You humble moderator has been hearing about telomere’s and telomerase for hmmm, 10 years or so? Telomere’s are little strands at the end of our chromosomes and they get shorter with each cell division, so that we’re essentially born with an internal clock which is ticking down every time our cells divide all our lives. But it was all a theory.

I remember hearing that they were going to test a population of Ashkenazi Jews who have longer lifespans than most for their telomerase content a few years back. Now it appears that the results are in:

The BBC reports:

There is a clear link between living to 100 and inheriting a hyperactive version of an enzyme that prevents cells from aging, researchers say.

Scientists from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the US say centenarian Ashkenazi Jews have this mutant gene.

They found that 86 very old people and their children had higher levels of telomerase which protects the DNA.

They say it may be possible to produce drugs that stimulate the enzyme.

Writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the team say they studied the Ashkenazi Jewish community because they are closely related so it is easier to identify disease causing genetic differences.

They took blood samples from 86 very old, but generally healthy, people with an average age of 97; 175 of their offspring; and 93 other people who were the offspring of parents who had lived a normal lifespan and could therefore make up a control group, with which the results could be compared.

SNIP …

The centenarians in this study had a lower average body mass index than the controls and higher levels of good (HDL) cholesterol.

Yousin Suh, associate professor of medicine and genetics at Einstein and a lead author on the paper, said: “Our findings suggest that telomere length and variants of telomerase genes combine to help people live very long lives, perhaps by protecting them from the diseases of old age.

“We’re now trying to understand the mechanism by which these genetic variants of telomerase maintain telomere length in centenarians.

“It may be possible to develop drugs that mimic the telomerase that our centenarians have been blessed with.”

Three scientists received the 2009 Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine for determining the strucutre of telomere’s, giving recognition that telomere’s exist and the function they play in cellular life.

Here’s hoping they’re right.

Godspeed my friends,

Dean

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Here at Future SciTech, your humble moderator does his best to find things that you’ll find functional.

But there is room for beauty in the world as well and I couldn’t resist sharing this spectacular 360 degree panoramic view of the Milky Way with my friends! Enjoy!

Courtesy  of the Southern European Observatory via Fox News Scitech.

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Now here’s an interesting subject. Scientists have suspected for the last couple years that the moon had very significant amounts of frozen water stored underground and in craters. One of the limiting factors to space colonization is H2O since it serves a dual purpose: water for human/mechanical consumption and being split for the hydrogen and oxygen components that are used to fuel rockets.

Andrea Thompson, Senior Editor of SPACE.com reports:

It’s official: There’s water ice on the moon, and lots of it. When melted, the water could potentially be used to drink or to extract hydrogen for rocket fuel.

NASA’s LCROSS probe discovered beds of water ice at the lunar south pole when it impacted the moon last month, mission scientists announced today. The findings confirm suspicions announced previously, and in a big way.

“Indeed, yes, we found water. And we didn’t find just a little bit, we found a significant amount,” Anthony Colaprete, LCROSS project scientist and principal investigator from NASA’s Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, Calif.

The LCROSS probe impacted the lunar south pole at a crater called Cabeus on Oct. 9. The $79 million spacecraft, preceded by its Centaur rocket stage, hit the lunar surface in an effort to create a debris plume that could be analyzed by scientists for signs of water ice.

Snip …

Scientists have suspected that permanently shadowed craters at the south pole of the moon could be cold enough to keep water frozen at the surface based on detections of hydrogen by previous moon missions. Water has already been detected on the moon by a NASA-built instrument on board India’s now defunct Chandrayaan-1 probe and other spacecraft, though it was in very small amounts and bound to the dirt and dust of the lunar surface.

Water wasn’t the only compound seen in the debris plumes of the LCROSS impact.

“There’s a lot of stuff in there,” Colaprete said. What exactly those other compounds are hasn’t yet been determined, but could include organic materials that would hint at comet impacts in the past.

We need to keep something else in mind here. Water on the moon could be more valuable than anything else in the solar system over time. Besides water, there’s another limiting factor to human colonization of space: $10,000/pound.

That’s what’s required to send something from the surface of Earth to Earth orbit. Earth Escape Velocity is (if memory serves) about 11.2 km/s. That makes human colonization of the solar system VERY expensive.

That may not sound like much, but the moon’s escape velocity is only 2.4 km/s and would make things MUCH less expensive and we’d be able to ramp up solar system exploration and colonization a lot more rapidly.

It’s either factories on space stations in Earth/Lunar orbit or factories on a moon base. There really aren’t a whole lot of other options if we’re ever going to get out there.

Godspeed my friends!

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I stated yesterday that stem cell science and technology was at an absolutely remarkable stage. But it’s difficult to see that going article by article, so I’m going to try something a bit different this time.

Some of these are a bit dated, but they still represent the top of the line technology and are an indicator to what the future of the science and research holds. I set the search to go back just one year. These are just some of the headlines that I’ve seen while surfing:

And I only went to page 9 of 338! There’s a LOT of research going on in this area and I can only report a small (VERY) part of it.

