Schools 4 Online

Romance may happen every day, but finding true love in London is as rare as aliens in the galaxy, says one London-based economist.
Peter Backus, a teaching fellow of economics at the University of Warwick, has calculated that he has a 0.00034 percent chance of finding love in the British capital using the same “Drake” equation scientists use to determine the potential number of extra-terrestrials in our galaxy.

American astronomer and astrophysicist Frank Drake devised his namesake equation in the early 1960s.

The 31-year-old Backus — who lives on a narrow boat in central London — is not even that particular about his ideal match, requiring only that she be a London-based female, aged 24-34, with a university education.

“I am not trying to be an elitist or anything,” he said about his educational requirements. “Everyone has preferences. I just think we would have more in common.”
continue reading…

A new fast-acting disinfectant that is effective against bacteria, viruses and other germs could help stop the spread of deadly infections in hospitals, German scientists said on Wednesday.
Researchers from the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin said they had developed a fast-acting, practical formula which would kill germs on surgical instruments without damaging them through corrosion.

Disinfectants are the first line of defense against the spread of hospital-acquired infections and effective cleaning of surgical instruments is vital to beating them.

The German formula works against a wide range of germs, including some that survive ordinary disinfectants, such as Mycobacterium avium bacteria which can cause a tuberculosis-type illness and enteroviruses that may cause polio.

Drug-resistant bacteria, the so-called “superbugs,” are a growing problem in hospitals worldwide and poor hygiene among staff is often blamed for the spread of such infections. They kill about 25,000 people a year in Europe and about 19,000 in the United States.

In previous studies, the German team found a simple alkaline detergent that could eradicate prions — disease-causing proteins that are particularly hard to get rid of because they can become fixed onto surfaces through the use of some conventional disinfectants.

In their new study, Michael Beekes and Martin Mielke from the Institute’s hygiene department mixed the alkaline with varying amounts of alcohol and tested its ability to rid surgical instruments of bacteria, viruses and fungi and prions. They found that a mixture with 20 percent alcohol was best.

Beekes said he thought the new disinfectant could have a huge impact on hospital safety protocols.

“Standard formulations that eliminate prions are very corrosive,” he said in the study published in the Journal of General Virology.

“The solution we’ve come up with is not only safer and more material-friendly, but easy to prepare, cheap and highly effective against a wide variety of infectious agents.”

A Dutch study published last week found that the methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) superbug, which can cause blood poisoning, spreads not freely but in clusters, suggesting it is spread through healthcare systems by patients being repeatedly admitted to different hospitals.

An exotic type of symmetry — suggested by string theory and theories of high-energy particle physics, and also conjectured for electrons in solids under certain conditions — has been observed experimentally for the first time.
An international team, led by scientists from Oxford University, report in a recent article in Science how they spotted the symmetry, termed E8, in the patterns formed by the magnetic spins in crystals of the material cobalt niobate, cooled to near absolute zero and subject to a powerful applied magnetic field.

The material contains cobalt atoms arranged in long chains and each atom acts like a tiny bar magnet that can point either ‘up’ or ‘down’.

When a magnetic field is applied at right angles to the aligned spin directions, the spins can ‘quantum tunnel’ between the ‘up’ and ‘down’ orientations. At a precise value of the applied field these fluctuations ‘melt’ the ferromagnetic order of the material resulting in a ‘quantum critical’ state.
continue reading…

It’s been implicated as the bacterium that causes ulcers and the majority of stomach cancers, but studies by researchers at Stanford University, UC Davis, and the University of Pittsburgh have found that Helicobacter pylori (H. pylori) also may play a protective role — against the worldwide killer, tuberculosis (TB).
In an article appearing online in PLoS ONE, Jay Solnick, UC Davis professor of medicine and microbiology, and his co-authors report that H. pylori infection may enhance immunity against tuberculosis, a disease endemic in many parts of the world, and for which there is no effective vaccine.

“Here is a bacterium that we know is sometimes harmful and that is clearly associated with cancer,” Solnick said. “But it’s not that simple.”

Solnick explains that up until the 20th century, when public health improved and antibiotic use was widespread, virtually everyone was infected with H. pylori. That remains the case today in most developing countries, implying that H. pylori may have evolved with its human host because it confers some selective benefit.

“These new findings suggest that one such benefit may that H. pylori provides protection against tuberculosis, and perhaps other infectious diseases as well,” he said.
continue reading…

The complete asexuality of a widespread fungus-gardening ant, the only ant species in the world known to have dispensed with males entirely, has been confirmed by a team of Texas and Brazilian researchers.
Most social insects—the wasps, ants and bees—are relatively used to daily life without males. Their colonies are well run by swarms of sterile sisters lorded over by an egg-laying queen. But, eventually, all social insect species have the ability to produce a crop of males who go forth in the world to fertilize new queens and propagate.

Queens of the ant Mycocepurus smithii reproduce without fertilization and males appear to be completely absent, report Christian Rabeling, Ulrich Mueller and their Brazilian colleagues in PLoS ONE this week.

