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Science Daily — Cardiff University scientists will shortly set sail (March 5) to investigate a startling discovery in the depths of the Atlantic.

Scientists have discovered a large area thousands of square kilometres in extent in the middle of the Atlantic where the Earth’s crust appears to be missing. Instead, the mantle – the deep interior of the Earth, normally covered by crust many kilometres thick – is exposed on the seafloor, 3000m below the surface.

Marine geologist Dr Chris MacLeod, School of Earth, Ocean and Planetary Sciences said: “This discovery is like an open wound on the surface of the Earth. Was the crust never there? Was it once there but then torn away on huge geological faults? If so, then how and why?”

To answer some of these questions Dr MacLeod with a team of scientists, led by marine geophysicist Professor Roger Searle, Durham University, will travel to the area which lies mid-way between the Cape Verde Islands and the Caribbean.

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Progress of the cruise can be monitored via a live web link to the ship: ➡

Scientists at the University of Washington have developed an autonomous underwater vehicle that can stay out to sea for up to a year and dive to depths of nearly 9,000 feet — nearly three times deeper than the deepest-diving military submarines.

Known as Deepglider, the 71-inch long, 138-pound device is made of carbon fiber that can withstand the deep ocean’s immense pressure. The energy-efficient, battery-powered glider carries sensors to measure oceanic conditions including salinity and temperature — information that is key to understanding climate change. When the measurements are complete, Deepglider rises to the surface and transmits the data via satellite to onshore scientists.

“Reaching a depth of 2,700 meters (nearly 9,000 feet) is quite a feat and promises to extend the nature and type of missions that can be carried out by gliders,” says Princeton University engineering professor Naomi Leonard. “You could even imagine a heterogeneous fleet of gliders working in tandem at different depths to explore this otherwise impenetrable undersea.”

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– This is one of the cooler things I’ve seen in a long time. I wish we’d have had graphics like this when I was in college to help understand the moving dynamics of what we were trying to grasp from words on a page. Here, you can see DNA replicating three dimensionally. ➡

Science Daily — Among Greek adults, taking regular midday naps is associated with reduced risk of death from heart disease over a six-year period, especially among working men, according to a report in the February 12 issue of Archives of Internal Medicine, one of the JAMA/Archives journals.

Some evidence suggests that in countries where siestas are common, rates of death from heart disease tend to be lower. However, the few studies that have assessed the potential relationship have not controlled for other factors that may influence heart disease risk, such as physical activity and age, according to background information in the article.

Androniki Naska, Ph.D., University of Athens Medical School, Greece, and colleagues studied 23,681 Greek men and women ages 20 to 86 who did not have a history of heart disease or any other severe condition when they enrolled in the study between 1994 and 1999. At the beginning of the study, participants were asked if they took midday naps, and if so, how often and for how long at a time. They also reported their level of physical activity and dietary habits over the previous year.

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Science Daily — Researchers from The Weizmann Institute of Science report the discovery of two new properties of the genetic code. Their work, which appears online in Genome Research, shows that the genetic code — used by organisms as diverse as reef coral, termites, and humans — is nearly optimal for encoding signals of any length in parallel to sequences that code for proteins. In addition, they report that the genetic code is organized so efficiently that when the cellular machinery misses a beat during protein synthesis, the process is promptly halted before energy and resources are wasted.

“Our findings open the possibility that genes can carry additional, currently unknown codes,” explains Dr. Uri Alon, principal investigator on the project. “These findings point at possible selection forces that may have shaped the universal genetic code.”

The genetic code consists of 61 codons–tri-nucleotide sequences of DNA–that encode 20 amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. In addition, three codons signal the cellular machinery to stop protein synthesis after a full-length protein is built.

While the best-known function of genes is to code for proteins, the DNA sequences of genes also harbor signals for folding, organization, regulation, and splicing. These DNA sequences are typically a bit longer: from four to 150 or more nucleotides in length.

Alon and his doctoral student Shalev Itzkovitz compared the real genetic code to alternative, hypothetical genetic codes with equivalent codon-amino acid assignment characteristics. Remarkably, Itzkovitz and Alon showed that the real genetic code was superior to the vast majority of alternative genetic codes in terms of its ability to encode other information in protein-coding genes–such as splice sites, mRNA secondary structure, or regulatory signals.

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RESIDENTS of a remote Chinese village are hoping DNA tests will prove one of history’s most unlikely legends, that they are descended from Roman legionaries lost in antiquity.

Scientists have taken blood samples from 93 people living around Liqian, a settlement in north-western China on the fringes of the Gobi Desert, more than 300 kilometres from the nearest city.

They are seeking an explanation for the unusual number of local people with Western characteristics – green eyes, big noses, and even blond hair – mixed with traditional Chinese features.

“I really think we are descended from the Romans,” said Song Guorong, 48, who with his wavy hair, 1.8-metre frame and strikingly long, hooked nose stands out from his short, round-faced colleagues.

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) — Daydreaming seems to be the default setting of the human mind and certain brain regions are devoted to it, U.S. researchers reported Friday.

When people are given a specific task to do, they focus on that task but then other brain regions get busy during down time, the researchers report in Friday’s issue of the journal Science.

“There is this network of regions that always seems to be active when you don’t give people something to do,” psychologist Malia Mason of Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital said in a telephone interview.

When Mason asked people what was happening during this down time, the answer was clear.

“It’s daydreaming,” she said. “But I find that the vast majority of time, people aren’t having fanciful thoughts. People are thinking about what they have to do later today.”

Her team has chosen to call it stimulus-independent thought or mind wandering.

Neurologists and psychologists have debated what goes on when people are not specifically thinking about or doing something, and there had been general agreement that the mind does not simply go blank.

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Science Daily — NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft is on the doorstep of the solar system’s largest planet. The spacecraft will study and swing past Jupiter, increasing speed on its voyage toward Pluto, the Kuiper Belt and beyond.

The fastest spacecraft ever launched, New Horizons will make its closest pass to Jupiter on Feb. 28, 2007. Jupiter’s gravity will accelerate New Horizons away from the sun by an additional 9,000 miles per hour, pushing it past 52,000 mph and hurling it toward a pass through the Pluto system in July 2015.

“Our highest priority is to get the spacecraft safely through the gravity assist and on its way to Pluto,” says New Horizons Principal Investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute, Boulder, Colo. “We also have an incredible opportunity to conduct a real-world encounter stress test to wring out our procedures and techniques, and to collect some valuable science data.”

The New Horizons mission team will use the flyby to put the probe’s systems and seven science instruments through the paces of more than 700 observations of Jupiter and its four largest moons. The planned observations from January through June include scans of Jupiter’s turbulent, stormy atmosphere; a detailed survey of its ring system; and a detailed study of Jupiter’s moons.

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