Other News
$150 Million TeraGrid Award Heralds New Era for Scientific Computing
The National Science Foundation (NSF) has made a five-year, $150 million award to operate and enhance the Extensible Terascale Facility (ETF)--also called "TeraGrid." Researchers and educators around the country can now access a range of computing resources that will accelerate advances in science and engineering.
TeraGrid--built over the past 4 years--is the world's largest, most comprehensive distributed cyberinfrastructure for open scientific research. Through high-performance network connections, TeraGrid integrates high-performance computers, data resources and tools, and high-end experimental facilities around the country.
The scientists and engineers responsible for TeraGrid operations will work closely with researchers whose science requires powerful computing resources. For example, researchers using TeraGrid are exploring functions of decoded genomes, how the brain works, the constitution of the universe, disease diagnosis, and real-time weather forecasting to predict the exact locations of tornado and storm threats. TeraGrid will also help engineers design better aircraft via realistic simulations of new designs.
The new TeraGrid award includes US$48 million to provide overall architecture, software integration, operations and coordination of user support. The University of Chicago will lead this effort under the guidance of Charlie Catlett, director of the TeraGrid project and former chair of Global Grid Forum. An additional $100 million will provide for operation, management and user support of TeraGrid resources at eight resource provider sites.
TeraGrid's creators and collaborators are developing a "science gateways" initiative to allow more researchers and educators access to TeraGrid capabilities, tailored to their own communities, through their own desktop computers. Science gateway projects are aimed at supporting access to TeraGrid via web portals, desktop applications or via other grids. An initial set of 10 gateways will address new scientific opportunities in fields from bioinformatics to nanotechnology as well as interoperation between TeraGrid and other grid infrastructures.
Such access will enable researchers to analyze terabytes--trillions of bytes--of data collected by scientific instruments, telescopes, satellites and remote sensors. TeraGrid will allow researchers to manipulate enormous data sets in novel ways to gain new insights into research questions and societal problems.
George Karniadakis, a professor of Applied Mathematics at Brown University, has long been a leader in applying NSF computing resources to a variety of fluid dynamics problems. Karniadakis now uses computational resources at four different TeraGrid sites simultaneously.
Thomas Jordan, director of the Southern California Earthquake Center at the University of Southern California, leads an effort to combine computational models from several disciplines to shed new light on the consequences of earthquakes.
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China Plans Unmanned Moon Mission By 2007
China plans to launch its first unmanned lunar flight by 2007 in a three-phase mission that aims to bring back rock samples, state media said on Tuesday.
In the second stage, a lunar vehicle would land on the moon by 2012 and by 2017 the rock samples could be collected, the report said quoting aerospace officials.
China has developed an ambitious space program since its first Long March rocket blasted off in 1970. It became the third country to successfully send a man into space in October 2003 and regularly sends up research satellites.
China 's lunar orbiter weighed more than two tons and was expected to fly for a year, collecting information for a mapping of the moon's surface and studying its mineral content, Luan Enjie, chief commander of China's lunar exploration program, said in a China Daily interview.
He did not say when China might be sending an astronaut to the moon, but said the 2017 mission would provide data for a manned expedition.
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Major Stem Cell Research Breakthrough Announced
Scientists at the Universities of Edinburgh and Milan have made a major breakthrough in tackling neurological conditions like Parkinson's and Alzheimer's. They are the first in the world to develop a new technique to grow pure brain stem cells helping to discover more about these diseases.
The research is published online this week, in open-access journal PLoS Biology. The commercial arm of the Institute for Stem Cell Research has been granted a license to grow these cells which should speed up the race to find a cure.
In the body, stem cells divide to produce both copies of themselves and other, more specialised, cell types. Until now, scientists had not been able to sustain the ability of neural stem cells to produce copies of themselves when grown in a dish. This meant that the population of cells in the dish would always become mixed, with only a few stem cells and many more specialized cells. By changing the growth conditions for the cells, the Edinburgh and Milan labs have for the first time established pure stem cell divisions, thus avoiding the unwanted differentiated cells.
Says researcher Luciano Conti: “We applied techniques developed to control the behavior of embryonic stem cells to our neural stem cells. The knowledge we already have about embryonic stem cells helped us to understand and control these more specialized stem cells.” The scientists have replicated their initial findings with mouse cells, using human stem cells.
