we-are-star-stuff: Astronomers searching for the building blocks of life in a giant dust cloud at the heart of the Milky Way have concluded that it would taste vaguely of raspberries. The unanticipated discovery follows years of work by astronomers who trained their 30m radio telescope on the enormous ball of dust and gas in the hope of spotting complex molecules that are vital for life. Finding amino acids in interstellar space is a Holy Grail for astrobiologists, as this would raise the possibility of life emerging on other planets after being seeded with the molecules. In the latest survey, astronomers sifted through thousands of signals from Sagittarius B2, a vast dust cloud at the centre of our galaxy. While they failed to find evidence for amino acids, they did find a substance called ethyl formate, the chemical responsible for the flavour of raspberries. “It does happen to give raspberries their flavour, but there are many other molecules that are needed to make space raspberries,” Arnaud Belloche, an astronomer at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, told the Guardian. Curiously, ethyl formate has another distinguishing characteristic: it also smells of rum. The astronomers used the IRAM telescope in Spain to analyse electromagnetic radiation emitted by a hot and dense region of Sagittarius B2 that surrounds a newborn star. Radiation from the star is absorbed by molecules floating around in the gas cloud, which is then re-emitted at different energies depending on the type of molecule. While scouring their data, the team also found evidence for the lethal chemical propyl cyanide in the same cloud. The two molecules are the largest yet discovered in deep space. Dr Belloche and his colleague Robin Garrod at Cornell University in New York have collected nearly 4,000 distinct signals from the cloud but have only analysed around half of these. “So far we have identified around 50 molecules in our survey, and two of those had not been seen before,” said Belloche. Last year, the team came tantalisingly close to finding amino acids in space with the discovery of a molecule that can be used to make them, called amino acetonitrile. The latest discoveries have boosted the researchers’ morale because the molecules are as large as the simplest amino acid, glycine. Amino acids are the building blocks of proteins and are widely seen as being critical for complex life to exist anywhere in the universe. “The difficulty in searching for complex molecules is that the best astronomical sources contain so many different molecules that their ‘fingerprints’ overlap and are difficult to disentangle,” Belloche said. The molecules are thought to form when chemicals that already exist on some dust grains, such as ethanol, link together to make more complex chains. “There is no apparent limit to the size of molecules that can be formed by this process, so there’s good reason to expect even more complex organic molecules to be there,” said Garrod.

we-are-star-stuff:

Astronomers searching for the building blocks of life in a giant dust cloud at the heart of the Milky Way have concluded that it would taste vaguely of raspberries.

The unanticipated discovery follows years of work by astronomers who trained their 30m radio telescope on the enormous ball of dust and gas in the hope of spotting complex molecules that are vital for life.

Finding amino acids in interstellar space is a Holy Grail for astrobiologists, as this would raise the possibility of life emerging on other planets after being seeded with the molecules.

In the latest survey, astronomers sifted through thousands of signals from Sagittarius B2, a vast dust cloud at the centre of our galaxy. While they failed to find evidence for amino acids, they did find a substance called ethyl formate, the chemical responsible for the flavour of raspberries.

“It does happen to give raspberries their flavour, but there are many other molecules that are needed to make space raspberries,” Arnaud Belloche, an astronomer at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, told the Guardian.

Curiously, ethyl formate has another distinguishing characteristic: it also smells of rum.

The astronomers used the IRAM telescope in Spain to analyse electromagnetic radiation emitted by a hot and dense region of Sagittarius B2 that surrounds a newborn star.

Radiation from the star is absorbed by molecules floating around in the gas cloud, which is then re-emitted at different energies depending on the type of molecule.

While scouring their data, the team also found evidence for the lethal chemical propyl cyanide in the same cloud. The two molecules are the largest yet discovered in deep space.

Dr Belloche and his colleague Robin Garrod at Cornell University in New York have collected nearly 4,000 distinct signals from the cloud but have only analysed around half of these.

“So far we have identified around 50 molecules in our survey, and two of those had not been seen before,” said Belloche.

Last year, the team came tantalisingly close to finding amino acids in space with the discovery of a molecule that can be used to make them, called amino acetonitrile.