You’re humble moderator is awed and can’t wait to see where this science and technology go in the next 10-20 years!

Godspeed my friends!

Sigh. 3 months gone by that fast huh? Ok. To make it up, I’m going to, over the next few weeks, post a lot of articles about a single topic for now: Stem Cells.

If even half of what I’ve been reading is true, we may have found the fountain of youth after a fashion.

And not embryonic stem cells either, but adult stem cells so the politics can be left out of it.

To start with, let’s define what a stem-cell is so that we’re all reading from the same page.

Here’s a good concise definition from the National Institutes of Health:

So.

A stem cell is a cell that exists with no actual purpose. It’s a cell, but it’s really only a potential cell which hasn’t differentiated itself yet into any special functions such as muscle or liver cells.

And it’s major purpose, or one of them at least, is as an internal repair mechanism for the body. This is the aspect that we’re interested in.

Over the past year or two we’ve done some absolutely REMARKABLE research and experimentation in the area of stem cells. I’m really a computer type but I’ve been watching the development of science and technology for over 30 years and I’m pretty used to advances in these areas. So I don’t make a statement like “absolutely REMARKABLE” lightly.

Here’s one instance:

Embryonic Stem Cell Therapy Restores Walking Ability In Rats With Neck Injuries

Results of the cervical study currently appear online in the journal Stem Cells. UCI scientist Hans Keirstead hopes the data will prompt the FDA to authorize clinical testing of the treatment in people with both types of spinal cord damage. About 52 percent of spinal cord injuries are cervical and 48 percent thoracic.

SNIP …

A week after test rats with 100 percent walking ability suffered neck spinal cord injuries, some received the stem cell treatment. The walking ability of those that didn’t degraded to 38 percent. Treated rats’ ability, however, was restored to 97 percent.

These are the building blocks of myelin, the biological insulation for nerve fibers that’s critical to proper functioning of the central nervous system. When myelin is stripped away through injury or disease, paralysis can occur.

Your humble moderator has a 25 year history in the computer industry, not science or technology, but he’s avidly watched the development of these areas for longer than that.

Generally when we read about scientific advances, we see advances in 3-5% of experimental subjects or some low number like that. Nice, but not something to get excited about.

It’s been a very rare occasion when we’ve read about a treatment having a 97% effectiveness.

And as we’ll see in the next couple of weeks, this is only the very small tip of a very large iceberg. We’ve made advances in the regrowth of liver cells, muscle tissue, nerve cells, skin cells and much more. I’ve even read an article about the regrowth of lost teeth in rats. (I’m sure the rats of the world are happy over that )

The series “That’s Impossible” on the History Channel showed stem cells being grown on a biodegradable scaffolding to form a new bladder that was surgically implanted into a human. It also showed the formation of stem cells forming an artificial ear.

And this is just the start. We’ve learned how to grow stem cells at will and all of this is just in the last 5-10 years. There’s a lot of tread left in this science and the technologies that we’re developing.

There’s an ancient Chinese curse that goes, “May you live in interesting times!” We do live in interesting times and I consider it a blessing instead of a curse. These are the times to be alive!

Godspeed my friends!

Sometimes in the development of science and technology, serendipity and luck play a large part, such as the following:

According to a report in Discovery Magazine:

Seeing in the dark could soon be as easy as popping a pill or squeezing some drops into your eyes, thanks to some new science, an unusual deep-sea fish, and a plant pigment.

In the 1990s, marine biologist Ron Douglas of City University London discovered that, unlike other deep-sea fish, the dragonfish Malacosteus niger can perceive red light. Douglas was surprised when he isolated the chemical responsible for absorbing red: It was chlorophyll. “That was weird,” he says. The fish had somehow co-opted chlorophyll, most likely from bacteria in their food, and turned it into a vision enhancer.

Your humble moderator will grant you that it’ll take a significant amount of time, but the results of this one ought to be spectacular.

Science now reports:

It’s large, it’s fast, and it’s heading toward the Milky Way. Less than 40 million years from now, a giant cloud of hydrogen gas, clocked at 250 kilometers per second, will smash into our home galaxy, likely setting off a huge burst of star formation. In fact, the cloud contains enough gas to form a million stars like our sun, astronomers reported here today at the 211th meeting of the American Astronomical Society. The finding also indicates that pristine material is still entering the relatively mature Milky Way.

Many clouds of hydrogen surround the Milky Way. But astronomers didn’t start spotting them until a half-century ago–after the advent of radio telescopes, which are able to detect cold, neutral hydrogen gas. The early observations were not accurate enough to determine the clouds’ distances, masses, or directions of motion, however.

Now, thanks to more powerful telescopes such as the 100-meter Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Telescope in Green Bank, West Virginia, these clouds are finally getting their close-up. The first to be spotlighted in extreme detail is Smith’s Cloud, named after Dutch astronomy student Gail Smith, who discovered it in 1963. Curious about the cloud’s elongated shape, a team of astronomers led by Felix “Jay” Lockman of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Charlottesville, Virginia, took tens of thousands of radio brightness measurements. The data reveal that the cloud is just 8000 light-years away from the Milky Way’s central plane, making it the closest one known. Its cometary shape is apparently due to the tidal effects of the Milky Way.

