#UK company pursues deep-sea bonanza If it were to go ahead, the mining would be the culmination of decades of technological effort and exploration."
"Lockheed martin (US) in the end did more development and at sea testing than any other company, says Caitlyn Antrim, executive director of the Rule of law Committee for the Oceans in WASHINGTON DC,
and a deep-seabed-mining consultant. The venture could add#40#billion (US$60#billion) to the UK economy over the next 30#years,
said UK Prime minister David cameron last week. Cameron s government sponsored Lockheed s claim to the 58,000-square-kilometre potential mining site through the company s subsidiary UK Seabed Resources in London.
The International Seabed Authority in Kingston Jamaica, which granted the exploration rights, has granted also claims in the region to several other countries,
but work towards harvesting has been slow. The UK effort has advantages, says Antrim: Lockheed has proven technologies and the most nodule-bed data.
Polymetallic nodules form over thousands of years on the sea floor, through processes that are still not fully understood;
most nodules range in size from the diameter of a golf ball to that of a large potato. Between the 1960s and the 1980s, various companies explored the possibility of harvesting them#but as metal prices fell,
the prospect became economically unfeasible. In recent years, however, climbing prices and advances in deep-sea equipment such as remotely operated vehicles and flexible risers#pipes used to lift material#have revived interest."
"It s part of the art of the possible now, says Miles Libbey, a former employee of Lockheed martin US,
and the founder of Seaminr, a seabed-mining consultancy in Urbanna, Virginia. PAUL JACKMAN/NATUREHARVESTING nodules is technically easier than mining the mineral-rich remnants of non-active hydrothermal vents on the sea floor,
a proposal that has garnered also attention (see Nature 447,246-247; 2007). ) Nodules rest unattached, and often visible, in seafloor sediments,
Lockheed has released not specific plans, but the general scheme for harvesting uses a device that moves along the sea floor,
but is used in everything from stainless steel to rechargeable batteries. Rare-earth elements are concentrated much less at around 0. 1,
Philip Rood, a spokesman for Lockheed martin UK, says that it hopes operations can begin in 5-6#years,
once Lockheed has completed technology tests and environ#mental studies. Data are so far sparse on the degree to
which the operations would threaten deep-sea life such as sediment-dwelling sea cucumbers, worms and small crustaceans,
or creatures that live higher in the water column, such as fish. A study at a nodule plain off Peru found that seafloor communities showed limited recovery after disturbance
) Craig Smith, a deep-sea biologist at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, will lead an initial assessment of seafloor life for Lockheed s project, gathering baseline data for the potential harvest zone
"To manage the environmental impacts well we really need excellent information. Cindy Van Dover, director of the Duke university Marine Laboratory in Beaufort, North carolina, has worked on assessments of deep-sea mining impacts.
She says, "I don t think there are red flags but I do think there are yellow flags. Her main concern is one of scale."
which may have helped them to make hasty retreats from oncoming vehicles, according to a study published in Current Biology1.
The study s authors discovered the trend after noticing that the number of vehicle-killed birds had declined over the past three decades.
says Charles Brown, a biologist at the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma and one of the authors of the study.
the shortening does support the idea that the birds are adapting to disturbed environments, as other organisms presumably are.
Together with Mary Bomberger Brown, a ornithologist at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Brown tracked roadside populations of cliff swallows (Petrochelidon pyrrhonota) in western Nebraska for 30 years, mostly to study the birds social
but have taken also to living under bridges and highway overpasses. As the two researchers checked the roadside colonies, Brown, an amateur taxidermist,
and stuffing#gathering 104 vehicle-killed adults and 134 adults killed accidentally in nets used for the study.
