Gaming Tech Aids Scientists Building Virtual Synthetic Chromatophore

The study of processes that make life possible is hardly a leisurely pursuit, but that doesn't preclude researchers from taking advantage of the most advanced video gaming technology available to aid in their work. A team of University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign (U.I.U.C.) physicists has assembled a supercomputer consisting of several hundred superfast graphics processing units (GPUs) --typically used for rendering highly sophisticated video game graphics--that they think will help them build a simulation depicting how chromatophore proteins turn light energy into chemical energy, a process called photosynthesis.

"Ninety-five percent of the energy that life on Earth requires are fueled by photosynthetic processes," says Klaus Schulten , a (U.I.U.C.) physics professor leading the simulation-building effort and director of the school's Theoretical and Computational Biophysics Group . To better understand how these processes work, Schulten's team is assembling a computer-based, virtual photosynthetic chromatophore . [More]


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Champagne Bubbles Liberate Flavor Compounds

Bubbles percolating up through a freshly poured glass of champagne do more than just tickle the tongue, according to a new study.  

A team of European researchers, publishing in this week's Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , finds that the bubbles in sparkling wine drag compounds that activate smell receptors to the surface of the sparkling wine and then shoot them upward where a taster can easily encounter them. (Although "champagne" technically refers to sparkling wines from the Champagne region of France, all effervescent wines should be subject to the same mechanism.)  

Champagne Bubbles Key To Taste

[ The following is an exact transcript of this podcast. ]

Let’s raise a toast to champagne. And its ubiquitous bubbles. Because new research says the bubbles aren’t just tickling your tongue. They’re erupting with aromas vital to the taste of the beverage.

Steven Chu to greenhouse gases: we will bury you

The U.S. Secretary of Energy-- channeling former Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev perhaps?--has one thing to say in this week's Science to the greenhouse gases emitted by coal-fired power plants: we will bury you. Nobel Laureate Steven Chu's department has funneled $3.4 billion in stimulus dollars to research and develop the technology known as carbon capture and storage (CCS). [More]


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Greenhouse Rock: Stone-Cold Data from Ancient Glacial Deposits May Help Reveal Future Climate Change

Aptly named for its location behind a ball field in New York City's Central Park, Umpire Rock may offer a useful vantage point for calling balls and strikes. For scientists, however, it has served as a speed gun for calculating the trajectory and timing of an ancient glacier that once played an active role in global climate change. [More]


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LSD Returns--For Psychotherapeutics

Albert Hofmann, the discoverer of LSD, lambasted the countercultural movement for marginalizing a chemical that he asserted had potential benefits as an invaluable supplement to psychotherapy and spiritual practices such as meditation. “This joy at having fathered LSD was tarnished after more than ten years of uninterrupted scientific research and medicinal use when LSD was swept up in the huge wave of an inebriant mania that began to spread over the Western world, above all the United States, at the end of the 1950s,” Hofmann groused in his 1979 memoir LSD: My Problem Child.

For just that reason, Hofmann was jubilant in the months before his death last year, at the age of 102, when he learned that the first scientific research on LSD in decades was just beginning in his native Switzerland. “He was very happy that, as he said, ‘a long wish finally became true,’ ” remarks Peter Gasser, the physician leading the clinical trial. “He said that the substance must be in the hands of medical doctors again.”

Water On The Moon

[ The following is an exact transcript of this podcast. ]

For all you space buffs who like to keep track of where the water is, it looks like you can add our very own moon to your list. Because according to a trio of papers appearing in the journal Science , the lunar surface is wetter than we realized. [More]


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Stream of Evidence from 3 Spacecraft Indicates That the Moon Has Water

A hotly anticipated experiment will test the theory next month that the moon's permanently shadowed polar craters harbor pockets of water ice. A NASA spacecraft called the Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) will perform a two-stage bombardment of a south polar crater to see what rises up in the ensuing debris plume.  

Now, just two weeks before LCROSS's scheduled barrage, comes a suite of evidence that the moon indeed hosts water. But the new studies point to a different sort of deposit than the concentrated ice supply LCROSS seeks--they indicate that water exists diffusely across the moon as molecules clinging to the surface in low concentrations. What is more, there may be a water cycle in which the molecule is broken down and reformulated over the span of a lunar daytime (about two Earth weeks long).  

Grappling with the Anthropocene: Scientists Identify Safe Limits for Human Impacts on Planet

The scale of mankind's impact on the globe is becoming more and more apparent: We have achieved a species extinction rate to rival great extinction events of all geologic time as well as a rapidly acidifying ocean, dwindling ice caps, and even sinking river deltas , a new study from scientists at the University of Colorado at Boulder reveals. No wonder then that some geologists and other scientists have dubbed the modern epoch the Anthropocene. And now an international group of 28 scientists has taken a preliminary stab at setting some concrete environmental thresholds for the planet. [More]


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Inhale or Don't?: Marijuana Hurts Some, Helps Others

Clinton didn’t inhale, Obama did--and maybe Reagan should have. New research suggests that THC, the chemical that gives marijuana its mind-bending properties, kills developing neurons, yet oddly, the same chemical saves neurons in adults with Alzheimer’s disease.

