Hair Follicles Track the Body’s Clock
“Those red-eye flights and all nighters may be leaving their mark in your hair. Researchers have found that hair follicles contain a signature of the 24-hour circadian clock that sets our sleeping habits. The method could one day help track patients with sleep disorders and help evaluate health problems in late-night shift workers.
At one point, researchers thought that the circadian clock was located solely in the brain. But after scientists discovered human circadian clock genes in the late 1990s, they found that the genes were expressed in tissues throughout the body. In experiments with mice, researchers have linked these genes to weight gain and even to the “lost in time” feeling of marijuana use, but they’ve had a harder time studying them in humans. That’s because analyzing these genes relies on invasive methods, such as drawing a person’s blood several times a day or excising a small chunk of skin.
Makoto Akashi of Yamaguchi University in Japan and his colleagues sought an easier way to check clock gene activity. They turned to hairs plucked from scalps or beards, which contain cell-rich follicles. When they extracted RNA from these cells, they found that circadian gene activities peaked when volunteers were awake and alert, and it peaked earliest in the volunteer who woke up earliest in the morning.
Next, Akashi and colleagues disrupted the sleep-wake cycle of healthy people: They asked volunteers to sleep in later and later over a 3-week period and to shine a bright light on themselves to mimic sunlight for half an hour after they awoke. At the end of 3 weeks, when the volunteers were waking up about 4 hours later than they used to, the activity of their hair follicle circadian genes had shifted too—but only by about two and a half 2½ hours, the team reports online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Akashi’s group saw a similar lag in shift workers. The team examined the hair follicles of volunteers who worked the 6 a.m. to 3 p.m. shift one week, the 3 p.m. to midnight shift the next week, and back to the morning shift on their third week. Clock gene activity lagged 5 hours behind the workers’ lifestyles, the researchers found, which indicates that 3 weeks was not long enough for the body clock to adapt to the new schedules.
Tracking clock genes in hair follicles could help researchers better monitor patients with sleep disorders and other circadian rhythm dysfunction, says molecular biologist Ueli Schibler of the University of Geneva in Switzerland. Because these genes control everything from organ function to eating cycles, he says, the lag the team observed in shift workers could help explain some of the serious health problems they develop.”
Read more at Science Mag (Thanks @XxLadyClaireXx)
Fate of Universe revealed by galactic lens
“A “galactic lens” has revealed that the Universe will probably expand forever. Astronomers used the way that light from distant stars was distorted by a huge galactic cluster known as Abell 1689 to work out the amount of dark energy in the cosmos. Dark energy is a mysterious force that speeds up the expansion of the Universe. Understanding the distribution of this force revealed that the likely fate of the Universe was to keep on expanding. It will eventually become a cold, dead wasteland, researchers say.
The study, conducted by an international team led by Professor Eric Jullo of Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, is published in the journal Science. Dark energy makes up three-quarters of our Universe but is totally invisible. We only know it exists because of its effect on the expansion of the Universe. To work out how dark energy is spread through space, astronomers used the Hubble Space Telescope to observe the way that light from distant stars was distorted around Abell 1689, a nearby cluster of galaxies.
Abell 1689, found in the constellation of Virgo, is one of the biggest galactic clusters known to science. Because of its huge mass, the cluster acts as a cosmic magnifying glass, causing light to bend around it. The way in which light is distorted by this cosmic lens depends on three factors: how far away the distant object is; the mass of Abell 1689; and the distribution of dark energy. The astronomers were able to measure the first two variables using the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope, enabling them to calculate this crucial third factor.”
Read more at BBC News (Thanks Tracey)
Young People Identify With an Online Community Almost as Strongly as With Their Own Family
“Teenage online community users feel part of their online community almost as much as they feel part of their own family. An international study of the users of teenage online community Habbo reveals that users identify more strongly with the online community than with their neighbourhood or offline hobby group. The study is based on a survey with 4299 respondents from United Kingdom, Spain and Japan. All three nationalities yielded similar results.