The team discovered that vehicle-killed birds had longer wings than birds that died in nets
and that while the wings of the vehicle-killed birds had lengthened over time, those#of net-killed birds
or enter their nesting sites, or take off from the pavement, Brown explains. And that in turn would enable them to survive
and produce more short-winged offspring. The researchers tried to rule out other factors that might have explained the decline in roadkill#including changes in methods to find the animals, traffic patterns, predators,
diseases and scavengers#but acknowledge that it might have been caused by behavioural changes, such as the birds learning to avoid cars.
Taxidermist Johannes Erritzoe at the House of Birdresearch in Christiansfeld Denmark, has noticed also a decline in the number vehicle-killed birds around Denmark,
and suspects natural selection. Although he has measured not yet wing length, he says that he now plans to do so.
It is hard to definitely prove that animals are adapting to living around roads, says behavioural ecologist Colleen St clair at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada.
But, she says"this is the best demonstration that they do have that capacity a
#Flashing fish brains filmed in action"It s phenomenal, says Rafael Yuste, a neuroscientist at Columbia University in New york."
"It is a bright star now in the literature, suggesting that it is not crazy to map every neuron in the brain of an animal.
Yuste has been leading the call for a big biology project2 that would do just that in the human brain,
consolidates learning or processes sights and smells.""It allows a much better view of the dynamics throughout the brain during different behaviours
and during learning paradigms, says Joseph Fetcho, a neurobiologist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New york. The imaging system relies on a genetically engineered zebrafish (Danio rerio).
and a detector captures the signals like a viewer watching a cinema screen. The system records activity from the full brain every 1. 3 seconds.
In a series of hour-long experiments, each of which generated 1 terabyte (1 million megabytes) of data,
For one thing, it works best in zebrafish embryos, which are transparent. Ahrens and Keller think that it could work in intact mammal brains,
but it would require surgery and would cover only a small fraction of the brain.
Another limitation is that neither the protein sensor nor the imaging system yet works fast enough to distinguish
#Distinctive virus behind mystery horse disease For almost 100 years, veterinarians have puzzled over the cause of Theiler's disease,
a mysterious type of equine hepatitis that is linked to blood products and causes liver failure in up to 90%of afflicted animals.
A team of US scientists has discovered now that the disease is caused by a virus that shares just 35%of its amino acid sequences with its closest-known relative.
The team named it Theiler's disease-associated virus (TDAV), and published the discovery in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences1.
Led by Amy Kistler at the Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research in Emeryville California, the team responded to an outbreak of Theiler's disease at a farm in
which eight horses had developed suddenly hepatitis after being injected with an antitoxin to prevent them from developing botulism.
The researchers used next-generation sequencing to analyse RNA samples from the antitoxin and from two of the horses,
and assembled the complete genome of the new virus. The virus was found in every one of the eight horses,
as well as in the animal (from a different farm) that was the source of the contaminated antitoxin.#"
#"In the span of a few months, we were able to sequence and validate a virus that had gone undetected for almost a century,
says Kistler. She thinks that traditional virus-hunting techniques failed to find TDAV because they rely on strong similarities to known viruses,
the team inoculated four healthy horses with the contaminated antitoxin. Within ten weeks all of them carried TDAV in their bloodstream,
and one later showed rising levels of liver enzymes that suggested liver disease. Although the researchers did not purify the virus before injecting it into the horses, Pablo Murcia, a virologist from the University of Glasgow,
UK, says that"they have a strong case: I will be surprised very if TDAV turns out not to be the cause of equine serum hepatitis."
It is also possible that there is another unknown virus behind Theiler's disease. After all, human hepatitis can be caused by at least five viruses. TDAV belongs to the family Flaviviridae,
which includes the viruses behind yellow fever, dengue fever and hepatitis C. It is associated most closely with a genus of newly discovered viruses called Pegivirus,
and is the first of these to be linked convincingly to disease.""The challenges in culturing pegiviruses mean that we re only now getting an understanding of how widely distributed and significant they are,
says James wood, who studies animal infections at the University of Cambridge, UK. He hints that some studies on new pegiviruses may be published in the future u
#Obama to announce $2 billion plan to get US cars off gasoline An article by Scientific American.