The latest discoveries have boosted the researchers’ morale because the molecules are as large as the simplest amino acid, glycine. Amino acids are the building blocks of proteins and are widely seen as being critical for complex life to exist anywhere in the universe.

“The difficulty in searching for complex molecules is that the best astronomical sources contain so many different molecules that their ‘fingerprints’ overlap and are difficult to disentangle,” Belloche said.

The molecules are thought to form when chemicals that already exist on some dust grains, such as ethanol, link together to make more complex chains.

“There is no apparent limit to the size of molecules that can be formed by this process, so there’s good reason to expect even more complex organic molecules to be there,” said Garrod.

(Reblogged from thescienceofreality)
mohandasgandhi: saveplanetearth: “These weather events are not simply an example of what climate change could bring. They are caused by climate change.” ––James Hansen, NASA Climate Scientist This quote is from Hansen’s must-read op-ed piece in the Washington Post: “Climate change is here — and worse than we thought”: When I testified before the Senate in the hot summer of 1988, I warned of the kind of future that climate change would bring to us and our planet. I painted a grim picture of the consequences of steadily increasing temperatures, driven by mankind’s use of fossil fuels. But I have a confession to make: I was too optimistic. My projections about increasing global temperature have been proved true. But I failed to fully explore how quickly that average rise would drive an increase in extreme weather. In a new analysis of the past six decades of global temperatures, which will be published Monday, my colleagues and I have revealed a stunning increase in the frequency of extremely hot summers, with deeply troubling ramifications for not only our future but also for our present. This is not a climate model or a prediction but actual observations of weather events and temperatures that have happened. Our analysis shows that it is no longer enough to say that global warming will increase the likelihood of extreme weather and to repeat the caveat that no individual weather event can be directly linked to climate change. To the contrary, our analysis shows that, for the extreme hot weather of the recent past, there is virtually no explanation other than climate change. The deadly European heat wave of 2003, the fiery Russian heat wave of 2010 and catastrophic droughts in Texas and Oklahoma last year can each be attributed to climate change. And once the data are gathered in a few weeks’ time, it’s likely that the same will be true for the extremely hot summer the United States is suffering through right now. These weather events are not simply an example of what climate change could bring. They are caused by climate change. The odds that natural variability created these extremes are minuscule, vanishingly small. To count on those odds would be like quitting your job and playing the lottery every morning to pay the bills. Twenty-four years ago, I introduced the concept of “climate dice” to help distinguish the long-term trend of climate change from the natural variability of day-to-day weather. Some summers are hot, some cool. Some winters brutal, some mild. That’s natural variability. But as the climate warms, natural variability is altered, too. In a normal climate without global warming, two sides of the die would represent cooler-than-normal weather, two sides would be normal weather, and two sides would be warmer-than-normal weather. Rolling the die again and again, or season after season, you would get an equal variation of weather over time. But loading the die with a warming climate changes the odds. You end up with only one side cooler than normal, one side average, and four sides warmer than normal. Even with climate change, you will occasionally see cooler-than-normal summers or a typically cold winter. Don’t let that fool you. Our new peer-reviewed study, published by the National Academy of Sciences, makes clear that while average global temperature has been steadily rising due to a warming climate (up about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit in the past century), the extremes are actually becoming much more frequent and more intense worldwide. When we plotted the world’s changing temperatures on a bell curve, the extremes of unusually cool and, even more, the extremes of unusually hot are being altered so they are becoming both more common and more severe. The change is so dramatic that one face of the die must now represent extreme weather to illustrate the greater frequency of extremely hot weather events. Such events used to be exceedingly rare. Extremely hot temperatures covered about 0.1 percent to 0.2 percent of the globe in the base period of our study, from 1951 to 1980. In the last three decades, while the average temperature has slowly risen, the extremes have soared and now cover about 10 percent of the globe. This is the world we have changed, and now we have to live in it — the world that caused the 2003 heat wave in Europe that killed more than 50,000 people and the 2011 drought in Texas that caused more than $5 billion in damage. Such events, our data show, will become even more frequent and more severe. There is still time to act and avoid a worsening climate, but we are wasting precious time. We can solve the challenge of climate change with a gradually rising fee on carbon collected from fossil-fuel companies, with 100 percent of the money rebated to all legal residents on a per capita basis. This would stimulate innovations and create a robust clean-energy economy with millions of new jobs. It is a simple, honest and effective solution. The future is now. And it is hot. You can read Hansen’s study “Perception of climate change” from the National Academy of Sciences by clicking here. Hansen and his co-authors argue that seasonal-mean temperature anomalies have shifted dramatically to a higher, that is, a hotter, norm caused by anthropogenic (man-made) global warming. Furthermore, related to what we’re seeing today, warmer seasons start sooner, end later, and are hotter than “normal.” This increases the frequency of weather-related natural disasters and their intensity, meaning, we’ll have a lot more natural disasters like tornadoes, droughts, hurricanes, etc., and they’ll be more powerful. The authors add: It is not uncommon for meteorologists to reject global warmingas a cause of these extreme events, offering instead a meteorologicalexplanation. For example, it is said that the Moscow heatwave was caused by an extreme atmospheric “blocking” situation,or the Texas heat wave was caused by La Niña ocean temperaturepatterns. Certainly the locations of extreme anomalies in anygiven case depend on specific weather patterns. However, blockingpatterns and La Niñas have always been common, yet thelarge areas of extreme warming have come into existence onlywith large global warming. Today’s extreme anomalies occur as a result of simultaneous contributions of specific weather patternsand global warming. View high resolution