The study was authored by Dr. Vili Lehdonvirta, a researcher at the Helsinki Institute for Information Technology HIIT (currently a visiting scholar at the University of Tokyo), and Professor Pekka Räsänen from the University of Turku, Finland. The authors point out that peer groups are important for the development of adolescents’ identity and values. The study addresses the question of whether online groups are standing in for traditional peer groups that are thought to be weakening in some developed countries. The results confirm that online groups can act as strong psychological anchoring points for their members. The authors conclude that games, social networking sites and other online hangouts should be seen as crucial contexts for today’s youths’ identification and socialisation experiences.
The results also suggest that in relatively young information societies such as Spain, online groups are more often “virtual communities” consisting of relative strangers. In mature information societies such as Japan, online groups are more likely to be a way of keeping in touch with family and friends. This may influence the experiences that youth receive from online groups in different countries.
The study, titled “How do young people identify with online and offline peer groups? A comparison between United Kingdom, Spain and Japan,” is published by the Journal of Youth Studies, the leading international scholarly journal focusing on youth research. Habbo is a popular teenage virtual world developed by Sulake Corporation. It has 15 million monthly unique visitors from over 150 countries, according to Sulake. The site is available in 11 local language versions and recently celebrated its 10th anniversary. 90 percent of Habbo users are between 13 and 18 years old.”
Read more at Science Daily (Thanks @XxLadyClaireXx)
London’s Foursquare hotspots mapped
“A PhD student named Anil Bawa-Cavia has created some lovely visualisations of the data from location-based social network Foursquare, showing where the greatest activity in London is in a number of different categories.
Bawa-Cavia created the maps as part of his research into cities at the Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis at University College London. He sifted through the city’s Foursquare checkins, and then broke down the results into different categories.
For example, the nightlife map is well distributed among a number of venues, with the Hospital Club proving the most popular check-in location. There are far fewer arts venues, however, with the O2 arena proving the most popular.
Regent’s Park is the most difficult green space in London to become the mayor of, but it should be relatively trivial in comparison to get the top spot for Camden Lock, which was top of the listing of shops.
The dataset used contained 162,068 check-ins at 7,191 venues. That suggests that every location that’s been checked-in to at least once has an average of 23 check-ins — a surprisingly high figure.
As for locations, the most popular places to check in were Shoreditch, London Fields, Covent Garden, the South Bank, the O2, Angel, Regent’s Park, Kensington, King’s Cross and Camden Town. Areas south of the river were extremely underrepresented, with most of the activity taking place in central, east and north London. Of course, that probably says more about the demographics of Foursquare users than the demographics of Londoners.”
Read more at Wired (Thanks @XxLadyClaireXx)
See a meteor shower in a minute
“Meteor showers are marvelous sights, as myriads of stargazers found out a week ago. But seeing them can sometimes be inconvenient. To get the best view, you have to go far from city lights and stay up until the wee hours of the morning. The ideal situation would be to camp out in a beautiful location like California’s Joshua Tree National Park and keep your eyes open all night.
That’s exactly what photographer Henry Jun Wah Lee did last week. He set up his camera in the park for two nights around the peak of the Perseid meteor shower (Aug. 12 and 15), took a series of exposures, and spliced them together artfully into a multi-day time-lapse sequence. The result makes it seem as if the meteors are popping like fireworks amid the multitudes of stars in the Milky Way … two nights’ worth in just a little more than minute. But not all of the flashes you see are shooting stars.
“I did catch some airplanes,” Lee told me today. The streaks that appear to move across the sky are more likely nighttime airplane transits rather than meteors. But there’s a killer meteor flash that pops up around the 30-second mark, leaving a little wisp of vapor in its wake.”
Read more at Cosmic Log (Thanks @XxLadyClaireXx)
Mafia using football show to send messages to jailed bosses
The Telegraph is making the claim that Italian gangsters are using a TV’s shows text ticker to send coded messages to their jailed bosses.
The Italian programme, which is hosted by a former showgirl, allows football fans to send SMS text messages which then run along a ticker tape at the bottom of the screen when the show is being broadcast.
Anti-mafia prosecutors believe that members of organised crime gangs have caught onto the interactive feature, sending seemingly innocuous comments and remarks which in fact contain important messages for imprisoned mafia godfathers, many of whom continue to run their criminal empires despite being behind bars. One of the messages, allegedly of significance for a jailed criminal mastermind, simply read: “All is well, Paolo”. Full article here.
