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Providing a kaleidoscopic upgrade to creatures that are largely colorblind, scientists have endowed mice with a human gene that allows the rodents to see the world in full Technicolor splendor.

The advance, which relied on imaginative tests to confirm that the mice can perceive all the hues that people see, helps resolve a long-standing debate about how color vision arose in human ancestors tens of millions of years ago. That seminal event brought a host of practical advantages, such as the ability to spot ripe fruit, and unveiled new aesthetic pleasures — autumn foliage, magenta sunsets and the blush of a potential mate, among them.

The work also points to the possibility of curing some of the millions of colorblind Americans — and even enhancing the vision of healthy people, allowing them to experience a richer palette than is possible with standard-issue eyes.

“It opens up huge doors to understanding how color vision evolved and where it can go,” said Brian C. Verrelli, an evolutionary geneticist who studies color vision at Arizona State University and was not involved in the work, published today in the journal Science.

Mice, like most mammals, have limited color perception, equivalent to that of people with red-green color blindness. Their eyes have two kinds of color detectors, or “cone” cells, each sensitive to a different part of the spectrum.

Unable to differentiate between reds and greens, they see the world as a blend of blues and yellows, with gray overlays added by black-and-white-registering “rod” cells.

By contrast, most people — along with Old World primates and South and Central American female monkeys — have three kinds of cones. That gives birth to the vibrant world of reds and a vast repertoire of related colors.

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The already-reeling “consensus” supposedly linking climate change to CO2 is about to receive its final coup-de-grace from a remarkable new result announced in a press conference today by Dr. Ewe Noh-Watt of the New Zealand Institute of Veterinary Climatology [1]. Noh-Watt and his co-workers, describing work funded by a generous grant from the Veterinary Climate Science Coalition, declared “We have seen the future of climate — and it is Sheep.” Prof. Jean-Belliere Poisson d’Avril, star student of Claude Allegro Molto-Troppo (discoverer of the Tropposphere) reacted with the words, “Parbleu! C’est la meilleure chose depuis les baguettes tranchées!”

The hypothesis begins with the simple observation that most sheep are white, and therefore have a higher albedo than the land on which they typically graze (see figure below). This effect is confirmed by the recent Sheep Radiation Budget Experiment. The next step in the chain of logic is to note that the sheep population of New Zealand has plummeted in recent years. The resulting decrease in albedo leads to an increase in absorbed Solar radiation, thus warming the planet. The Sheep Albedo hypothesis draws some inspiration from the earlier work of Squeak and Diddlesworth [2] on the effect of the ptarmigan population on the energy balance of the Laurentide ice sheet. Noh-Watt hastens to emphasize that the two hypotheses are quite distinct, since the species of ptarmigan involved in the Squeak-Diddlesworth effect is now extinct.

The proof of the pudding is in the data, shown in the Figure below. Here, the Sheep Albedo Index is defined as the New Zealand Sheep population in each year, subtracted from the 2007 population. The index is defined that way because fewer sheep means lower albedo, and thus a positive radiative forcing. It can be seen that the recent warming can be explained entirely by the decline in the New Zealand sheep population, without any need to bring in any mysterious so-called “radiative forcing” from carbon dioxide, which doesn’t affect the sunlight (hardly) anyway — unlike Sheep Albedo. Some researchers have expressed surprise at the large effect from the relatively small radiative forcing attributable to New Zealand Sheep, or indeed to New Zealand as a whole. “This only shows the fallacy of the concept of Radiative Forcing, which is after all only a theory, not a fact,” says Noh-Watt. “Evidently there are amplifying feedbacks at work which give the Sheep Albedo Index a disproportionate influence over climate.”

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Science Daily — Purdue University chemical engineers have proposed a new environmentally friendly process for producing liquid fuels from plant matter – or biomass – potentially available from agricultural and forest waste, providing all of the fuel needed for “the entire U.S. transportation sector.”

The new approach modifies conventional methods for producing liquid fuels from biomass by adding hydrogen from a “carbon-free” energy source, such as solar or nuclear power, during a step called gasification. Adding hydrogen during this step suppresses the formation of carbon dioxide and increases the efficiency of the process, making it possible to produce three times the volume of biofuels from the same quantity of biomass, said Rakesh Agrawal, Purdue’s Winthrop E. Stone Distinguished Professor of Chemical Engineering.

The researchers are calling their approach a “hybrid hydrogen-carbon process,” or H2CAR.