This afternoon, President Barack Obama will ask Congress to direct our cars, trucks and buses to a realm that doesn t include gas stations.
During a visit to Argonne National Laboratory, he will call for $2-billion energy security trust fund dedicated to research to boost automobile efficiency,
enhance battery technology and expand the use of biofuels, among other clean energy efforts. The ultimate goal:
getting the country off oil. Obama had mentioned briefly the idea of an energy security trust in his State of the Union address in January,
as a means of providing a long-term, reliable stream of money to researchers. The White house has argued that energy innovation is not only good for cutting carbon emissions to tame global warming,
but that it also plays an important part in growing the economy. Ahead of his March 15 announcement, White house officials offered a preview of the plan s details.
They said that the trust fund s $2 billion spread over 10 years, would come from leases of offshore oil drilling.
The money for the fund, which would probably be dispersed in the way that the ARPA-E program does it,
would come from an increase in expected revenue generated by a more efficient permit approval process and other reforms.
One official emphasized that the administration had no intention of modifying existing plans for the outer continental shelf
and does not support drilling in the Artic National Wildlife Refuge. Congress would have to approve the trust fund,
and despite the ongoing sequester and other budget battles, White house officials seemed optimistic that the plan would get a bipartisan thumbs-up.
and military leaders and enjoys support from Lisa Murkowski, the ranking Republican on the Senate s Energy and Natural resources Committee.
as one administration official stated, is to"double down on the opportunities for achieving a cleaner-energy future.
the crust"would be the first major ecosystem On earth to run on chemical energy rather than sunlight,
says Mark Lever, an ecologist at Aarhus University in Denmark, who led the study. The results are published in Science1."
says Kurt Konhauser, a geomicrobiologist at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. The oceanic crust is formed at ridges between tectonic plates,
where rising lava meets sea water and cools. The newborn rock#mostly basalt#is pushed away from the ridges
and becomes buried under thick sediment. Although scientists have known long that microbes live in this sediment
and in exposed basalt that has not yet been covered2, the deeper, buried parts of the crust have been a mystery."
but this time,"we had five microbiologists on board, says Lever. The team, which included scientists from six different countries, drilled through 265 metres of sediment
and 300 metres of crust to collect basalt that had been formed around 3. 5 million years ago.
Lever now plans to analyse fragments of crust collected from other sites in the Pacific ocean and the North atlantic."
but wonder how the amount of living biomass there compares to that at the Earth s surface, says Konhauser s
#Wildlife trade meeting endorses DNA TESTING of seized ivory If you go into a bar in Bangkok tonight,
the states party to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) took the unprecedented step of granting protection to sharks and various species of tropical timber tree in their final vote today.
Tom Milliken, who works for the wildlife trade monitoring group TRAFFIC, which is headquartered in Cambridge, UK and has been involved heavily in the debates about elephant poaching,
because it was the first time that the entire COP acknowledged the value and need for DNA TESTING for the origin of poached ivory.
All my hard work had paid finally off, says Samuel Wasser, director of the Center for Conservation Biology at the University of Washington in Seattle and one of the driving forces behind the push for forensic examinations of elephant ivory.
The delegates also approved measures to curb demand for ivory, which could include public-awareness campaigns in countries driving the trade, such as China.
a move welcomed by Iain Douglas-Hamilton, a researcher at the University of Oxford, UK and the founder of the charity Save the Elephants, based in Nairobi."
says Leigh Henry, a senior policy adviser at the conservation organization WWF in WASHINGTON DC.""The parties to CITES are really stepping up,
#Wireless brain-computer interface streams thought commands with the speed of an Internet connection Following more than a decade of engineering work,
a wireless brain-computer interface could finally give paralyzed people the ability to control everyday devices like TVS, computers,
or wheelchairs with their thoughts. The mental remote control, developed by Braingate, will be tested in volunteers possibly within a year.
