Other News
Discovery of Distant Planet Offers Hope for Future Finds
The discovery of a new planet by astronomers from institutions worldwide, including Princeton, offers greater hope that researchers can eventually find planets that are closer in distance and size to Earth.
The new planet is one of the most distant ever discovered, at roughly 15,000 light years from Earth, and is about three to five times the size of Jupiter. It is the second planet discovered in the last year through a method known as gravitational microlensing, which allows astronomers to detect changes in the brightness of a star if a planet passes before it.
While both planets found in the past year are estimated at a similar size and distance, researchers believe the technique will lead to the discovery of smaller planets closer to Earth. Scientists are eager to study these Earth-like planets to understand their chemical makeup and to determine whether they might support some form of life.
Bohdan Paczynski, the Lyman Spitzer Professor of Theoretical Astrophyics at Princeton is the co-founder of the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (OGLE) with Andrzej Udalski of Warsaw University. He noted that the two recent discoveries, as well as expected future findings by OGLE, will help inform the work of NASA as it tries to determine the probability of locating planets comparable in size to Earth around nearby stars. One of NASA's main goals over the next decade is to obtain images of such planets through a program known as the Terrestrial Planet Finder.
Gravitational microlensing occurs when a massive object in space, such as a star or even a black hole, crosses in front of a star shining in the background. The object's strong gravitational pull bends the light rays from the more distant star and magnifies them like a lens.
The newest planet discovery came after Udalski noticed in March that a star located thousands of light years from Earth was starting to move in front of another star that was even farther away, near the center of our galaxy. A month later, when the more distant star had brightened a hundred-fold, astronomers from OGLE and another group, the Microlensing Follow Up Network (MicroFUN), detected a rapid distortion of the brightening. The new pattern indicated that a planet was around the star in front.
Because the method allowed the scientists to monitor the light signal with near-perfect precision, it could easily have revealed an even smaller planet, said Andrew Gould, professor of astronomy at Ohio State and leader of the MicroFUN collaboration.
The collaborators have submitted a paper announcing the planet to Astrophysical Journal Letters and have posted the paper online. The researchers have secured the use of NASA's Hubble Space Telescope in late May to examine the star that the planet is orbiting.
OGLE finds more than 600 "microlensing events" per year using a telescope at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile (operated by Carnegie Institution of Washington). MicroFUN is a collaboration of astronomers from the United States, Korea, New Zealand and Israel that picks out those events that are most likely to reveal planets and monitors them from telescopes around the world.
Other institutions involved in the project include: the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Universidad de Concepcion in Chile, University of Manchester in the United Kingdom, California Institute of Technology, American Museum of Natural History, Chungbuk National University in Korea, Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute, Massy University in New Zealand, Nagoya University in Japan and the University of Auckland in New Zealand.
The OGLE collaboration is funded by the Polish Ministry of Scientific Research and Information Technology, the Foundation for Polish Science, the National Science Foundation and NASA. Some MicroFUN team members received funding from the National Science Foundation, Harvard College Observatory, Korea Science and Engineering Foundation and Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute.
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Sheep Genome Project on Bovine Fast-Track
Australian researchers are part of an international consortium developing a virtual sheep genome map to fast-track application of the bovine genome sequence for sheep research.
The project will ultimately lead to sequencing of the sheep genome.
CSIRO Livestock Industries Bioinformatics project leader, Dr Brian Dalrymple, says the similarities between the cow and sheep genomes will simplify the mapping task.
"From my position in front of a computer, you could say sheep are cattle with wool," Dr Dalrymple says.
"The ovine and bovine genomes have a greater than 90 percent genetic sequence similarity. Most of the protein building blocks of mammals are remarkably similar, it is just the way the blocks are put together that accounts for many of the physical differences that we see between a sheep and a cow."
The virtual sheep genome project involves limited sequencing of long segments of sheep genomic DNA and positioning this data onto the framework of the publicly available bovine genome sequence.
This will enable construction of a virtual sheep genome map containing predictions of the locations of most sheep genes without the expense of sequencing the entire sheep genome.
Dr Dalrymple will be working with SheepGenomics and AgResearch in New Zealand, as part of a trans-Tasman group of researchers undertaking computer analysis of the sheep sequences.
SheepGenomics - established by Meat and Livestock Australia, Australian Wool Innovation and a number of Australasian research organisations - is providing funding for the project which also recently received an additional US$1 million from the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) through Utah State University.
This will enable researchers to more rapidly isolate specific genes from the sheep genome that could be used primarily to improve meat and wool production and quality and parasite resistance," Dr Rob Forage, Program Director of SheepGenomics says.
Dr Dalrymple expects the initial sequencing work to be completed by the end of the year.
USDA Under Secretary for Research, Dr Joseph Jen, says international collaborations like these are vital for promoting worldwide use and understanding of important scientific information.