The research teams made different cell types of the nervous system from the neural stem cells. All were in perfect working order, suggesting that the neural stem cells can be used to generate, and study in detail, the cells that are affected in neurodegenerative disorders, like Huntington’s and Parkinson’s disease. Researchers will then be able to study the cellular and molecular processes that go wrong in disease - a crucial first step in developing effective, safe therapies.
Drugs that are being developed to interfere with the onset and/or progression of the disease may now be tested on the neural stem cells, or on specific cell types made from them. Such an approach will reduce the number of animals used in this type of research.
The researchers also feel that their work may be a step in the right direction for using stem cells to replace damaged tissue. “The purity of the cells, and the fact that they do not make tumours, means they should be valuable for studying the potential of transplantation to repair damage,” says Steve Pollard, one of the Edinburgh researchers.
Professor Austin Smith, leading the Edinburgh team, believes that sharing information and knowledge is critical to take stem cell research forward. “Collaboration with our colleagues in Milan, through the EuroStemCell project, made our breakthrough possible. We have published in an open-access journal and included comprehensive practical protocols so that other researchers can replicate and advance this work.”
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NASA's Swift Satellite Finds Newborn Black Holes
Scientists using NASA's Swift satellite say they have found newborn black holes, just seconds old, in a confused state of existence. The holes are consuming material falling into them while somehow propelling other material away at great speeds.
These black holes are born in massive star explosions. An initial blast obliterates the star, yet the chaotic black hole activity appears to re-energize the explosion several times in just a few minutes. This is a dramatically different view of star death, one that entails multiple explosive outbursts and not just a single bang, as previously thought.
"Stars are exploding two, three and sometimes four times in the first minutes following the initial explosion," said Prof. David Burrows of Penn State, University Park, Pa. "First comes a blast of gamma rays followed by intense pulses of X-rays. The energies involved are much greater than anyone expected," he added.
Scientists have seen this phenomenon in nearly half of the longer gamma-ray bursts detected by Swift. These gamma-ray bursts are the most powerful explosions known. They are forerunners of a massive star explosion called a hypernova, which is bigger than a supernova. Using Swift, scientists are finally able to see gamma-ray bursts within minutes after the trigger, instead of hours or days, and are privy to newborn black hole activity.
Until this latest Swift discovery, scientists assumed a simple scenario of a single explosion followed by a graceful afterglow of the dying embers. The new scenario of a blast followed by a series of powerful "hiccups" is particularly evident in a gamma-ray burst from May 2, 2005, named GRB 050502B. This burst lasted 17 seconds during the early morning hours in the constellation Leo. About 500 seconds later, Swift detected a spike in X-ray light about 100 times brighter than anything seen before.
Previously there had been hints of an "X-ray bump" between the burst and afterglow in previous gamma-ray bursts, coming a minute or so after the burst. Swift has seen more than one dozen clear cases of multiple explosions. There are several theories to describe this newly discovered phenomenon and most point to the presence of a newborn black hole.
"The newly formed black hole immediately gets to work," said Prof. Peter Meszaros of Penn State, head of the Swift theory team. "We aren't clear on the details yet, but it appears to be messy. Matter is falling into the black hole, which releases a great amount of energy. Other matter gets blasted away from the black hole and flies out into the interstellar medium. This is by no means a smooth operation," he added.
Another theory is the jet of material shooting away from the dead star starts to fall back onto itself, creating shockwaves in the jet core that ram together blobs of gas and produce X-ray light.
"None of this was realized before simply because we couldn't get to the scene of the explosion fast enough," said Dr. Neil Gehrels of NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md., Swift principal investigator. "Swift has the unique ability to detect bursts and turn its X-ray and ultraviolet-optical telescopes to the explosion's embers within minutes. As such, Swift is detecting new burst details that might rewrite theory," Gehrels said.
Swift carries three main instruments: the Burst Alert Telescope (BAT); X-ray Telescope (XRT); and the Ultraviolet/Optical Telescope (UVOT). Today's announcement is based largely on XRT data. The XRT was built at Penn State with partners at the Brera Astronomical Observatory in Italy and the University of Leicester in England.
Swift was launched in November 2004. It is a NASA mission in partnership with the Italian Space Agency and the Particle Physics and Astronomy Research Council, United Kingdom. Swift is managed by Goddard. Penn State controls science and flight operations from the Mission Operations Center in University Park, Pa. The spacecraft was built in collaboration with national laboratories, universities and international partners.