According to a recent post on MTI Technology Review, researchers at Brown University and a company callled Blackrock Microsystems, have commercialized a wireless device that can be attached to a person skull
and transmit thought commands collected from a brain implant. The researchers say that the wireless BCI is able to stream thought commands via its radio at a rate of 48 megabits per second, about the speed of a home Internet connection.
The amount of data transmitted daily by the device equals about the amount of data stored on 200 DVDS.
Blackrock is already selling the wireless processor to research labs under the product name ereplex-W for about $15, 000.
The small interface can be attached to the skull and wired to electrodes inside the brain.
The processor inside the device amplifies the electrical signals emitted by neurons, then translates the information into digital codes,
and the built-in radio beams this info to the receiver placed within a few meters. From this point the original thought command becomes available as a control signal for computers.
The device was developed by the Braingate consortium based at Brown University. Braingate was among the first to place implants in the brains of paralyzed people
and show that electrical signals emitted by neurons inside the cortex could be recorded, then used to steer a wheelchair
or direct a robotic arm. The Braingate team also won the $1-million B. R. A i. N. Prize at Braintech Israel 2013.
According to Florian Solzbacher, president of Blackrock and professor at University of Utah, human tests of the wireless BCI could happen soon
#MIT's multifunctional fiber implant could revolutionize neural prosthetics Today cutting edge neural implants can passively read brain activity,
actively stimulate or modulate neuronal firing, or precisely deliver drugs to a particular area when they are needed.
No one device can do all of these things simultaneously, but that may soon change due to recent research on ultifunctional fibersdone by MIT Bioelectronics group.
Wee covered quite a few evolutionarynew interface technologies here at NG, so what new tricks do these fibers bring to the table?
Flexible: these fiber based neural implants are much more flexible than the current industry standard, multielectrode arrays and hooked eedlestyle stimulators.
The brain itself is composed of some of the softest tissue in the body, so harder implants that don bend with their surrounding biological environment can easily shift
and move to a different area than they were implanted, causing scarring along the way. Biocompatible:
This sort of goes without saying, but anything implanted with the body has to be entirely non-reactive, especially in the brain.
Even a small inflammatory response could cause serious damage, so a polymer that is both flexible and biocompatible is perfect for neural implantation.
Multiple functionalities: though the current process can only create threads that perform a single type of task,
or chemical, they are so small that several fibers can be bundled together in a customized cable designed for the area it is designed to interface with.
The most exciting thing about these new fibers is undoubtedly the ability to bundle together different functionalities in the same implant,
to have an implant with electrodes paired with drug delivery pumps that could sense an oncoming epileptic seizure
Scientists at MIT Bioelectronics group not as interested in creating applications for these new multifunctional fibers as they are in perfecting the technology,
what theye created to build whatever kind of neural implants they can dream up. And people say we aren living in the future
which is a platform for visualization, simulation, analysis and interaction of large data, that combines computational power with human intuition in representing
As is often the case with complex data, one might not always have a specific hypothesis to start with.
On this platform, the researchers reconstructed a large-scale simulation of human brain activity in a 3d virtual reality environment.
Using the brain known connectivity along with detailed biophysics, the researchers reconstruct neuronal activity of the entire cortex in the resting-state.
Users can interact with Brainx3 in real-time by perturbing brain regions with transient stimulations to observe reverberating network activity,
simulate lesion dynamics or implement network analysis functions from a library of graph theoretic measures. Within the immersive mixed/virtual reality space of Brainx3 users can explore and analysis dynamical activity patterns of brain networks
both at rest or during task, or for discovering of signaling pathways associated to brain function and/or dysfunction or as a tool for virtual neurosurgery.
