Robert Edwards wins Nobel Prize for Medicine

British physiologist Robert Edwards, whose work led to the first "test-tube baby", won the 2010 Nobel prize for medicine or physiology, the prize-awarding institute said on Monday.

Edwards, 85, won the prize of 10 million Swedish crowns ($1.5 million), Sweden's Karolinska Institute said.

"His achievements have made it possible to treat infertility, a medical condition afflicting a large proportion of humanity including more than 10 percent of all couples worldwide," the institute said in a statement.

Medicine is traditionally the first of the Nobel prizes awarded each year. Prizes for achievements in science, literature and peace were first awarded in 1901 accordance with the will of dynamite inventor and businessman Alfred Nobel.

New species of coral, sponges found near Hawaii

UNKNOWN: Scientists at the Hawaii Undersea Research Laboratory are working to identify the discovered corals. (Photo: NOAA, Greg McFall/AP)

New and dramatic species of coral and sponges have been found in the Pacific during deep sea dives near the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands, scientists said Monday.

Christopher Kelley, the lab’s program biologist, called sponges found at dive sites off Middle Bank, some 120 miles northwest of Hawaii, “absolutely bizarre.“

Submersibles operated by the Hawaii Undersea Research Laboratory discovered the species in early December in Papahanaumokuakea Marine National Monument. They found the species during dives nearly 1 mile deep.

Kelley will be working with other scientists to identify the sponges.

During radio transmissions between the submersible Pisces IV and its support ship, Kelley said one observer remarked when first seeing the sponges, “It looks like something out of Dr. Seuss.”

The expedition marked the first time the lab used high definition video cameras to capture images of its deep ocean work.

“There are lots of things down there that are just brand new,” he said. “We don’t know what they are, and this is a fantastic opportunity to try and help the monument and determine what some of the deep water resources are.”

In addition to its research value, HD brings the deep sea experience to the general public, he said.

The quality of the HD video is so good, scientists expect to be able to identify some animals from the video alone, rather than having to collect actual specimens, Kelley said.

“It’s really the type of quality we see out the windows of the submersible,” Kelley said. “People are going to be seeing what we’re seeing. People are going to see why we’re so excited about these deep water environments, because these animals are spectacular.”

source :yahoo news, mnn.com.

Men, please note: 'Smoking, drinking can affect your progeny'

Science has long been clear that smoking or heavy alcohol consumption causes cancer. But, a new study has found that babies could inherit genetic damage from a father who puffs or drinks too much.
A team of international researchers has found that smoking or drinking alcohol can cause chemical changes in the semen in men and the alterations could be potentially inherited by their progenies and their future generations.
The researchers came to the conclusion after they analysed the effects of smoking and heavy drinking -- both toxic in nature -- on a group of rodents. They gave pregnant female mice daily injections of pesticide vinclozolin during the period when the sex of embryos is determined.
Male offspring had abnormalities, including prostate and sperm development problems, and genetic changes that the researchers found were passed on through four generations when the males were mated with healthy females. The researchers have also identified specific genes involved in the production of sperm that were permanently altered by the exposure to the pesticide.
"In addition to the spermatogenic and prostate abnormalities, trans-generational effects on numerous disease states were observed including tumour development and kidney disease," 'The Daily Telegraph' quoted Dr Matthew Anway of the University of Idaho as saying.

Gigantoraptor discovered in the Gobi Desert

Xu Xing, a Chinese paleontologist, puzzled over the thigh bone of a monstrous new dinosaur he and his partners had discovered in the rich fossil beds of the Gobi Desert.

The bone was so big, he said in an e-mail to The Chronicle, that he thought he and his colleagues had merely found another of those familiar plant-eating, long-necked, semi-aquatic creatures called sauropods, well known in the evolutionary past of the dinosaur world.

Then he thought the bone most likely had come from a tyrannosaur -- perhaps the voracious and towering T. rex, the prime predator of fright movies.

But no, it wasn't T. rex at all; it was a fossil from the largest birdlike creature ever seen, Xu said. More than 26 feet long and 16 1/2 feet tall, it was a young adult that must have weighed at least a ton and a half when it was alive more than 70 million years ago, he said. It thrived in the late Cretaceous period only a few million years before all the dinosaurs on Earth became extinct.

Mr.Xu Xing describe the Bird dinosaur(Gigantoraptor) as "gigantic chicken!' "

The journal Nature report says discovery of a creature Xu's team has named Gigantoraptor erlianensis, a giant birdlike dinosaur from the Gobi's Erlian basin, long known to science for its famous fossils and to prospectors for its vast oil reserves.
From the fossil record, the world's leading paleontologists are now sure that all modern birds are descended from the dinosaurs; in fact, the scientists often term birds "modern dinosaurs." And paleontologists, studying the fossils marking the evolution of birds during the age of dinosaurs, have observed that as the birdlike dinosaurs approached birdness, they seem to have evolved into smaller and smaller types.

What's an enormous beast like Gigantoraptor doing among the avian world's ancestors?

It's a curious twist in the long up-and-down saga of evolution that has intrigued science ever since the Cambrian explosion of 500 million years ago, when the ancestors of countless familiar life forms emerged -- in the short span of 10 million years.

