Monthly Archives: July 2012

Science in British Sign Language – Summer Lecture

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Science Brainwaves is proud to announce the details of our first summer lecture:

Science in British Sign Language

We are delighted to welcome Brainy and Brawny, aka Dr Audrey Cameron and Gary Quinn, and their fantastic science show! Gary and Audrey will be producing explosions, illusions, and a little bit of science…suitable for all ages and hearing abilities! The show will be performed in British Sign Language with audio interpretation.

The lecture is on Friday August 3rd from 6pm – 8pm at the Richard Roberts Building, University of Sheffield, Western Bank. Doors will open from 5.30

This event is FREE. To reserve your tickets, go to http://www.amiando.com/sciencebrainwaves0812

If you have any questions or special requirements, please contact Holly at h.rogers@sciencebrainwaves.com. We hope to see you at the lecture!

A New Moon Has Been Discovered Orbiting Pluto

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By Maria Panagiotidi

A fifth moon was discovered orbiting Pluto by a team of astronomers using NASA’s Hubble space Telescope.

The icy dwarf planet Pluto has four other known moons, the largest being Charon which was discovered in 1978 at the United States Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C. Hubble observations in 2006 uncovered two additional small moons, Nix and Hydra. Pluto’s fourth moon, which is provisionally named “P4″, was discovered almost a year ago.

Hubble Discovers a Fifth Moon Orbiting Pluto

This image, taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope, shows five moons orbiting the distant, icy dwarf planet Pluto. The green circle marks the newly discovered moon, designated P5, as photographed by Hubble's Wide Field Camera 3 on July 7. (Source: Hubblesite.org)

Pluto’s fifth moon  was provisionally named P5 and was detected in nine separate sets of images taken by Hubble’s Wide Field Camera 3 on 26, 27 and 29 June, and 7 and 9 July 2012. It is estimated to be irregular in shape and 6 to 15 miles across. P5 is in a 58,000-mile-diameter circular orbit around Pluto that is assumed to lie in the same plane as Pluto’s other known moons.

Scientists are intrigued that such a small planet (Pluto is smaller than our moon) can have such a complex collection of satellites.

“The discovery of so many small moons indirectly tells us that there must be lots of small particles lurking unseen in the Pluto system,” said Harold Weaver of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md.

The new discovery provides additional clues about  the formation and evolution of the Pluto system. The most popular theory suggests that all the moons are relics of a collision between Pluto and another large Kuiper belt object billions of years ago. The Kuiper belt refers to a region of the Solar System that consists mainly of small icy bodies.

The new detection will allow scientists navigate NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft through the Pluto system in 2015, when it is expected to make an historic and long-awaited high-speed flyby of the distant world.  New Horizons will return the first ever detailed images of the Pluto system.

 

Official NASA announcement here: http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/science/new-pluto-moon.html

 

Particle Consistent with the Higgs Boson Discovered at the LHC

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By Stephen Sadler

On Wednesday, in a seminar watched live on the Internet all around the world, scientists from the two main detectors at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Geneva announced the discovery of a new particle whose properties are consistent with the long sought-after Higgs boson.

The Higgs is the fundamental particle responsible for providing all other particles with mass, and represents the final missing piece of the Standard Model of particle physics. Its existence was proposed in 1964 by three groups independently: Peter Higgs; Robert Brout and Francois Englert; and Gerald Guralnik, C.R. Hagen and Tom Kibble, and in 2010 the six physicists were jointly awarded the J.J. Sakurai Prize for Theoretical Particle Physics for their work.

Candidate Higgs event recorded by the CMS detector in May 2012. This event exhibits the characteristics expected from a Standard Model Higgs (not seen) decaying into two photons (yellow dashes and green bars).

In Wednesday’s seminar, CMS spokesman Joe Incandela and ATLAS spokeswoman Fabiola Gianotti announced that both of their experiments had detected a new particle with a significance of 5 sigma, which corresponds to a 1 in 3.5 million chance that the result is in fact a statistical fluke. This is the benchmark in the field for claiming the discovery of a new particle.

“We observe in our data clear signs of a new particle, at the level of 5 sigma, in the mass region around 126 GeV. The outstanding performance of the LHC and ATLAS and the huge efforts of many people have brought us to this exciting stage,” said Gianotti.

Scientists at the University of Sheffield have played a key role in both engineering and data analysis for the ATLAS detector, as well as providing supercomputers for the worldwide particle physics computing network known as the Grid.

CERN Director General Rolf Heuer had this to say about the new discovery:

“We have reached a milestone in our understanding of nature. The discovery of a particle consistent with the Higgs boson opens the way to more detailed studies, requiring larger statistics, which will pin down the new particle’s properties, and is likely to shed light on other mysteries of our universe.”

Scientists discover bees that can reverse brain aging

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By Maria Panagiotidi

Scientists at Arizona State University have discovered that older honey bees can reverse brain aging when they take on nest responsibilities typically handled by much younger bees.

This finding could provide alternative interventions for the treatment of age-related dementia. Current research focuses mainly on potential new drug treatments.

The study was published in the scientific journal Experimental Gerontology by a team of scientists from ASU and the Norwegian University of Life Sciences, led by Gro Amdam. The researchers found that tricking older, foraging bees into doing social tasks inside the nest causes changes in the molecular structure of their brains.

Previous research on honey bees has found that bees that stay in the nest and take care of larvae – the baby bees – remain mentally competent. However, after a period of nursing, bees fly out looking for food and begin aging very quickly. The effects of aging are visible after two weeks in the appearance of the foraging bees (worn wings, hairless bodies) and more importantly, in their brain function. Specifically, these bees lose the ability to learn new things.

Influenced by recent studies on brain plasticity, Amdam and colleagues wanted to see what would happen if the foraging bees returned to the nest and took care of the larval babies again.

The results of the experiment were fascinating. After 10 days, about 50 percent of the older bees caring for the nest and larvae had significantly improved their ability to learn new things.

The change observed in the older bees was not just behavioural but also physiological; Amdam and colleagues discovered a change in proteins in the bees’ brains. After comparing the brains of the bees that improved to those that did not, they found that two proteins had noticeably changed: Prx6 and “chaperone” protein. Both proteins have been previously found to protect the brain against diseases such as Alzheimer’s.

This finding could lead to the development of a drug that could help older people maintain brain function. However, many years of basic research and trials will be needed before such a drug becomes commercially available.

For now, Amdam and colleagues propose that social interventions might help our brains stay younger. Since the proteins being researched in people are the same as those found in bees, it is possible that these proteins may be able to respond to specific social experiences. Further research is needed on mammals in order to confirm that the same molecular changes occur on other species’ brains.

 

Reference

Nicholas Baker, Florian Wolschin, Gro V. Amdam. Age-related learning deficits can be reversible in honeybees Apis mellifera. Experimental Gerontology, 2012; DOI: 10.1016/j.exger.2012.05.011