Our research group at the University of Oklahoma is leading NASA's latest Earth Venture Mission, the Geostationary Carbon Observatory, or GeoCarb. This mission will place an advanced payload on a satellite to study the Earth from more than 22,000 miles above the Earth's equator. Observing changes in concentrations of three key carbon gases – carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4) and carbon monoxide (CO) – from day to day and year to year will help us to make a major leap forward in understanding natural and human changes in the carbon cycle. Read more
People who are in a deep slumber may not be able to say whether they're dreaming, but their brain waves might. In a new study, scientists say they can predict whether people are dreaming by looking at the brain activity in a region at the back of the brain, which they dub the posterior cortical "hot zone." "Monitoring this posterior 'hot zone' in real time predicted whether an individual reported dreaming or the absence of dream experiences … suggesting that it may constitute a core correlate of conscious experiences in sleep," the researchers wrote in the study, published online April 10 in the journal Nature Neuroscience. Read more
New research from Yale University reveals four genes linked to cystic diseases of the liver and kidney. These findings provide a more complete definition of the spectrum of dominant human polycystic diseases. Researchers need to identify which gene mutations cause the disease in order to diagnose and find treatments for a genetic disorder. Polycystic kidney disease (PKD) is a common and often devastating genetic disease that results in cysts in both the liver and kidney. Cysts are pockets of fluid in an organ that develop over time and crowd out the normal functioning parts. The more common form of polycystic kidney disease, which affects adults and approximately half of their children, typically leads to kidney failure by the sixth decade of life. It is caused by mutations in the genes PKD1 or PKD2. The more rare juvenile form is caused by mutations inherited from both parents in a gene called PKHD1. Read more
The types of bacteria in your mouth may be linked to your risk of certain cancers. By studying the links between bacteria and cancer, scientists one day hope to be able to tell a person what his or her cancer risk is based on the bacteria present in his or her body, said Jiyoung Ahn, an associate professor of epidemiology at the New York University School of Medicine. Perhaps more important, Ahn said, these bacteria and microbes, collectively called the microbiome, could give people information about what they can do to lower their risk. Read more
NASA has launched a new website that will allow the public search and download out-of-this-world images, videos and audio files by keyword and metadata searches from NASA.gov. The NASA Image and Video Library website consolidates imagery spread across more than 60 collections into one searchable location. https://images.nasa.gov
NASA Image and Video Library allows users to search, discover and download a treasure trove of more than 140,000 NASA images, videos and audio files from across the agency’s many missions in aeronautics, astrophysics, Earth science, human spaceflight, and more. Users now can embed content in their own sites and choose from multiple resolutions to download. The website also displays the metadata associated with images. Read more
The vaccine consists of strands of genetic material known as messenger RNA, which are packaged into a nanoparticle that delivers the RNA into cells. Once inside cells, the RNA is translated into proteins that provoke an immune response from the host, but the RNA does not integrate itself into the host genome, making it potentially safer than a DNA vaccine or vaccinating with the virus itself. “It functions almost like a synthetic virus, except it’s not pathogenic and it doesn’t spread,” says Omar Khan, a postdoc at MIT’s Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research and an author of the new study. “We can control how long it’s expressed, and it’s RNA so it will never integrate into the host genome.” This research also yielded a new benchmark for evaluating the effectiveness of other Zika vaccine candidates, which could help others who are working toward the same goal. Read more
Scientists have long believed that the central amygdala, a structure located deep within the brain, is linked with fear and responses to unpleasant events. However, a team of MIT neuroscientists has now discovered a circuit in this structure that responds to rewarding events. In a study of mice, activating this circuit with certain stimuli made the animals seek those stimuli further. The researchers also found a circuit that controls responses to fearful events, but most of the neurons in the central amygdala are involved in the reward circuit, they report. “It’s surprising that positive-behavior-promoting subsets are so abundant, which is contrary to what many people in the field have been thinking,” says Susumu Tonegawa, the Picower Professor of Biology and Neuroscience and director of the RIKEN-MIT Center for Neural Circuit Genetics at the Picower Institute for Learning and Memory. Read more
A team of international scientists found a further 54 potential planets, meaning that in all the researchers might have discovered a full 114 planets. And at least some of those might be like Earth, and able to support life, the researchers have said. One of the exoplanets was a hot "super-Earth" that has a rocky surface and is found in the fourth nearest star system to our own. That planet, known as Gliese 411-b, could suggest that all the stars near our own sun have planets orbiting them – and as such that those too might be like Earth and have the conditions for supporting alien life. The results are based on almost 61,000 individual observations of 1,600 stars taken over a 20-year period by US astronomers using the Keck-I telescope in Hawaii. Readmore
As the world is fighting hard to end hunger in the world by 2050 diseases are rupturing too. Scientists have discovered dangerous pests which attacks young maize plants at high rate. The disastrous insect is called armyworm. The armyworm is destroying young maize plants across Africa and could reach Asia and the Mediterranean in the next few years, threatening agricultural trade. Readmore
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