“Animals that are completely asexual are relatively rare, which makes this is a very interesting ant,” says Rabeling, an ecology, evolution and behavior graduate student at The University of Texas at Austin. “Asexual species don’t mix their genes through recombination, so you expect harmful mutations to accumulate over time and for the species to go extinct more quickly than others. They don’t generally persist for very long over evolutionary time.”
continue reading…

Researchers have found four new genetic variants that increase the risk of contracting one of the major forms of leukemia, confirming that risk factors for the fatal blood cancer can be inherited.

The findings mean scientists now know of 10 genetic variants associated with chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), scientists at Europe’s Institute of Cancer Research who conducted the study said.

The four new genetic factors are all common in European populations and each factor contributes to an increase in the risk of the disease.

CLL is the most common type of leukemia in adults, accounting for around 30 to 40 percent of all forms of leukemia in Western countries. Most of those diagnosed are over the age of 55, and while the incidence of CLL is broadly equal in black and white populations, the disease is rare among Asians.

Richard Houlston, who led the study, said it confirmed the inherited risk of CLL, and showed it was not due to a single gene due to the cumulative effect of many genetic changes.

Each person may carry any number, from a few of the identified risk factors to all of them, he said in research published in the journal Nature Genetics. And the more genetic factors carried, the higher their risk of developing CLL.
“People who have more than 13 risk factors are seven times more likely than the general population to develop CLL,” Houlston added in a statement about the study.

The risk factors were identified using a genetic analysis technique that scientists have used previously to find risk genes in breast, prostate, testes, brain and colon cancer and childhood leukemia.

The researchers scanned the genes of 2,503 CLL patients and compared them to 5,789 healthy people, looking for differences in DNA between the two groups.

In previous studies, Houlston’s team found that genetic factors could make people more susceptible to CLL, identifying six genetic factors more common among sufferers.

The four new factors add to those findings and the study also found that 87 percent of people with CLL would have at least one of these genetic risks.

David Grant, scientific director of the Leukemia Research charity which funded the study, said it confirmed some long-held suspicions that this form of leukemia may run in families.

“This research is providing the genetic evidence that an increased risk of developing CLL can be inherited,” he said in a statement.

“However it is clearly a complex picture and we need to study more families before we can be certain of the particular genetic traits that are most important.”

Pattern of chemical tags on DNA linked to the autoimmune disease
Lupus can tell identical twins apart by the distinguishing marks the pairs carry on their DNA.

Fewer DNA methylation marks may leave one twin vulnerable to the inflammatory autoimmune disease, even while the other sibling remains healthy, a new study appearing online December 22 in Genome Research shows.

The finding suggests that environmental factors determine whether genetically susceptible twins will contract lupus, or systemic lupus erythematosus, which is characterized by the immune system attacking the body’s own cells.

Researchers have previously identified at least 17 different genes involved in lupus. If genes alone were responsible for determining whether a person gets lupus, then every time one identical twin got the disease, the other should too.
continue reading…

Fossilized footprints found in an abandoned quarry in Poland hint that four-limbed creatures called tetrapods evolved much earlier and in a radically different environment than previously thought.

The footprints — many individual impressions, as well as some arranged in sets called trackways — are preserved in 395-million-year-old rocks in the Holy Cross Mountains, in the southeastern part of the country, paleontologist Per E. Ahlberg and colleagues report in the Jan. 7 Nature. That age substantially predates the time frame that paleontologists have pinned as the sea-to-land transition.

Evidence suggests that the carbonate rocks were laid down as sediments in the intertidal areas of a tropical shoreline, possibly in a lagoon, says Ahlberg, of Uppsala University in Sweden.
continue reading…

Scientists are developing mind-to-machine technology that could enable people who cannot speak to communicate using their own brain waves and a computer screen.

Recently, neuroscientists at the Mayo Clinic campus in Jacksonville, Fla., demonstrated that brain waves, focusing on a matrix of letters, can project letters onto a monitor – with the goal of eventually typing out words and sentences. For example, by concentrating on the letter “q,” that “q” will appear on the screen.
The technique requires a craniotomy – that is, a surgical incision into the skull – to place electrodes directly onto the surface of the brain. The implanted devices then record electrical activity produced by the firing of nerve cells.
continue reading…

New Hubble telescope images provide a look at the cosmos when it was just 600 to 800 million years old. Galaxies from this period might have helped transform the universe from dark to light.

The recently refurbished Hubble Space Telescope has drawn back a curtain on a group of galaxies that are the earliest the universe has yet produced.

The galaxies, hot, small, and blue, appear as faint patches of fuzz in the image Hubble took of a patch of sky over four days last August, peering back into a period when the cosmos was only 600 million to 800 million years old – less than one-twentieth of its current age – and a little more than 10 percent of its current size.

In addition these early galaxies, the international team of scientists reporting the results Tuesday say their “ultra-deep field” image contains at least three galaxy candidates that existed when the universe was some 500 million years old. They remain candidates because they are too faint for detailed study.
continue reading…