This is not the first case of an incident like this – in the past there have been multiple claims about hidden codes displayed in public such as the very recent FBI accusations about Russian spies using US newspapers to hide messages in newspapers. This was also a main theme of the film A Beautiful Mind based on the life of John Nash, the inventor of Game Theory. So whilst it may seem inventive for some, the idea stetches back to the 1930′s.
Heliotrope: The World’s First Energy Positive Solar Home
Look, up in the sky — it’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s the Heliotrope! The brainchild of Architect Ralph Disch, this rotating solar home was the seed for the extraordinary Sonnenschiff Solar Development and the modern solar movement in Germany. The home takes full advantage of the sun by rotating with it, allowing daylight to course though its triple-pane windows and energize its large roof-mounted solar array and solar thermal pipes. The result is one of the first zero-energy modern homes in the world — one that actually ends up generating five times the energy it consumes.
More pics and full details at Inhabitat
Futurama Writer Created And Proved A Brand New Math Theorem Just For 1 Episode
We all knew the writing staff of Futurama was brainy, but this is something else. To work out the ridiculous brain switching plot line from last night’s hilarious episode, writer Ken Keeler (who also just happens to have a PhD in mathematics) ended up writing and proving an entirely new theorem. This is probably the most impressive bit of side work from a TV writer since a writer ofDesperate Housewives discovered a new species or the staff of Full House developed a vaccine for a specific strain of syphilis.
In the episode “The Prisoner of Benda,” the Professor and Amy use a new invention to switch bodies. Unfortunately, they discover that the same two brains can’t switch twice and have to come up with some equation to prove that, with enough people switching, eventually everyone will end up in their rightful form. This, of course, leads to much hijinks as well as the grossest sex scene the show has ever done (take that, Prof. Farnsworth and Mom!).
Check out the full description of the theory here.
The moon is shrinking, say scientists
“Astronomers have declared that the moon is shrinking after spotting wrinkles all over the lunar surface. The tell-tale contraction marks were discovered by US scientists who examined thousands of photographs of the moon’s surface taken by a Nasa orbiter.
Some of the wrinkles are several miles long and rise tens of metres above the dusty terrain. Researchers believe they arise from the moon decreasing in size by around 200 metres across its diameter. The moon’s mean diameter is generally calculated to be 2,159 miles.
The prospect of a shrinking moon is not new to planetary experts. When the moon formed it had a hot core, much like that of the Earth, which caused it first to expand and then contract as it cooled down.
The latest findings suggest the moon could still be cooling, a process that causes the surface to compress and form the wrinkle-like features, known as lobate scarps.
A team led by Thomas Watters at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC studied high-resolution images of the moon taken over the past year by Nasa’s latest moon probe, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. The spacecraft cameras provide the most detailed images of the moon ever taken from orbit.
Fourteen lobate scarps were identified, at sites as far apart as the lunar equator and near the poles. The features are so pristine scientists think they could be no more than a billion years old.
“Not only could they be indicating recent contraction of the moon, they may be indicating that the moon is still contracting,” said Watters. “Until now, we really had no evidence of cooling and the contraction of the moon that would go along with it. This isn’t anything to worry about. The moon may be shrinking, but not by much. It’s not going anywhere.”"
Read more at The Guardian (Thanks elke and UKgnome)
How to create a ‘super password’
“Say goodbye to those wimpy, eight-letter passwords. The 12-character era of online security is upon us, according to a report published this week by the Georgia Institute of Technology. The researchers used clusters of graphics cards to crack eight-character passwords in less than two hours. But when the researchers applied that same processing power to 12-character passwords, they found it would take 17,134 years to make them snap.
“The length of your password in some cases can dictate the vulnerability,” said Joshua Davis, a research scientist at the Georgia Tech Research Institute. It’s hard to say what will happen in the future, but for now, 12-character passwords should be the standard, said Richard Boyd, a senior research scientist who also worked on the project. The researchers recommend 12-character passwords — as opposed to those with 11 or, say, 13 characters — because that number strikes a balance between “convenience and security.”
They assumed a sophisticated hacker might be able to try 1 trillion password combinations per second. In that scenario, it takes 180 years to crack an 11-character password, but there’s a big jump when you add just one more character — 17,134 years. Passwords have gotten longer over time, and security experts are already recommending that people use full sentences as passwords.”
Read more at CNN (Thanks @XxLadyClaireXx)
