SPACE DIGEST: JANUARY 2005

This release contains a summary of some significant astronomical and space events that will be taking place during January. It has been written in order to assist the media in planning and researching future stories related to space science and astronomy, particularly those with UK involvement. It is not intended to be fully comprehensive. Dates and times may be subject to change.

EINSTEIN YEAR

2005 is Einstein Year, the UK’s contribution to

A quiet revolution is coming our way. Recent successful trials of European semantic-Web applications suggest that machine-readable data will soon usher in an improved Web that will facilitate information reuse, and provide for painless building and maintenance of community portals.

“Computers struggle to attach meaning to information written in common Web languages such as Hypertext Markup Language [HTML],” says Libby Miller, coordinator of the IST SWAD-Europe project. “One way to h

For the first time, a team of astronomers based in Germany has detected the presence of magnetic fields in the central stars of four planetary nebulae. Planetary nebulae are expanding gas shells that remain after Sun-like stars eject their outer layers at the end of their lifetimes. It is a long-standing and unsolved mystery why 80% of all planetary nebulae are not spherical. Theories suggest that magnetic fields play a role in shaping planetary nebulae. The team, led by Stefan Jordan, has now

Cord blood cells limit heart attack damage in animal study

Stem cells from umbilical cord blood effectively treated heart attacks in an animal study, report cardiologist Robert J. Henning, MD, and colleagues at the University of South Florida and James A. Haley Veterans’ Hospital.

When injected into rats’ hearts soon after a heart attack, stem cells taken from human umbilical cord blood (HUCB) greatly reduced the size of heart damage and restored pumping func

The rice genome is larger, but we make the most of what we’ve got

In April 2003, scientists completed the massive Human Genome Project, recording for the first time in history the location and sequence of every gene in the human body. One result of the international project came as a bit of a shock. Scientists discovered that the body has only 30,000 genes, far fewer than the 50,000 to 140,000 they had expected to find.

Moreover, scientists learned that some less compl

An American engineer has produced a mathematical model explaining the elegant shape of the Eiffel Tower that was derived from French engineer Gustave Eiffel’s writings regarding his own fears about the effects of wind on such a structure.

University of Colorado at Boulder Associate Professor Patrick Weidman said Eiffel, one of the premier structural engineers in history, was determined to build the world’s first tower reaching 300 meters, the nearest metric equivalent to

Finding how the fowl-borne bacteria Campylobacter jejuni makes at least a million Americans miserable for a week each year is on the plates of two Medical College of Georgia microbiologists.

Raw and undercooked poultry and meat, raw milk and untreated water are sources for Campylobacter, the most common bacterial cause of diarrhea in the United States, according the U.S. Public Health Service.

But finding how these bacteria that happily co-exist with chickens and turkeys

Carbon and silicate grains in interplanetary dust particles are helping scientists solve a 40-year-old astronomical mystery.

Using a transmission electron microscope, researchers from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have detected a 5.7-electron volt or 2175 Å (angstrom) wavelength feature in interstellar grains that were embedded within interplanetary dust particles (IDPs). They found that this feature is carried by carbon and amorphous silicate grains that are abundant in

More than 250 new examples of England’s finest array of prehistoric rock art carvings, sited close to the Scottish border, have been discovered by archaeologists compiling a unique database.

Now over one thousand of the ’cup and ring’ carvings can be admired on a new website, which carries 6,000 images and is said to be the most comprehensive of its kind in the world. The site, which goes live today, includes the 250 panels unearthed during a two-and-a-half year t

Engineering researchers at the University of California, San Diego are using the shell of a seaweed-eating snail as a guide in the development of a new generation of bullet-stopping armor. The colorful oval shell of the red abalone is highly prized as a source of nacre, or mother-of-pearl, jewelry, but the UCSD researchers are most impressed by the shell’s ability to absorb heavy blows without breaking.

In a paper published in the Jan. 15 issue of Materials Science and Engin

How do you remember your own name? Is it possible ever to forget it? The memory trace, or engram, “feels” like it is stored permanently in the brain and it will never be forgotten.

Indeed, the current view of memory is that, at the molecular level, new proteins are manufactured, in a process known as translation, and it is these newly synthesized proteins that subsequently stabilize the changes underlying the memory. Thus, every new memory results in a permanent representation in

Although mass is the most important property of stars, it has proved very hard to measure for the lowest mass objects in the universe. Thanks to a powerful new camera, a very rare, low-mass companion has finally been photographed.

The discovery suggests that, due to errors in the models, astronomers have overestimated the number of young “brown dwarfs” and “free floating” extrasolar planets. An international team of astronomers lead by University of Arizona Associate Professor La

Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Technical University Munch have discovered evidence of a phenomenon that may lead to drastically lowering the cost of manufacturing of materials from plastics to fertilizers. Studying nano-sized clusters of gold on a magnesium oxide surface, scientists found direct evidence for electrical charging of a nano-sized catalyst. This is an important factor in increasing the rate of chemical reactions. The research will appear in the 21 January, 2

Newly published North Carolina State University research into the evolution of birds shows the first definitive fossil proof linking close relatives of living birds to a time when dinosaurs roamed the earth.

Research by paleontologist Dr. Julia A. Clarke, an assistant professor in the marine, earth and atmospheric sciences department at NC State, and colleagues provides unprecedented fossil proof that some close cousins to living bird species coexisted with dinosaurs more than

New results show that land-living crabs, descended from marine ancestors, have re-invented key aspects of the insect nose through evolution in order to solve the problem of olfaction in their air-filled terrestrial environment.

The robber crab, Birgus latro, is the world’s largest land-dwelling arthropod, with a weight reaching 4 kg and a length of more than half a meter. Robber crabs are perhaps most famous for their ability to climb tall palm trees in search of coconuts, which

Mayo Clinic researchers have identified a previously unknown form of muscular dystrophy, a group of genetic diseases characterized by progressive weakness and muscle degeneration. This newly identified form develops after age 40 and causes heart muscle damage, limb muscle weakness and nerve damage. The researchers have named the newly defined disorder “zaspopathy” (Zas-PO-path-ee).

Some 50,000 Americans have some form of muscular dystrophy, and there are currently no cures. M

Swimming endurance improvement comes from equivalent of four cups of tea a day over 10 weeks

Now that even baseball players may need to seek new, more natural performance aids, will Japanese green tea sets become standard in dugouts and athletic training tables around the world? A new study tested the effect of regularly taking green tea extract (GTE) and found that over 10 weeks, endurance exercise performance was boosted up to 24% with 0.5% GTE supplementation, and 8% with 0.

A gene that plays many fundamental roles in cells throughout the body has, for the first time, been implicated in human disease, according to researchers at the Duke Center for Human Genetics. A defect in the ubiquitous gene dynamin 2 underlies one form of the prevalent, familial nerve disorder, known as Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease (CMT). The disorder affects approximately 1 in every 2,500 people, making it one of the most common of all hereditary disorders, said the researchers.

May offer new approach to smallpox treatment

In a finding that represents an entirely new approach to treating viral diseases such as smallpox, scientists at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and collaborating institutions have shown that infections can be stymied by interfering with signals used by viruses to reproduce in human cells.

The results, reported in the February issue of the Journal of Clinical Investigation, point to a possible strategy for broadly treating acut

Scientists fear rise in deaths from untreated depression

Challenging recent claims linking antidepressant use to suicidal behavior, a new UCLA study shows that American suicide rates have dropped steadily since the introduction of Prozac and other serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI) drugs. Published in the February edition of the journal Nature Reviews Drug Discovery, the authors caution that regulatory actions to limit SSRI prescriptions may actually increase death rates from untrea