Other News
Bush Seeks $10.5 Billion Storm-relief Package
President Bush asked Congress on Thursday for $10.5 billion in emergency assistance for the Gulf Coast communities battered by Hurricane Katrina, and it is expected to be approved quickly.
The money will finance ongoing rescue and recovery efforts in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama that are costing the federal government $500 million per day, according to Josh Bolton, director of the Office Management and Budget.
Bolton said the aid package is "a stop-gap measure" and that the administration will soon ask for more.
"This is an initial measure to ensure that there is no disruption in funding for the relief efforts," Bolton said. "We do anticipate going forward to the Congress again within the next few weeks to make an additional request that will be better informed about the likely scope and cost of the disaster."
Members of the House and Senate raced back early from their summer vacation to consider the bill, which leaders in both parties said would be approved.
The ultimate cost of the devastation wrought by Katrina has been estimated to be as high as $30 billion, but with search and rescue teams still pulling people from the water in New Orleans' flooded streets, any estimate falls into the realm of speculation.
The aid package, which will fund the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Department of Defense, was welcomed by members of both parties in Louisiana, the last stop on Bush's expected visit today to the Gulf Coast to survey the damage.
"It's a reasonable start," said Rep. William Jefferson, D-New Orleans. "The administration seems tuned into making this work. We all know that the ultimate amount will be much higher than that."
As he did after the tsunami devastation late last year in Indonesia, Bush asked his father, former President Bush, and former President Clinton, to join forces to raise money for Katrina's victims. The two raised more than $1 billion for tsunami victims.
Bush also announced his administration would shoulder the full cost of debris removal and rescue operations for the next two months. The decision came in response to requests from officials in Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama who said their state budgets would be overwhelmed if they had to pitch in for the cost.
Under federal rules, state and local governments are required to pick up 25 percent of the cost. Bush's action waives those rules for 60 days.
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Storm Blogs Offer Katrina Insight
The web has once again proved its worth as a news source as blogs offered a vivid description of the destruction caused by Hurricane Katrina.
As the storm carved a path through southern US, weblogs provided first-hand accounts of those affected.
Mainstream media outlets in New Orleans found the web an invaluable asset as their offices were flooded.
Web tracking firm Technorati reported that seven of the top 10 search terms were hurricane-related on Tuesday.
According to internet measurement firm Keynote Systems, some websites were unable to cope with demand for Katrina-related news.
Wikipedia, the user-generated net encyclopedia, provided video coverage of the hurricane and regularly updated reports on the storms history and effects. It was not a news story entirely dominated by citizen-led news and images as the London terrorist attacks had been.
In fact some of the best coverage came from media outlets utilizing the power of the web.
CBS affiliate WWL-TV turned to its news blog to provide constant bulletins on the hurricane's progress as it was forced to abandon its News Orleans studios due to rising waters.
New Orleans 's daily newspaper, the Times-Picayune published only in digital format on Tuesday.
Reporters joined with colleagues on its affiliated website NOLA.com to produce stories about the hurricane.
NOLA.com editor Jon Donley described in detail his view of the storm.
"Water appears about knee deep, whipped by the steady wind into whitecaps and breakers," he said on the newspaper's blog on Tuesday morning.
" New Orleans is sinking...I don't want to swim," he wrote.
The website also offered a community bulletin board for affected citizens to discuss the state of their neighbourhood and post messages for relatives caught up in the devastation.
A similar site - Katrinacheck-in.org - was rapidly set up to allow people to both reassure worried relatives that they were safe and allow others to search for loved ones they hadn't been able to get in contact with.
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New Genome Comparison Finds Chimps, Humans Very Similar at the DNA Level
The first comprehensive comparison of the genetic blueprints of humans and chimpanzees shows that our closest living relatives share perfect identity with 96 percent of our DNA sequence, an international research consortium reported this week.
In a paper published in the Sept. 1 issue of the journal Nature, the Chimpanzee Sequencing and Analysis Consortium, which is supported in part by the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), one of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), describes its landmark analysis comparing the genome of the chimp ( Pan troglodytes) with that of human ( Homo sapiens).
“The sequencing of the chimp genome is a historic achievement that is destined to lead to many more exciting discoveries with implications for human health,” said NHGRI Director Francis S. Collins, M.D., Ph.D. “As we build upon the foundation laid by the Human Genome Project, it’s become clear that comparing the human genome with the genomes of other organisms is an enormously powerful tool for understanding our own biology.”