mohandasgandhi:

saveplanetearth:

“These weather events are not simply an example of what climate change could bring. They are caused by climate change.” ––James Hansen, NASA Climate Scientist

This quote is from Hansen’s must-read op-ed piece in the Washington Post: “Climate change is here — and worse than we thought”:

When I testified before the Senate in the hot summer of 1988, I warned of the kind of future that climate change would bring to us and our planet. I painted a grim picture of the consequences of steadily increasing temperatures, driven by mankind’s use of fossil fuels.

But I have a confession to make: I was too optimistic.

My projections about increasing global temperature have been proved true. But I failed to fully explore how quickly that average rise would drive an increase in extreme weather.

In a new analysis of the past six decades of global temperatures, which will be published Monday, my colleagues and I have revealed a stunning increase in the frequency of extremely hot summers, with deeply troubling ramifications for not only our future but also for our present.

This is not a climate model or a prediction but actual observations of weather events and temperatures that have happened. Our analysis shows that it is no longer enough to say that global warming will increase the likelihood of extreme weather and to repeat the caveat that no individual weather event can be directly linked to climate change. To the contrary, our analysis shows that, for the extreme hot weather of the recent past, there is virtually no explanation other than climate change.

The deadly European heat wave of 2003, the fiery Russian heat wave of 2010 and catastrophic droughts in Texas and Oklahoma last year can each be attributed to climate change. And once the data are gathered in a few weeks’ time, it’s likely that the same will be true for the extremely hot summer the United States is suffering through right now.

These weather events are not simply an example of what climate change could bring. They are caused by climate change. The odds that natural variability created these extremes are minuscule, vanishingly small. To count on those odds would be like quitting your job and playing the lottery every morning to pay the bills.

Twenty-four years ago, I introduced the concept of “climate dice” to help distinguish the long-term trend of climate change from the natural variability of day-to-day weather. Some summers are hot, some cool. Some winters brutal, some mild. That’s natural variability.

But as the climate warms, natural variability is altered, too. In a normal climate without global warming, two sides of the die would represent cooler-than-normal weather, two sides would be normal weather, and two sides would be warmer-than-normal weather. Rolling the die again and again, or season after season, you would get an equal variation of weather over time.

But loading the die with a warming climate changes the odds. You end up with only one side cooler than normal, one side average, and four sides warmer than normal. Even with climate change, you will occasionally see cooler-than-normal summers or a typically cold winter. Don’t let that fool you.

Our new peer-reviewed study, published by the National Academy of Sciences, makes clear that while average global temperature has been steadily rising due to a warming climate (up about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit in the past century), the extremes are actually becoming much more frequent and more intense worldwide.