A paper discussing these findings appears online today on Science Express and in the September 9 issue of Science. Burrows is lead author of the paper.
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Cornell Conservationists Propose Wild Animals to Roam Parts of North America
If Cornell University researchers and their colleagues have their way, cheetahs, lions, elephants, camels and other large wild animals may soon roam parts of North America.
"If we only have 10 minutes to present this idea, people think we're nuts," said Harry Greene, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Cornell. "But if people hear the one-hour version, they realize they haven't thought about this as much as we have. Right now, we are investing all of our megafauna hopes on one continent -- Africa."
Greene and a number of other highly eminent ecologists and conservationists have authored a paper, published in the latest issue of Nature, advocating the establishment of vast ecological history parks with large mammals, mostly from Africa, that are close relatives or counterparts to extinct Pleistocene-period animals that once roamed the Great Plains.
The plan, which is called Pleistocene rewilding and is intended to be a proactive approach to conservation, would help revitalize ecosystems that have been compromised by the extinction of many of the continent's large mammals, many of them predators. It would also offer ecotourism and land-management jobs to help the struggling economies in rural areas of the Great Plains and Southwest.
During the Pleistocene era -- between 1.8 million to about 10,000 years ago -- North America's ecosystems were much more diverse. As animals became extinct, many gaps developed in the web of interactions that makes up a healthy ecosystem. These gaps could be filled by restoring animals that are counterparts to the extinct Pleistocene-period animals, the researchers said.
For example, 4 million years of being hunted by the now extinct American cheetah (Acinonyx trumani) was probably why the pronghorn (Antilocapra americana) -- an antelopelike animal found throughout the deserts of the American Southwest -- developed such blinding speed, clocking in at around 60 miles an hour. Introducing free-ranging African cheetahs back to the Southwest, the scientists assert, could restore strong interactions with pronghorns and provide endangered cheetahs with new habitat.
Other living species that are counterparts to Pleistocene-era animals in North America include feral horses (Equus caballus), wild asses (E. asinus), Bactrian camels (Camelus bactrianus), Asian (Elephas maximus) and African (Loxodonta africana) elephants and lions (Panthera leo).
"Obviously, gaining public acceptance is going to be a huge issue, especially when you talk about reintroducing predators," said the paper's lead author, Josh Donlan, a graduate student in Cornell's Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, pointing to the controversy that raged when wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park in 1995. "There are going to have to be some major attitude shifts. That includes realizing predation is a natural role, and that people are going to have to take precautions."
A pilot study will test the rewilding notion by releasing the endangered Bolson tortoise on a private ranch in New Mexico. The tortoise, which can weigh up to 100 pounds and once thrived in Arizona, New Mexico, Texas and Mexico, now only survives in a small area of northern Mexico.
Evidence shows that animals near the top of the food chain play important roles in structuring ecological systems and maintaining biodiversity, according to the paper. These keystone species -- animals that contribute to diversity of life and which the rewilding researchers would like to reintroduce -- play a disproportionate role in an ecosystem. Extinction of a keystone species can lead to homogenous landscapes with less biodiversity and different species proliferating and dominating the ecosystem.
For example, when humans almost wiped out wolves and grizzly bears in the United States, the species dynamics shifted. The loss of wolves and grizzlies allowed elk populations to soar. Elk, in turn, ate willows, a favorite food of beavers. As a result, along winter elk ranges in Colorado, beaver populations have declined by 80 to 90 percent. With fewer beavers to create dams that raise water tables, fewer wetlands developed to support willows. Today, there are 60 percent fewer willows in parts of Colorado where beavers have declined.
Similarly, after major predators became extinct in Montana and Wyoming, the number of moose, which eat willows, increased in the Yellowstone National Park area. The loss of willows has negatively impacted the numbers of nesting migrant songbirds.
Co-authors of the Nature paper include University of Arizona professor of geoscience Paul Martin, who had the original vision for Pleistocene, and Michael Soulé, the past president and current board member and science adviser of the Wildlands Project and professor emeritus at the University of California-Santa Cruz.
The Turner Endangered Species Fund, the Environmental Leadership Program and the Lichen Foundation supported the research.