Besides the dynamics of the resting-state, on Brainx3, the researchers have simulated also neural activity from lesioned brains
Knowledge of brain activity in these various states is clinically relevant for assessing levels of consciousness in patients with severe brain injury y
which could revolutionize drug discovery and personalized medicine. In a laboratory first, Duke researchers have grown human skeletal muscle that contracts
and responds just like native tissue to external stimuli such as electrical pulses, biochemical signals and pharmaceuticals.
and study diseases in functioning human muscle outside of the human body. The study was led by Nenad Bursac, associate professor of biomedical engineering at Duke university
and Lauran Madden, a postdoctoral researcher in Bursac laboratory. It appears January 13 in the open-access journal elife. he beauty of this work is that it can serve as a test bed for clinical trials in a dish,
said Bursac. e are working to test drugsefficacy and safety without jeopardizing a patient health
and also to reproduce the functional and biochemical signals of diseasesspecially rare ones and those that make taking muscle biopsies difficult.
Bursac and Madden started with a small sample of human cells that had progressed already beyond stem cells
and media to make this work with human muscle cells, said Madden. Madden subjected the new muscle to a barrage of tests to determine how closely it resembled native tissue inside a human body.
To see if the muscle could be used as a proxy for medical tests, Bursac and Madden studied its response to a variety of drugs,
causing abnormal fat accumulation at high concentrations. Clenbuterol showed a narrow beneficial window for increased contraction.
Both of these effects have been documented in humans. Clenbuterol does not harm muscle tissue in rodents at those doses
showing the lab-grown muscle was giving a truly human response. ne of our goals is to use this method to provide personalized medicine to patients,
said Bursac. e can take a biopsy from each patient, grow many new muscles to use as test samples
Bursac is already working on a study with clinicians at Duke Medicinencluding Dwight Koeberl, associate professor of pediatricso try to correlate efficacy of drugs in patients with the effects on lab-grown muscles.
Bursac group is also trying to grow contracting human muscles using induced pluripotent stem cells instead of biopsied cells. here are a some diseases, like Duchenne Muscular dystrophy for example,
that make taking muscle biopsies difficult, said Bursac. f we could grow working, testable muscles from induced pluripotent stem cells,
the R. Eugene and Susie E. Goodson Professor of Biomedical engineering and senior associate dean for research for the Pratt School of engineering,
and William Krauss, professor of biomedical engineering, medicine and nursing at Duke university. The research was supported by NIH Grants R01ar055226 and R01ar065873 from the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin disease and UH2TR000505 from the NIH Common Fund for the Microphysiological Systems Initiative.
Bioengineered human myobundles mimic clinical responses of skeletal muscle to drugs Existing in vitro models of human skeletal muscle cannot recapitulate the organization and function of native muscle
These biomimetic constructs exhibit aligned architecture, multinucleated and striated myofibers, and a Pax7+cell pool.
myobundles undergo dose-dependent hypertrophy or toxic myopathy similar to clinical outcomes. Human myobundles provide an enabling platform for predictive drug
and toxicology screening and development of novel therapeutics for muscle-related disorders. ioengineered human myobundles mimic clinical responses of skeletal muscle to drugsby Lauran Madden, Mark Juhas, William
#Researchers Identify Important Control Mechanisms for Walking Even after complete spinal paralysis, the human spinal cord is able to trigger activity in the leg muscles using electrical pulses from an implanted stimulator.
Now, as part of a joint international project, a team of young researchers at the Center for Medical Physics and Biomedical engineering at Meduni Vienna has succeeded in identifying the mechanisms the spinal cord uses to control this muscle activity.
even if the neural pathways from the brain are interrupted physically as the result of a spinal cord injury.
This is the first time throughout the world that the spinal-cord activation patterns for walking have been decoded Paraplegics still have neural connections (so-called locomotion centers) below the site of the injury
and these can trigger rhythmic movements in the legs. sing statistical methods, we were able to identify a small number of basic patterns that underlie muscle activities in the legs and control periodic activation or deactivation of muscles to produce cyclical movements,
Just like a set of building blocks, the neural network in the spinal cord is able to combine these basic patterns flexibly to suit the motor requirement,
explains study author Simon Danner, from the Center for Medical Physics and Biomedical engineering of Meduni Vienna.
it is the neural networks in the spinal cord that actually generate the complex motor patterns. These locomotion centers are to be found in most vertebrates.