The chimp sequence draft represents the first non-human primate genome and the fourth mammalian genome described in a major scientific publication. A draft of the human genome sequence was published in February 2001, a draft of the mouse genome sequence was published in December 2002 and a draft of the rat sequence was published in March 2004. The essentially complete human sequence was published in October 2004.
“As our closest living evolutionary relatives, chimpanzees are especially suited to teach us about ourselves,” said the study’s senior author, Robert Waterston, M.D., Ph.D., chair of the Department of Genome Sciences of the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle. “We still do not have in our hands the answer to a most fundamental question: What makes us human? But this genomic comparison dramatically narrows the search for the key biological differences between the species.”
The 67 researchers who took part in the Chimp Sequencing and Analysis Consortium share authorship of the Nature paper. Most of the work of sequencing and assembling the chimp genome was done at the Broad Institute of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass., and the Washington University School of Medicine in Saint Louis. In addition to those centers, the consortium included researchers from institutions elsewhere in the United States, as well as Israel, Italy, Germany and Spain.
The DNA used to sequence the chimp genome came from the blood of a male chimpanzee named Clint at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Atlanta. Clint died last year from heart failure at the relatively young age of 24, but two cell lines from the primate have been preserved at the Coriell Institute for Medical Research in Camden, N.J.
The consortium found that the chimp and human genomes are very similar and encode very similar proteins. The DNA sequence that can be directly compared between the two genomes is almost 99 percent identical. When DNA insertions and deletions are taken into account, humans and chimps still share 96 percent of their sequence. At the protein level, 29 percent of genes code for the same amino sequences in chimps and humans. In fact, the typical human protein has accumulated just one unique change since chimps and humans diverged from a common ancestor about 6 million years ago.
To put this into perspective, the number of genetic differences between humans and chimps is approximately 60 times less than that seen between human and mouse and about 10 times less than between the mouse and rat. On the other hand, the number of genetic differences between a human and a chimp is about 10 times more than between any two humans.
The researchers discovered that a few classes of genes are changing unusually quickly in both humans and chimpanzees compared with other mammals. These classes include genes involved in perception of sound, transmission of nerve signals, production of sperm and cellular transport of electrically charged molecules called ions. Researchers suspect the rapid evolution of these genes may have contributed to the special characteristics of primates, but further studies are needed to explore the possibilities.
The genomic analyses also showed that humans and chimps appear to have accumulated more potentially deleterious mutations in their genomes over the course of evolution than have mice, rats and other rodents. While such mutations can cause diseases that may erode a species’ overall fitness, they may have also made primates more adaptable to rapid environmental changes and enabled them to achieve unique evolutionary adaptations, researchers said.
Despite the many similarities found between human and chimp genomes, the researchers emphasized that important differences exist between the two species. About 35 million DNA base pairs differ between the shared portions of the two genomes, each of which, like most mammalian genomes, contains about 3 billion base pairs. In addition, there are another 5 million sites that differ because of an insertion or deletion in one of the lineages, along with a much smaller number of chromosomal rearrangements. Most of these differences lie in what is believed to be DNA of little or no function. However, as many as 3 million of the differences may lie in crucial protein-coding genes or other functional areas of the genome.
“As the sequences of other mammals and primates emerge in the next couple of years, we will be able to determine what DNA sequence changes are specific to the human lineage. The genetic changes that distinguish humans from chimps will likely be a very small fraction of this set,” said the study’s lead author, Tarjei S. Mikkelsen of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Among the genetic changes that researchers will be looking for are those that may be related to the human-specific features of walking upright on two feet, a greatly enlarged brain and complex language skills.
Although the statistical signals are relatively weak, a few classes of genes appear to be evolving more rapidly in humans than in chimps. The single strongest outlier involves genes that code for transcription factors, which are molecules that regulate the activity of other genes and that play key roles in embryonic development.
A small number of other genes have undergone even more dramatic changes. More than 50 genes present in the human genome are missing or partially deleted from the chimp genome. The corresponding number of gene deletions in the human genome is not yet precisely known. For genes with known functions, potential implications of these changes can already be discerned.
For example, the researchers found that three key genes involved in inflammation appear to be deleted in the chimp genome, possibly explaining some of the known differences between chimps and humans in respect to immune and inflammatory response. On the other hand, humans appear to have lost the function of the caspase-12 gene, which produces an enzyme that may help protect other animals against Alzheimer’s disease.
