Science News Digest 23rd November 2009
In the science news this week; troubled Mercury mission gets the go ahead, a new hope for Down syndrome, mobile phones as scientific instruments, the LHC is ready to rock again and finally.....the irony of willpower!
Money to burn.
Researchers can breathe a sigh of relief this week as the European Space Agency’s mission to Mercury has been saved by a new injection of funds as reported by the BBC.
Due to its proximity to the Sun, the ‘BepiColumbo’ craft, containing two orbiters, will need much more resistance to the massive doses of UV light and heat it will be exposed to than was previously anticipated.
This has meant that a whole host of new fittings have had to be applied to protect the craft pushing its weight up from three tonnes to just over four and this has pushed up the costs of the mission in turn.
BepiColumbo was scheduled to launch in 2014 at a cost of 665 million euros, but this has now risen to 970 million. It has been a joint enterprise with Japan, who will take charge of the Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter (MMO) once the craft reaches the planet in 2020, while the European Space Agency’s (ESA) will be responsible for the Mercury Planetary Orbiter (MPO).
The MPO will be equipped with 11 scientific instruments and will study Mercury for at least a year collecting data on its atmosphere, composition and imaging the surface.
The MMO has five instruments on board and will be studying the planet’s magnetic field.
Although the mission has faced criticism due to the fact that the US already has the Mercury Messenger in orbit, experts have described the Messenger as providing the ‘hors d’oeuvre’ for BepiColumbo’s ‘feast.’ The latter has many more instruments and according to Dr David Rothery, the lead scientist on Bepi's Mercury Imaging X-ray Spectrometer (MIXS), the science case for another Mercury mission is exceptional.
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New hope for Down syndrome.
There’s new hope for sufferers of Down syndrome reported in ScienceNOW this week as scientists reveal that they may have found a drug that can significantly improve their learning and memory skills.
By genetically modifying mice to contain multiple copies of more than 100 genes found on chromosome 21- the equivalent of Down Syndrome in humans- researchers from Stanford University in California have been able to replicate the condition that affects one in 800 human babies on the rodents.
Looking at the brains of the mice under a microscope, the scientists noted a degradation of the brain in the locus coeruleus region, which contains neurons that stretch to the hippocampus, the memory centre of the brain, and release norepinephrine- a neurotransmitter that promotes learning and memory.
From this, the team’s rationale was that a deficit of the neurotransmitter would undermine learning and memory, which are symptoms of Down syndrome. Therefore, they gave the mice drugs that boost the neurotransmitter throughout the brain and then tested the mice’s memory.
Using an enclosure where certain areas gave the mice a mild electric shock, the researchers noted that after being given the drug, the mice performed as well as normal mice in the same test of avoiding the shock, whereas before the modified mice had performed very poorly.
Luckily, norepinephrine is already in advanced clinical trials to treat people with low blood pressure, so launching a trial in humans with Down syndrome should be much easier than normal, giving hope to the potential for independent living to sufferers of the disorder.
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Apocalypse Now?
Are we all still here? Good, then the Large Hadron Collider didn’t destroy our universe on Friday as was previously reported as a possibility the last time it was switched on in September 2008.
Since then this project, which took eight years to build, has been blighted by problems, including a massive electrical fault causing a huge helium leak just ten days after experiments commenced and a recent baguette strike from a passing bird damaging a cooling unit.
Scientists working at CERN in Geneva now have the subatomic particles whizzing round the LHC and will shortly start smashing them into each other again.
The whole point of the exercise is to examine some of the mysteries of the universe by recreating the conditions present immediately after the Big Bang. Potential findings could include new dimensions of space and ‘supersymmetry’, which suggests that every particle in the universe has an invisible partner.
Furthermore, they also hope to discover the ‘Higgs boson’ or ‘God particle’ and the nature of dark matter, by colliding the particles at 99.99996% the speed of light. The scientists hope that slamming two protons into each other will release bursts of energy similar to those present a fraction after the Big Bang.
To ensure similar catastrophes don’t hinder the project, engineers have been tirelessly checking over the rest of the machine and installing safety measures over the past year.
If things go to plan this time, by January the machine could be running at three times the capacity as the current world leading collider, ‘Tevatron’ in Chicago.
Read more in the Guardian
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Bright Noise
In an ironic twist reported in New Scientist this week, mobile phones could now become a valuable asset in the fight against noise pollution!
Currently EU member states are required make ‘noise maps’ for their urban areas every five years, so instead of using expensive sensors all over a city, they usually use computational models to predict the effects of sources of noise on the areas around them.
However, researchers from the Sony Computer Science Laboratory in Paris say that those maps are not a true reflection of noise levels, so to combat this they have developed ‘Noise Tube’, a downloadable application that can monitor noise pollution from smartphones.
Tracking the phone using the GPS location and monitoring the noise through the phones microphone, the results are sent to Noise Tube’s server where they can be tracked on Google Earth and tagged accordingly.
Furthermore, the app checks on the local weather information and rejects any samples that could have been distorted by factors such as high winds.
Any locations with sustained levels of noise are listed as ‘dangerous’.
Andrea Iacoponi of ARPAT (Agenzia Regionale per la Protezione Ambientale della Toscana) said; "NoiseTube could provide an extra tool to noise experts and decision makers in environmental noise management and it can be used to improve the accuracy of European Directive strategic noise maps."
And finally.....
Pride before a fall.
A study from Kellogg School of Management in Illinois has discovered an interesting contrast to the commonly held perception of will power.
Their findings uphold that instead of people who consider themselves to have strong willpower being able to easily resist temptation, they are in fact more likely to indulge themselves than other groups.
The researchers articulate that many people regard themselves as being able to resist a lot more temptation than they actually can, causing them to be more likely to engage in impulsive or addictive behaviour.
Prof Loran Nordgren, the leader of the study said; “People are not good at anticipating the power of their urges. Indeed, those who are the most confident about their self-control are the most likely to give in to temptation.”
He conducted an experiment that showed the people with the most perceived willpower were much more likely to smoke after watching a film about smoking.
Read more in the Telegraph
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