“Marijuana is not the ‘soft drug’ people like to think it is,” says neuro­pharmacologist Veronica Campbell of Trinity College in Dublin, whose latest study uncovered the harmful effects of THC on young neurons. When Campbell and her co-workers treated brain cells from newborn or adolescent rats with THC, the neurons died, but THC did not have such deadly effects on neurons taken from adult rats. In fact, work from other labs shows that THC benefits adult neurons. “We don’t know why,” Campbell says. Several possi­bilities are being investigated for this “Jekyll and Hyde” effect.

Boosting Vaccines: The Power of Adjuvants (preview)

The thought of birth defects caused by rubella, rows of iron lungs housing children crippled by polio, or the horrific sound of a baby struggling with whooping cough can still evoke dread among people who have seen firsthand the damage inflicted by these and other vaccine-preventable diseases. Fortunately, those scourges are virtually unknown to modern generations that have had access to vaccines all their lives.

For more than 200 years vaccines have proved to be one of the most successful, lifesaving and economical methods of preventing infectious disease, second only to the sanitization of water. Vaccines have spared millions of people from early death or crippling illnesses and made the global eradication of smallpox in 1979 possible. Health experts now pledge to eliminate polio, measles and perhaps one day even malaria--although, as we shall see, a malaria vaccine will require novel approaches to immunization to be successful.

Burying Climate Change: Efforts Begin to Sequester Carbon Dioxide from Power Plants

Over the next five years at least half a million tons of carbon dioxide will be injected into rock deep underneath the Mountaineer power plant near New Haven, W.Va. Although that is less than 0.00001 percent of global emissions of the greenhouse gas and less than 2 percent of the plant’s own CO 2 output, the sequestration, which begins this week, marks the first commercial demonstration of the only available technological fix for the carbon problem of coal-fired power plants , one that many coal facilities around the world hope to emulate. [More]


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Uncharted waters: Students retrofit sailboat with hydrogen power and motor up the Hudson

Editor's Note: A team of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute students are sailing up New York's Hudson River this week on the New Clermont, a 6.7-meter boat outfitted with a pair of 2.2-kilowatt hydrogen fuel cells to power the boat's motor. Their journey began September 21 from Manhattan's Pier 84 and will cover 240 kilometers (at a projected speed of 8 kilometers per hour). After making several stops along the way, the crew expects to arrive back at Rensselaer Polytech's campus in Troy, N.Y., on September 25. This is the first of Scientific American.com's blogs chronicling this expedition, called the New Clermont Project . [More]


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Turbocharging the Brain--Pills to Make You Smarter? (preview)

The symbol H+ is the code sign used by some futurists to denote an enhanced version of humanity. The plus version of the human race would deploy a mix of advanced technologies, including stem cells, robotics, cognition-enhancing drugs, and the like, to overcome basic mental and physical limitations.

The notion of enhancing mental functions by gulping down a pill that improves attention, memory and planning--the very foundations of cognition--is no longer just a fantasy shared by futurists. The 1990s, proclaimed the decade of the brain by President George H. W. Bush, has been followed by what might be labeled “the decade of the better brain.”

Oil Rig of the Future: A Solar Panel That Produces Oil

BANGALORE, India--In the ongoing hunt for alternative fuel sources that are also cost-effective, researchers are looking into making biofuel from genetically engineered diatoms, a type of single-celled algae with shells made of glasslike silica. [More]


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Salty Origins For Early Earth Biomolecules

[ The following is an exact transcript of this podcast. ]

The early Earth’s oceans were home to a lot of interesting chemistry. Now scientists have found that amino acids thought to be present way back when could have been cooked into other compounds vital for life--an idea you should take with a grain of salt.

Open-Access Flu Research Web Site Is Relaunched Amid Controversy

A database designed to help researchers worldwide develop vaccines for avian and seasonal influenza viruses, not to mention the prolific H1N1 "swine flu," is now at the center of an ugly rift between its co-creators. Both the Global Initiative on Sharing Avian Influenza Data (GISAID) Foundation that initiated the effort and the Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (SIB) that built the actual influenza gene sequence "EpiFlu" database claim ownership of the project, thanks to legal and financial entanglements that the courts will now have to sort through. [More]


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Navy Green: Military Investigates Biofuels to Power Its Ships and Planes

Ships powered by algae and planes flying on weeds : that's part of the future the U.S. Navy hopes to bring to fruition. This week, the seagoing branch of the military purchased 40,000 gallons of jet fuel derived from camelina--a weedy relative of canola--and 20,055 gallons of algae-derived diesellike fuel for ships. [More]


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Sniffing out toxic chemicals--with colors

Miners had canaries; physicists and medical technicians get radiation badges. But for those in other labs or factories with toxic chemicals, there has long been a need for practical sensors to warn workers when chemical concentrations get dangerous. [More]


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