According to this astronomy article, there should be some spectacuar fireworks when this gas cloud gets incorporated into the Milky Way, creating tens of thousand of massive clouds millions of years into the future. It’s going to be some kind of light show.

This comes under the wowsers category. Halfway back to the big bang, a short gamma ray burst 100 times more powerful than most.

Science Daily reports:

ScienceDaily (Jan. 9, 2008) — Using the powerful one-two combo of NASA’s Swift satellite and the Gemini Observatory, astronomers have detected a mysterious type of cosmic explosion farther back in time than ever before. The explosion, known as a short gamma-ray burst (GRB), took place 7.4 billion years ago, more than halfway back to the Big Bang.

“This discovery dramatically moves back the time at which we know short GRBs were exploding. The short burst is almost twice as far as the previous confirmed record holder,” says John Graham of the Johns Hopkins University, in Baltimore, Md.

GRBs are among the most powerful explosions in the universe, releasing enormous amounts of energy in the form of X-rays and gamma rays. Most bursts fall in one of two categories: long bursts and short bursts, depending on whether they last longer or shorter than three seconds. Astronomers think that long GRBs are triggered by the collapse and explosion of massive stars. In contrast, a variety of mechanisms have been proposed for short bursts. The most popular model says that most short GRBs occur when two neutron stars smash into each other and collapse into a black hole, ejecting energy in two counterflowing beams.

The record-setting short burst is known as GRB 070714B, since it was the second GRB detected on July 14, 2007. Swift discovered the GRB in the constellation Taurus. The burst’s high energy and 3-second duration firmly place it in the short GRB category. Rapid follow-up observations with the 2-meter Liverpool Telescope and the 4-meter William Herschel Telescope found an optical afterglow in the same location as the burst, which allowed astronomers to identify the GRB’s host galaxy.

Your humble moderator is continually awed by the findings in astronomy that we’re making. From gravity to cosmology, relativity to the life of black holes, some of the most remarkable advances being made in science and technology are being made in astronomy, though this may change in the future with the growth of biology and chemistry.

Your humble moderator has spent a lot of time reading scitech articles and many of them have been about the future of solar cells. I’ve read about them for a long, long time and finally something is being done with them. It would be wonderful if we could capture even a small fraction of the energy of the fusion reactor that is Sol, whether by small steps like these solar cells or a Dyson Sphere.

We have to start somewhere though and this is as good a place to start as anywhere.

The CNet website reports:

Well-financed solar start-up Nanosolar on Tuesday said it has started shipping its flexible thin-film solar cells, meeting its own deadline and marking a milestone for alternative solar-cell materials.

On the company’s blog, CEO Martin Roscheisen announced that the first megawatt of its solar panels will be used as part of a power plant in eastern Germany.

Nanosolar CEO Martin Roscheisen with printed solar cells.

(Credit: Nanosolar)

The release of Nanosolar’s first products is significant because the company develops a process to print solar cells made out of CIGS, or copper indium gallium selenide, a combination of elements that many companies are pursuing as an alternative to silicon.

The 5-year-old company, based in San Jose, Calif., has raised more than $100 million in financing and has drawn in Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page as investors.

It seems to your humble moderator that this kind of computer technology comes under the category of “Big Brother.” It’s easy to say that this kind of thing will be used for productivity gains, but it’s waaaay too easy to corrupt something like this into an all around spy tool that can be put to used by any group from private industry to government to military.

From the Register, UK:

It gives a whole new meaning to the word “micromanager.”

Judging from a recent patent application, Microsoft hopes to build some sort of “activity monitoring system” that keeps an eye on worker productivity using various “physiological or environmental sensors.” These sensors would track everything from heart rate, respiration rate, body temperature, facial expressions, and blood pressure to brain signals and galvanic skin response.

Yes, galvanic skin response is what drives a lie detector.

Redmond sees this system as a way for companies and, um, governments to monitor “group activities.” “In particular, the system can monitor user activity, detect when users need assistance with their specific activities, and identify at least one other user that can assist them,” the patent application reads, in classic patent speak. “Assistance can be in the form of answering questions, providing guidance to the user as the user completes the activity, or completing the activity such as in the case of taking on an assigned activity.”

In other words: If you don’t do your duty, the system will make sure your duties are assigned to someone else.

The system is designed to provide its unique brand of “assistance” as workers slave away on various computing devices, including desktops, laptops, and cell phones. But it doesn’t just track your physical use of such devices. It also monitors things like “frustration and stress.”

Imagine the ways that something like this can be abused and it can gives your humble moderator nightmares. Of all the technologies in the scitech realm, perhaps computer technology is the easiest to corrupt. Keep in mind that the data that these systems can collect is sent to backup logs and can be used to put together “productivity” profiles over years.

EASILY corruptible! *shiver*