, the non-surgical screening for malignant skin cancers has till now successfully captured three-dimensional images of the chemical and structural changes underway beneath the surface of human skin.
According to Duke University scientists, this is the first approach that can target molecules like hemoglobin and melanin and get microscopic resolution images the equivalent of what a doctor would see if he or she were able to slice down to that particular point.
Warren Warren, director of Duke’s new Center for Molecular and Biomedical Imaging, said, “What we’re trying to do is find cancer signals we can get to without having to cut out the mole.”
The distributions of hemoglobin, a component of red blood cells, and melanin, a skin pigment, serve as early warning signs for skin cancer growth. But because skin scatters light strongly, simple microscopes cannot be used to locate those molecules except right at the surface.
Although laser methods have been developed to probe deeper down for some other molecules that can be made to glow, both melanin and hemoglobin remain dark and inaccessible using those methods.
Dr Ramesh Sarin, consultant, surgical oncology, at Apollo Hospital, said, “Skin cancer is not as common in India because we are of dark complexion and not that exposed to Sun’s rays. But a large number of people do suffer from it.” She added, “Any tumour in the body needs a biopsy to be sure — whether it’s with a needle or by cutting a little part — both for ethical and legal purposes. We need to be sure it is cancer or rule it out. With this non-invasive technology, we might not need a biopsy.”
The innovation uses a delicate interplay between two laser beams, each emitting a different colour of light. To keep the skin from overheating in the process, the laser pulses on for only femtoseconds — a thousand trillionth’s of a second — at a time. skin’s surface — more than enough for diagnosis.
What this is leading to is for a doctor to be able to touch a mole with a fiberoptic cable and characterise what is going on inside it. “Today, if you visit a dermatologist, he or she will probably see many moles on your body. But the difficulty is
The glow of the hemoglobin and melanin-bearing structures are then magnified by a microscope outside the skin and manipulated by computers to create cellular-scale images. The technique could enable doctors to see as much as a millimetre below the
trying to figure out which of those, if any, are dangerous,” the team said.

Websites let girls dress doll virtually

Websites let girls dress doll virtually
Matt Richtel & Brad Stone


Presleigh Montemayor often gets home after a long day and spends some time with her family. Then she logs onto the Internet, leaving the real world and joining a virtual one. But the digital utopia of Second Life is not for her. Presleigh, who is 9 years old, prefers a website called Cartoon Doll Emporium.
The site lets her chat with her friends and dress up virtual dolls, by placing blouses, hair styles and accessories on them. It beats playing with regular Barbies, said Presleigh, who lives near Dallas. “With Barbie, if you want clothes, it costs money,” she said. “You can do it on the Internet for free.”
Presleigh is part of a booming phenomenon, the growth of a new wave of interactive play sites for a young generation of Internet users, in particular girls.
Millions of children and adolescents are spending hours on these sites, which offer virtual versions of traditional play activities and cute animated worlds that encourage self-expression and safe communication. They are, in effect, like Facebook or MySpace with training wheels, aimed at an audience that may be getting its first exposure to the Web. While some of the sites charge subscription fees, others are supported by advertising. As is the case with children’s television, some critics wonder about the broader social cost of exposing children to marketing messages, and the amount of time spent on the sites makes some child advocates nervous. Regardless, the sites are growing in number and popularity, and they are doing so thanks to the word of mouth of babes, said Josh Bernoff, a social media and marketing industry analyst with Forrester Research. “They’re spreading rapidly among kids,” Bernoff said, noting that the enthusiasm has a viral analogy. “It’s like catching a runny nose that everyone in the classroom gets.” Visits to a group of seven virtual-world sites aimed at children and teenagers grew 68% in the year, according to a traffic measurement firm. Visits surge during summer vacation and other times when school is out. NYT NEWS SERVICE

Solar shield a quick-fix for climate change?

PROTECTING EARTH FROM SCALDING

It seems straight out of some sci-fi movie. Scientists have proposed a solar shield to protect humanity — not from some alien attack — but from a threat that’s imminent, global warming.
A solar shield that reflects some of the Sun’s radiation back into space would cool the climate within a decade and could be a quick-fix solution to climate change, reports New Scientist.
Because of their rapid effect, however, they should be deployed only as a last resort when “dangerous” climate change is imminent, the researchers warn. Solar shields are not a new idea — such “geoengineering” schemes to artificially cool the Earth’s climate are receiving growing interest, and include proposals to inject reflective aerosols into the stratosphere, deploying space-based solar reflectors and large-scale cloud seeding.
The shields are inspired by the cooling effects of large volcanic eruptions that blast sulphate particles into the stratosphere. There, the particles reflect part of the Sun’s radiation back into space, reducing the amount of heat that reaches the atmosphere, and so dampening the greenhouse effect. The 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines cooled Earth by a few tenths of a degree for several decades.
Ken Caldeira at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, in California, US, and Damon Matthews at Concordia University, Canada, used computer models to simulate the effects that a solar shield would have on the Earth’s climate if greenhouse gas emissions continued to rise along a “business as usual” scenario.
“We have been trying to pinpoint the one really bad thing that argues against geoengineering the climate,” says Caldeira. “But it is really hard to find.” His computer models simulated a gradually deployed shield that would compensate for the greenhouse effect of rising carbon dioxide concentrations. By the time CO₂ levels are double those of pre-industrial times — predicted to be at the end of the 21st century — the shield would need to block 8% of the Sun’s radiation.
The researchers found that a sulphur shield could act very quickly, lowering temperatures to around early 20th-century levels within a decade of being deployed. “The trouble is, the decadal timescale works both ways,” says Caldeira. A sulphate shield would need to be continuously replenished, and the models show that failing to do so would mean the Earth’s climate would suddenly be hit with the full warming effect of the CO₂ that has accumulated in the meantime. AGENCIES