When we plotted the world’s changing temperatures on a bell curve, the extremes of unusually cool and, even more, the extremes of unusually hot are being altered so they are becoming both more common and more severe.

The change is so dramatic that one face of the die must now represent extreme weather to illustrate the greater frequency of extremely hot weather events.

Such events used to be exceedingly rare. Extremely hot temperatures covered about 0.1 percent to 0.2 percent of the globe in the base period of our study, from 1951 to 1980. In the last three decades, while the average temperature has slowly risen, the extremes have soared and now cover about 10 percent of the globe.

This is the world we have changed, and now we have to live in it — the world that caused the 2003 heat wave in Europe that killed more than 50,000 people and the 2011 drought in Texas that caused more than $5 billion in damage. Such events, our data show, will become even more frequent and more severe.

There is still time to act and avoid a worsening climate, but we are wasting precious time. We can solve the challenge of climate change with a gradually rising fee on carbon collected from fossil-fuel companies, with 100 percent of the money rebated to all legal residents on a per capita basis. This would stimulate innovations and create a robust clean-energy economy with millions of new jobs. It is a simple, honest and effective solution.

The future is now. And it is hot.

You can read Hansen’s study “Perception of climate change” from the National Academy of Sciences by clicking here. Hansen and his co-authors argue that seasonal-mean temperature anomalies have shifted dramatically to a higher, that is, a hotter, norm caused by anthropogenic (man-made) global warming. Furthermore, related to what we’re seeing today, warmer seasons start sooner, end later, and are hotter than “normal.” This increases the frequency of weather-related natural disasters and their intensity, meaning, we’ll have a lot more natural disasters like tornadoes, droughts, hurricanes, etc., and they’ll be more powerful. The authors add:

It is not uncommon for meteorologists to reject global warming
as a cause of these extreme events, offering instead a meteorological
explanation. For example, it is said that the Moscow heat
wave was caused by an extreme atmospheric “blocking” situation,
or the Texas heat wave was caused by La Niña ocean temperature
patterns. Certainly the locations of extreme anomalies in any
given case depend on specific weather patterns. However, blocking
patterns and La Niñas have always been common, yet the
large areas of extreme warming have come into existence only
with large global warming. Today’s extreme anomalies occur as a result of simultaneous contributions of specific weather patterns
and global warming.

(Reblogged from scinerds)
neildegrassetyson: tuckthis: Google result for “Carl Sagan” That people also search for section is glorious. 

neildegrassetyson:

tuckthis:

Google result for “Carl Sagan”

That people also search for section is glorious. 

(Source: tuggysaurusrex)

(Reblogged from neildegrassetyson-deactivated20)
contemplatingmadness: Could your next hard drive be made with DNA? Okay, so maybe not your next one, but in a few year’s time? Maybe your storage will be writ across DNA itself. Researchers at Stanford have developed a method to store binary code on DNA. Dubbed the “recombinase addressable data (RAD) module,” the method controls the synthesis and degradation of two proteins, integrase and excisionase. With RAD, a particular section of a microbe’s DNA is tweaked to glow either red or green under ultraviolet light — and it can be switched back and forth at will. What really sets this biological bit apart from others is that it can be reliably, and non-destructively, switched back and forth. It took the researchers three years to come up with the precise cocktail of proteins to achieve this feat. Since the switch is programmed into the microbes, it remains in its current state while the cell doubles, and can then be modified if needed. “Programmable data storage within the DNA of living cells would seem an incredibly powerful tool for studying cancer, aging, organismal development and even the natural environment,” said synthetic biologist Drew Endy, but we’re a while from getting it to a more useful computational state. It’s currently got around a 30 minute switch time. As Endy put it, “We’re probably looking at a decade from when we started to get to a full byte.” View high resolution

contemplatingmadness:

Could your next hard drive be made with DNA?

Okay, so maybe not your next one, but in a few year’s time? Maybe your storage will be writ across DNA itself. Researchers at Stanford have developed a method to store binary code on DNA. Dubbed the “recombinase addressable data (RAD) module,” the method controls the synthesis and degradation of two proteins, integrase and excisionase. With RAD, a particular section of a microbe’s DNA is tweaked to glow either red or green under ultraviolet light — and it can be switched back and forth at will.