“This represents just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to exploring the genomic roots of our biological differences,” said one of the study’s co-authors LaDeana W. Hillier of the Genome Sequencing Center at Washington University School of Medicine. “As more is learned about other functional elements of the genome, we anticipate that other important differences outside of the protein-coding genes will emerge.”
Armed with the chimp sequence, researchers also scanned the entire human genome for deviations from normal mutation patterns. Such deviations may reveal regions of “selective sweeps,” which occur when a mutation arises in a population and is so advantageous that it spreads throughout the population within a few hundred generations and eventually becomes “normal.”
The researchers found six regions in the human genome that have strong signatures of selective sweeps over the past 250,000 years. One region contains more than 50 genes, while another contains no known genes and lies in an area that scientists refer to as a “gene desert.” Intriguingly, this gene desert may contain elements regulating the expression of a nearby protocadherin gene, which has been implicated in patterning of the nervous system. A seventh region with moderately strong signals contains the FOXP2 and CFTR genes. FOXP2 has been implicated in the acquisition of speech in humans. CFTR, which codes for a protein involved in ion transport and, if mutated, can cause the fatal disease cystic fibrosis, is thought to be the target of positive selection in European populations.
The chimp and human genome sequences, along with those of a wide range of other organisms such as mouse, honey bee, roundworm and yeast, can be accessed through the following public genome browsers: GenBank (www.ncbi.nih.gov/Genbank) at NIH's National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI); the UCSC Genome Browser (www.genome.ucsc.edu) at the University of California at Santa Cruz; the Ensembl Genome Browser (www.ensembl.org) at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute and the EMBL-European Bioinformatics Institute; the DNA Data Bank of Japan (http://www.ddbj.nig.ac.jp/); and EMBL-Bank (www.ebi.ac.uk/embl/index.html) at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory's Nucleotide Sequence Database.
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NASA's Durable Spirit Sends Intriguing New Images From Mars
Working atop a range of Martian hills, NASA's Spirit rover is rewarding researchers with tempting scenes filled with evidence of past planet environments.
The summit sits 82 meters (269 feet) above the edge of the surrounding plains. It is 106 meters (348 feet) higher than the site where Spirit landed nearly 20 months ago. Spirit and twin rover, Opportunity, successfully completed their three-month prime missions in April 2004. They have inspected dozens of rocks and soil targets since then, continuing their pursuit of geological evidence about formerly wet conditions on Mars.
The crest of "Husband Hill" offers Spirit's views of possible routes into a basin to the south with apparently layered outcrops. Shortly after Spirit landed, it observed a cluster of seven hills about 3 kilometers (2 miles) east of its landing site. NASA proposed naming the range "Columbia Hills" in tribute to the last crew of Space Shuttle Columbia. The tallest of the hills commemorates Rick Husband, Columbia's commander.
Volcanic rocks covering the plain Spirit crossed on its way to the hills bore evidence of only slight alteration by water. When Spirit reached the base of the hills five months after landing, it immediately began finding rocks with wetter histories.
"This climb was motivated by science," said Steve Squyres of Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y. Squyres is principal investigator for the rovers' science instruments. "Every time Spirit has gained altitude, we've found different rock types. Also, we're doing what any field geologist would do in an area like this: climbing to a good vantage point for plotting a route," he added. Researchers are viewing possible routes south to apparently layered ledges and to a feature dubbed "home plate," which might be a plateau of older rock or a filled-in crater.
The landing site and the Columbia Hills are within Gusev Crater, a bowl about 150 kilometers (95 miles) in diameter. It was selected for the Spirit mission because the shape of the terrain suggests the crater once held a lake. Volcanic deposits appear to have covered any sign of ancient lakebed geology out on the plain, but scientists say the hills expose older layers that have been lifted and tipped by a meteorite impact or other event.
Both Spirit and Opportunity have been extremely successful. Their solar panels are generating plenty of energy thanks to repeated dust-cleaning events. Spirit has driven 4,827 meters (3.00 miles), and Opportunity 5,737 meters (3.56 miles).
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Caltech, MIT Chemists Look for Better Ways to Use Chemical Bonds to Store Solar Energy
With gasoline prices hovering at $3 per gallon, probably few Americans need convincing that another energy crisis is imminent. But what precisely is to be done about our future energy needs is still a puzzle. There's talk about a "hydrogen economy," but hydrogen itself poses some formidable challenges.