“Further research is needed to make this a large-scale reality,” Agrawal said. “We could use H2CAR to provide a sustainable fuel supply to meet the needs of the entire U.S. transportation sector – all cars, trucks, trains and airplanes.”

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Scientists studying pictures from Nasa’s Odyssey spacecraft have spotted what they think may be seven caves on the surface of Mars.

The candidate caves are on the flanks of the Arsia Mons volcano and are of sufficient depth their floors mostly cannot be seen through the opening.

Details were presented here at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference in Houston, Texas.

Temperature data from Mars Odyssey’s Themis instrument support the idea.

The authors say that the possible discovery of caves on the Red Planet is significant.

The caves may be the only natural structures capable of protecting primitive life forms from micrometeoroids, UV radiation, solar flares and high energy particles that bombard the planet’s surface.

The spacecraft spotted what seemed to be vertical “skylight” entrances to caves below the surface.

There is a sheer drop of between about 80m and 130m or more to the cave floors below.

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Science Daily — A project by University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers has come one step closer to making fusion energy possible.

The research team, headed by electrical and computer engineering Professor David Anderson and research assistant John Canik, recently proved that the Helically Symmetric eXperiment (HSX), an odd-looking magnetic plasma chamber called a stellarator, can overcome a major barrier in plasma research, in which stellarators lose too much energy to reach the high temperatures needed for fusion.

Published in a recent issue of Physical Review Letters, the new results show that the unique design of the HSX in fact loses less energy, meaning that fusion in this type of stellarator could be possible.

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– If you are interested in molecular biology, there’s a great article in the January 2007 issue of Scientific American entitled, “the Power of Riboswitches”. My degree, from many years ago, is in Microbiology so I find this stuff extremely interesting.

– Decoding how our genomes work is like decoding software that arrived on an alien spacecraft. It is believed that before Earth’s biology became DNA centric, there was an earlier time when it was RNA centric. Here, scientists are describing some of this older RNA functionality that still exists within bacterial cells and, in one case, multicellular genomes.

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Discovering relics from a lost world run by RNA molecules may lead to modern tools for fighting disease

By Jeffrey E. Barrick and Ronald R. Breaker

A mystery surrounding the way bacteria manage their vitamins piqued our interest in the fall of 2000. Together with growing evidence in support of a tantalizing theory about the earliest life on earth and our own efforts to build switches from biological molecules, the bacterial conundrum set our laboratory group at Yale University in search of an answer. What we found was a far bigger revelation than we were expecting: it was a new form of cellular self-control based on one of the oldest types of molecule around–ribonucleic acid, or RNA.

Long viewed as mostly a lowly messenger, RNA could have considerable authority, as it turned out, and sophisticated mechanisms for asserting it. Although the workings of this newfound class of RNA molecules that we dubbed riboswitches are still being characterized, it is already clear that they may also provide novel ways of fighting human diseases. Many pathogenic bacteria rely on riboswitches to control aspects of their own fundamental metabolism, for instance.

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Industrial pollution coming from Asia is having a wider effect on global weather and climate than previously realised, research suggests.

The “Asian haze” of soot is boosting storms in the Pacific, scientists find.

It is also enhancing the growth of large clouds, which play a key role in regulating climate globally.

Writing in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the researchers say impacts may be felt as far away as the Arctic.

“It’s a complex picture,” observed study leader Renyi Zhang from Texas A&M University in College Station, US.

“But the bottom line is that the aerosols actually enhance convection and increase precipitation over a large domain,” he told the BBC News website.

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Science Daily — Having an out-of-body experience may seem far-fetched to some, but for those with arousal system disturbances in their brains, it may not be a far off idea that they could sense they were really outside their own body watching themselves. In previous studies of more than 13,000 Europeans, almost 6 percent said they have had such an out-of-body experience.

Dr. Kevin Nelson and a research team at the University of Kentucky have studied the link between out-of-body experiences, the sleep-wake transition and near death experiences, and published their findings today in the March 6 issue of the journal Neurology in their case report, “Out-of-body experience and arousal.”

The results are intriguing, and show that some people’s brains already may be predisposed to these sorts of experiences. They found that an out-of-body experience is statistically as likely to occur during a near death experience as it is to occur during the transition between wakefulness and sleep. Nelson suggests that phenomena in the brain’s arousal system, which regulates different states of consciousness including REM sleep and wakefulness, may be the cause for these types of out-of-body displays.

“We found it surprising that out-of-body experience with sleep transition seemed very much like out-of-body experience during near death,” Nelson said.

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