What really sets this biological bit apart from others is that it can be reliably, and non-destructively, switched back and forth. It took the researchers three years to come up with the precise cocktail of proteins to achieve this feat. Since the switch is programmed into the microbes, it remains in its current state while the cell doubles, and can then be modified if needed.

“Programmable data storage within the DNA of living cells would seem an incredibly powerful tool for studying cancer, aging, organismal development and even the natural environment,” said synthetic biologist Drew Endy, but we’re a while from getting it to a more useful computational state. It’s currently got around a 30 minute switch time. As Endy put it, “We’re probably looking at a decade from when we started to get to a full byte.”

(Reblogged from scinerds)
“
The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.
Isaac Asimov (via alnator)
(Reblogged from reperioaevum)

Sally Ride, On Teaching Tomorrow's Scientists

jtotheizzoe:

Sally Ride has an op-ed at Mashable detailing the challenges facing our STEM education system, and how the Sally Ride Science Academy is working to overcome them. 

But we must start early with students. In fact, fourth through eighth grade is critical. This is the age where many students, particularly girls and minorities, begin to disengage from these subjects. They feel and internalize the influences of peer pressure, popular culture, and society’s expectations. Science isn’t cool, negative stereotypes persist about scientists, mathematicians and engineers, and studying hard is rarely celebrated on reality TV or in pop music.

It starts with the teachers. I know that they made the difference for me. As did seeing Sally Ride on Sesame Street when I was a kid. That was pretty bad-ass. Teachers spend more time with students than anyone but their parents or friends. Which reminds me, having circles of friends (real-life or online *cough*Tumblr*cough*) who value and reward each other for enriching each other’s minds, we need more of that too.

Who makes the difference for you, or who could?

Check out the full piece here.

(Reblogged from jtotheizzoe)
crownedrose: jtotheizzoe: Handy Guide to Reading Science News! Someone very smart once said (paraphrasing here): “Your head should be open to new ideas, but not so open that your brains fall out.” Keep these tips in mind when you read science news, and beware alarmism. You don’t have to stop feeling amazed and awed to be a little cautious and skeptical. I’ll be posting more tips like this in the future. (via Double X Science) This is something to live by (okay, maybe not live by, but at least take into consideration), people! Reading the headline is what gets many people, I’ve found. Look for those sources - especially if it links to papers (read them if you can/want) - and do your own research to crack the code. Especially when it comes to science (or any topic of) news, see where you’re reading it and if you can find the same story on a better science website. Science websites > regular news sites. For me, if they say archaeologists instead of palaeontologists, I stop right there. Then again, even the science news sites seem to be victim to this at times.

crownedrose:

jtotheizzoe:

Handy Guide to Reading Science News!

Someone very smart once said (paraphrasing here): “Your head should be open to new ideas, but not so open that your brains fall out.”

Keep these tips in mind when you read science news, and beware alarmism. You don’t have to stop feeling amazed and awed to be a little cautious and skeptical. I’ll be posting more tips like this in the future.

(via Double X Science)

This is something to live by (okay, maybe not live by, but at least take into consideration), people! Reading the headline is what gets many people, I’ve found. Look for those sources - especially if it links to papers (read them if you can/want) - and do your own research to crack the code.

Especially when it comes to science (or any topic of) news, see where you’re reading it and if you can find the same story on a better science website. Science websites > regular news sites. For me, if they say archaeologists instead of palaeontologists, I stop right there. Then again, even the science news sites seem to be victim to this at times.

(Reblogged from crownedrose)

skeptv:

“The Public Understanding of Evolution and the KISS Principle”

Genie Scott won the first Stephen Jay Gould prize—given by the Society for the Study of Evolution—in early 2009. Here at last is her acceptance speech and musings on the state of evolution education. Where: University of Idaho. When: 6/12/2009

Run time: 1:21:50

(Reblogged from skeptv)

Who matters (or should) when scientist engage in ethical decision making?

(Source: christiantheatheist)

(Reblogged from neildegrassetyson-deactivated20)