The key challenge is, of course, how to make the hydrogen in the first place. The best and cheapest methods currently available involve burning coal or natural gas, which means more greenhouse gases and more pollution. Adopting the cheapest method by using natural gas would merely result in replacing our dependence on foreign oil with a dependence on foreign gas.
"Clearly, one clean way to get hydrogen is by splitting water with sunlight," says Harry Gray, who is the Beckman Professor of Chemistry at the California Institute of Technology.
Gray is involved with several other Caltech and MIT chemists in a research program they call "Powering the Planet." The broadest goal of the project is to "pursue efficient, economical ways to store solar energy in the form of chemical bonds," according to the National Science Foundation (NSF). With a new seed grant from the NSF and the possibility for additional funding after the initial three-year period, the Caltech group says they now have the wherewithal to try out some novel ideas to produce energy cheaply and cleanly.
"Presently, this country spends more money in 10 minutes at the gas pump than it puts into a year of solar-energy research," says Nathan S. Lewis, the Argyros Professor and professor of chemistry. "But the sun provides more energy to the planet in an hour than all the fossil energy consumed worldwide in a year."
The reason that Gray and Lewis advocate the use of solar energy is that no other renewable resource has enough practical potential to provide the world with the energy that it needs. But the sun sets every night, and so use of solar energy on a large scale will necessarily require storing the energy for use upon society's demand, day or night, summer or winter, rain or shine.
As for non-renewable resources, nuclear power plants would do the job, but 10,000 new ones would have to be built. In other words, one new nuclear plant would have to come on-line every other day somewhere in the world for the next 50 years.
The devices used in a simple experiment in the high school chemistry lab to make hydrogen by electrolysis are not currently the cheapest ones to use for mass production. In fact, the tabletop device that breaks water into hydrogen and oxygen is perfectly clean (in other words, no carbon emissions), but it requires a platinum catalyst. And platinum has been selling all year for more than $800 per ounce.
The solution? Find something cheaper than platinum to act as a catalyst. There are other problems, but this is one that the Caltech group is starting to address. In a research article now in press, Associate Professor of Chemistry Jonas Peters and his colleagues demonstrate a way that cobalt can be used for catalysis of hydrogen formation from water.
"This is a good first example for us," says Peters. "A key goal is to try to replace the current state-of-the-art platinum catalyst, which is extremely expensive, with something like cobalt, or even better, iron or nickel. We have to find a way to cheaply make solar-derived fuel if we are to ever really enable widespread use of solar energy as society's main power source."
"It's also a good example because it shows that the NSF grant will get us working together," adds Gray. "This and other research results will involve the joint use of students and postdocs, rather than individual groups going it alone."
In addition to the lab work, the Caltech chemists also have plans to involve other entities outside campus--both for practical and educational reasons. One proposal is to fit out a school so that it will run entirely on solar energy. The initial conversion would likely be done with existing solar panels, but the facility would also serve to provide the researchers with a fairly large-scale "lab" where they can test out new ideas.
"We'd build it so that we could troubleshoot solar converters we're working on," explains Gray.
The ultimate lab goal is to have a "dream machine with no wires in it," Gray says. "We visualize a solar machine with boundary layers, where water comes in, hydrogen goes out one side, and oxygen goes out the other."
Such a machine will require a lot of work and a number of innovations and breakthroughs, but Lewis says the future of the planet depends on moving away from fossil fuels.
"If somebody doesn't figure this out, and fast, we're toast, both literally and practically, due to a growing dependence on foreign oil combined with the increasing projections of global warming."
The NSF grant was formally announced August 11 as a means of funding a new group of chemical bonding centers that will allow research teams to pursue problems in a manner "that's flexible, tolerant of risk, and open to thinking far outside the box." The initial funding to the Caltech and MIT group for the "Powering the Planet" initiative is $1.5 million for three years, with the possibility of $2 to $3 million per year thereafter if the work of the center appears promising.
In addition to Gray, Lewis, and Peters, the other Caltech personnel include Jay Winkler and Bruce Brunschwig, both chemists at Caltech's Beckman Institute. The two faculty members from MIT involved in the initiative are Dan Nocera and Kit Cummins.
Jonas Peters's paper will appear in an upcoming issue of the journal Chemical Communications. In addition to Peters and Lewis, the other authors are Brunschwig, Xile Hu, a postdoctoral researcher in chemistry at Caltech, and Brandi Cossairt, a Caltech undergraduate.