New possibilities for rehabilitation following spinal paralysis These new findings relating to the basic patterns for triggering
and coordinating muscle movements in the legs should also help in developing new approaches to rehabilitation aimed at utilizing those neural networks that are still functional following an accident
and the resulting paralysis by stimulating them electrically. This opens the way to new therapeutic options for helping paraplegics to at least partially regain lost rhythmic movements.
Exactly how the neural networks need to be stimulated depends upon the patient individual injury profile and is the subject of further studies.
To help with this, the scientists at Meduni Vienna have developed a unique, noninvasive method for stimulating the spinal cord,
which involves attaching electrodes to the surface of the skin. his method allows easy access to the neural connections in the spinal cord below a spinal injury
#Genetic Brain disorders Converge at the Synapse Several genetic disorders cause intellectual disability and autism. Historically, these genetic brain diseases were viewed as untreatable.
However, in recent years neuroscientists have shown in animal models that it is possible to reverse the debilitating effects of these gene mutations.
But the question remained whether different gene mutations disrupt common physiological processes. If this were the case,
a treatment developed for one genetic cause of autism and intellectual disability might be useful for many others.
In a paper published today in the online edition of Nature Neuroscience, a research team led by Mark Bear,
the Picower Professor of Neuroscience in MIT Picower Institute for Learning and Memory, showed that two very different genetic causes of autism
and intellectual disability disrupt protein synthesis at synapses, and that a treatment developed for one disease produced a cognitive benefit in the other.
The research was performed by postdoc and lead author Di Tian, graduate student Laura Stoppel, and research scientist Arnold Heynen, in collaboration with scientists at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and Roche pharmaceuticals.
Researching the role of fragile X syndrome One heritable cause of intellectual disability and autism is fragile X syndrome,
which arises when a single gene on the X chromosome, called FMR1, is turned off during brain development.
Fragile X is rare, affecting one in about 4, 000 individuals. In previous studies using mouse models of fragile X,
Bear and others discovered that the loss of this gene results in exaggerated protein synthesis at synapses, the specialized sites of communication between neurons.
Of particular interest, they found that this protein synthesis was stimulated by the neurotransmitter glutamate, downstream of a glutamate receptor called mglur5.
This insight led to the idea, called the mglur theory, that too much protein synthesis downstream of mglur5 activation gives rise to many of the psychiatric and neurological symptoms of fragile X. Bear lab tested this idea in mice,
and found that inhibiting mglur5 restored balanced protein synthesis and reversed many defects in the animal models.
Different genes, same consequences Another cause of autism and intellectual disability is the loss of a series of genes on human chromosome 16,
Some of the 27 affected genes play a role in protein synthesis regulation, leading Bear and colleagues to wonder if 16p11.2 microdeletion syndrome and fragile X syndrome affect synapses in the same way.
the researchers used a mouse model of 16p11.2 microdeletion, created by Alea Mills at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory.
biochemical, and behavioral analyses, the MIT team compared this 16p11.2 mouse with what they already had established in the fragile X mouse.
Synaptic protein synthesis was disrupted indeed in the hippocampus, a part of the brain important for memory formation.
similar to fragile X. Restoring brain function after disease onset These findings encouraged the MIT researchers to attempt to improve memory function in the 16p11.2 mice with the same approach that has worked in fragile X mice.
The implication, according to Bear, is that ome cognitive aspects of this disease, previously believed to be an intractable consequence of altered early brain development,
Current research indicates that well over 100 distinct gene mutations can manifest as intellectual disability and autism.
as they indicate not only that drug therapies might be effective to improve cognition and behavior in affected individuals,
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