It's a curious twist in the long up-and-down saga of evolution that has intrigued science ever since the Cambrian explosion of 500 million years ago, when the ancestors of countless familiar life forms emerged -- in the short span of 10 million years.

Said UC Berkeley's Kevin Padian, a leading expert on dinosaur evolution and curator of the university's Museum of Paleontology who has seen the report from Xu and Tan:

"We have dwarf sauropods, so why not giant oviraptors (the term means 'egg thief')? If resources are available, all animals will take the opportunity to increase their size. Dinosaurs can get small, and dinosaurs can get big, and the bigger ones grow faster than the little ones, because getting bigger fast can reduce the number of predators around.

"It all goes to show that when it comes to the diversity of dinosaurs, we're still just scratching the surface."

The details in the report by Xu and Tan are fascinating: "Growth lines" in one bone showed that the creature grew to adult size in only seven years -- faster than most other two-footed, meat-eating dinosaurs and "probably died in the eleventh year of life."

The animal had no teeth in its beak so its diet is a mystery, Xu said, because it had the relatively small head and long neck typical of plant-eaters, and the sharp claws of many meat-eaters.

And while the fossil-hunters found no evidence of feathers -- as many dinosaur species show -- the beast could well have had feathered arms and feathers on its tail, most likely for sexual display.

Finally, although most two-footed dinosaurs had stout legs to carry their weight, and short arms, Gigantoraptor's legs were relatively long and slender, and its arms were unusually long -- "more birdlike than its small relatives in many features," Xu said.

Mark Norell at the American Museum of Natural History has hunted dinosaur fossils with Xu in the Gobi Desert in the past but was not involved in this discovery. He studied the Gigantoraptor's fossil bones last year at Xu's Institute of Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing.

"It was really a surprise when I first saw it," Norell said in a telephone conversation. As dinosaurs evolved toward birds, they got smaller and smaller, their fossils show; until now, birdlike dinosaurs were at most 10 or 11 feet long -- certainly not 26 feet.

Paul Sereno, a paleontologist at the University of Chicago who read the report, called it "a big find, really exciting -- a class act."

Source:http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/06/14/MNGUTQESS41.DTL&type=science

Hubble Captures Uranus's Rings on Edge

The images from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope shows how the ring system around the planet Uranus appears at ever more oblique tilts as viewed from Earth - culminating in the rings being seen edge-on in three observing opportunities in 2007. The best of these events appears in the far right image taken with Hubble's Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 on August 14, 2007.
The edge-on rings appear as two spikes above and below the planet. The rings cannot be seen running fully across the face of the planet because the bright glare of the planet has been blocked out in the Hubble photo (a small amount of residual glare appears as a fan- shaped image artifact). A much shorter color exposure of the planet has been photo- composited to show its size and position relative to the ring plane.


The rings were discovered in 1977, so this is the first time for a Uranus ring crossing to be observed from Earth. Earth's orbit around the Sun permits three opportunities to view the rings edge-on: Uranus made its first ring crossing as seen from Earth on May 3; it made its second crossing on August 16; and will cross for the third time on February 20, 2008. Though the last ring crossing relative to Earth will be hidden behind the Sun, most of Earth's premier telescopes, including Keck, Hubble, the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope and the Hale Telescope on Mt. Palomar, plan to focus on the planet again in the days following December 7, 2007. On December 7 the rings will be perfectly edge-on to the Sun.

For additional information, contact:


Ray Villard
Space Telescope Science Institute, Baltimore, Md.
410-338-4514
villard@stsci.edu

New insights into common knee injuries

August 30, 2007 - DURHAM, N.C. - The sort of swelling that occurs when a joint is damaged by injury or degeneration is normally essential to the healing process, but when it comes to the knee, that inflammation can actually interfere with healing.

These findings in experiments with pigs may lead to treatments for injuries or osteoarthritis in the knee, according to Duke University Medical Center orthopedic researchers. There are drugs that can block the action of these immune system proteins that trigger joint inflammation.

The Duke researchers report in the September issue of the journal Arthritis & Rheumatism that two immune system proteins, interleukin-1 (IL-1) and tumor necrosis factor (TNF), block the healing of the damaged pig meniscus, an important layer of buffering tissue within the joint. When agents that counteract the effects of these two proteins were administered directly to the damaged meniscus, the repair process resumed.

new reserch suggest that Sons of fat moms are less fertile'

LONDON: Sons of obese women can be less fertile and may have sperm of poorer quality, according to a recent study.

Obesity is believed to affect a woman’s chances of pregnancy and the new study is the first to find a link between overweight and the fertility of the next generation.

A team from Aarhus University in Denmark tracked the health of more than 300 women and their sons. Although the majority of the women were of normal weight when they became pregnant, 25 had body mass indexes classed as overweight or obese.

Tests showed their sons tended to have slightly lower concentrations of sperm, as well as fewer mobile sperms, the online edition of Daily Mail reported.

It was possible that higher levels of the hormone oestrogen, associated with being overweight, might harm the development of male foetus reproductive organs, the scientists said.

However, the differences were so small that the researchers could not be sure they were not due to chance. The researchers said further studies should be carried out.

Meanwhile, an Australian scientist says that she has discovered scientific evidence that obesity is a key factor in infertility because of how it affects a woman’s eggs.


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