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Weak Salmon Run Closes Some Northwest Fisheries
Idaho , Oregon, and Washington have ended commercial fishing in the Columbia River after this year's salmon run fell drastically short of expectation. Fisheries experts had expected 254,000 chinook salmon would pass the Bonneville Dam during the annual run, but only 52,000 have passed the dam.
A National Research Council report, Managing the Columbia River: Instream Flows, Water Withdrawals, and Salmon Survival, discusses changes that have affected salmon, including increasing water temperatures, river flow velocities and predation rates. Large salmon returns between 2001 and 2003 were considered by many to be the result of favorable ocean conditions, but the report notes that many variables make it difficult to explain precisely the numbers of salmon that return to the mouth of the Columbia River.
Another report, Upstream: Salmon and Society in the Pacific Northwest, explains in detail the adverse effects of dams and other human activities on salmon in the Columbia, and how changes in ocean conditions and climate influence these fish populations, as well. The report also looks at the impact of hatcheries, introduced to mitigate the problems caused by dams but which have actually had population, ecological, and genetic effects on wild salmon stocks.
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Dainty Pink Mt. Diablo Buckwheat Rediscovered
A petite pink flower that hasn't been seen in 70 years has been rediscovered on the flanks of Mount Diablo in Contra Costa County by a University of California, Berkeley, graduate student.
The Mount Diablo buckwheat, Eriogonum truncatum, "has been a Holy Grail in the East Bay for several decades," according to UC Berkeley botanist Barbara Ertter, who confirmed the identification in the field on Friday. Last reported in 1936, the flower was presumed extinct, she said, because its habitat has been overrun by introduced grasses. It is one of only three plants, all of them rare, that are endemic to Mount Diablo.
Michael Park had the missing buckwheat on his mind when he hiked out to a remote corner of Mount Diablo State Park on May 10, to a section that had been acquired and donated to the park by the organization Save Mount Diablo. Following a different routine from his normal survey, he stumbled across the plants - about 20 in all - in full bloom, looking like pink baby's breath. Less than eight inches tall, the annuals are inconspicuous, and were growing in a balding area between full chaparral and non-native grassland.
Park's discovery thrilled native plant enthusiasts and conservationists like Seth Adams, director of land programs for Save Mount Diablo, a non-profit group dedicated to preserving Mount Diablo's peaks and foothills through land acquisition and other preservation strategies.
The discovery site, a full day's hike from public trailheads in the park, is being kept secret for now so that admirers won't flock to the area and inadvertently destroy the rediscovered plant.
Ertter, the curator of western North American flora at UC Berkeley's Jepson Herbarium and co-author of the 2002 revision of Mary Bowerman's "The Flowering Plants and Ferns of Mount Diablo, California," noted that one priority should be to gather seeds and start cultivating the buckwheat at the UC Botanical Garden. Cultivated specimens conserved by the garden, which is part of the Center for Plant Conservation network, will provide a reserve of seeds in case the species declines further.
Park, 35, began surveying the flora of Mount Diablo three years ago as part of Ertter's ongoing surveillance of the area's plants. Funded by the Jepson Herbarium's Heckard Fund, Park took on the task of surveying the plants on land newly acquired by Mt. Diablo State Park. Much of this land was grazing land, but Park was pleased to discover that the many introduced weeds have not pushed out the native plants.
Park included many of his findings in his senior thesis, which he completed last spring under the supervision of Bruce Baldwin, UC Berkeley professor of integrative biology and curator of the Jepson Herbarium.
Now finishing his first year as a graduate student in the Department of Integrative Biology, Park found the buckwheat while completing his survey during a prime time of the year, when plants are flowering profusely after one of the latest and rainiest winters in decades. After he discovered the small population not far from where it last was reported 69 years ago by Bowerman, Park "vacillated back and forth between excitement and denial." Finally accepting the fact that he had been in the right place at the right time, he divulged his secret to Ertter and alerted the park service.
Two days later, he hiked with two fellow graduate students to take photos, which convinced Ertter he had indeed found the elusive buckwheat. First reported in 1862, there are only seven historical records of the plant, the last in 1936, when Bowerman, one of the first women to receive a Ph.D. in botany from UC Berkeley, collected a sample from Mount Diablo. She published her book of the flora of the mountain in 1944, as the summation of her dissertation work done under the guidance of Willis Linn Jepson, whose subsequent endowment established the Jepson Herbarium. Bowerman later went on to become one of the founders of Save Mount Diablo.
The buckwheat is important, Ertter said, because it is the only presumed extinct plant restricted to the East Bay and one of only three plants endemic to the mountain, that is, found there and nowhere else. It has been found as far afield as Antioch and Solano counties, though not in the past 69 years.
Park suspects that the unseasonably late rains may have produced the flowering, since many native plants produce seeds that remain dormant in the soil for decades until the right moisture conditions make them germinate. Brent Mishler, UC Berkeley professor of integrative biology and director of the Jepson and University Herbaria, noted that this is typical of plants in Mediterranean-type climates like California.
