Astronomers look to neighboring galaxy for star formation insight

ScienceDaily (Nov. 30, 2011) — An international team of astronomers has mapped in detail the star-birthing regions of the nearest star-forming galaxy to our own, a step toward understanding the conditions surrounding star creation.

Led by University of Illinois astronomy professor Tony Wong, the researchers published their findings in the December issue of the Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series.

The Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) is a popular galaxy among astronomers both for its nearness to our Milky Way and for the spectacular view it provides, a big-picture vista impossible to capture of our own galaxy.

"If you imagine a galaxy being a disc, the LMC is tilted almost face-on so we can look down on it, which gives us a very clear view of what's going on inside," Wong said.

Although astronomers have a working theory of how individual stars form, they know very little about what triggers the process or the environmental conditions that are optimal for star birth. Wong's team focused on areas called molecular clouds, which are dense patches of gas -- primarily molecular hydrogen -- where stars are born. By studying these molecular clouds and their relationship to new stars in the galaxy, the team hopes to learn more about the metamorphosis of gas clouds into stars.

"When we study star formation, an important question is, what is the environment doing? How does the location of star formation reflect the conditions of that environment? There's no better place to study the wider environment than the LMC."

Using a 22-meter-diameter radio telescope in Australia, the astronomers mapped more than 100 molecular clouds in the LMC and estimated their sizes and masses, identifying regions with ample material for making stars. This seemingly simple task engendered a surprising find.

Conventional wisdom states that most of the molecular gas mass in a galaxy is apportioned to a few large clouds. However, Wong's team found many more low-mass clouds than they expected -- so many, in fact, that a majority of the dense gas may be sprinkled across the galaxy in these small molecular clouds, rather than clumped together in a few large blobs.

"We thought that the big clouds hog most of the mass," Wong said, "but we found that in this galaxy, it appears that the playing field is more level. The low-mass clouds are quite numerous and they actually contribute a significant amount of the mass. This provides the first evidence that the common wisdom about molecular clouds may not apply here."

The large numbers of these relatively low-mass clouds means that star-forming conditions in the LMC may be relatively widespread and easy to achieve. The findings raise some interesting questions about why some galaxies stopped their star formation while others have continued it.

To better understand the connection between molecular clouds and star formation, the team compared their molecular cloud maps to maps of infrared radiation, which reveal where young stars are heating cosmic dust.

For the comparison, they exploited a carefully selected sample of newborn heavy stars compiled by U. of I. astronomy professor You-Hua Chu and resident scientist Robert Gruendl, who also were co-authors of the paper. These stars are so young that they are still deeply embedded in cocoons of gas and dust.

"It turns out that there's actually very nice correspondence between these young massive stars and molecular clouds," Wong said. "That's not entirely surprising, but it's reassuring. We assume that these stars have to form in molecular clouds, and it tells us that the molecular clouds do hang around long enough for us to see them associated with these massive young stars."

Wong hopes to continue to study the relationship between molecular clouds and star formation in greater detail. If researchers can determine the relative ages of young stars, they can correlate these against molecular clouds to figure out which clouds have star formation, how long the clouds live and what eventually leads to their destruction. They also plan to use a newly constructed array of telescopes in Chile to see the cloud environment in higher resolution, pinpointing exactly where inside the molecular cloud star formation will occur.

"This study provides us with our most detailed view of an entire population of clouds in another galaxy," Wong said. "We can say with great confidence that these clouds are where the stars form, but we are still trying to figure out why they have the properties they do."

The National Science Foundation and NASA supported this work.

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

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Tony Wong, Annie Hughes, Jürgen Ott, Erik Muller, Jorge L. Pineda, Jean-Philippe Bernard, You-Hua Chu, Yasuo Fukui, Robert A. Gruendl, Christian Henkel, Akiko Kawamura, Ulrich Klein, Leslie W. Looney, Sarah Maddison, Yoji Mizuno, Deborah Paradis, Jonathan Seale. The Magellanic Mopra Assessment (MAGMA). I. The Molecular Cloud Population of the Large Magellanic Cloud. The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series, 2011; 197 (2): 16 DOI: 10.1088/0067-0049/197/2/16

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Aggression prevents the better part of valor ... in fig wasps

ScienceDaily (Dec. 1, 2011) — Researchers have confirmed a unique behaviour within the male population of tiny fig wasps that pollinate fig trees -- they team up to help pregnant females, even if they have not mated themselves.

Published online in the Royal Society journal Biology Letters, the study confirms that placid male pollinator fig wasps work together to chew an escape tunnel for their females, before crawling back into the fig to die -- the non-pollinating variety are too busy fighting each other to help.

"Male insects can cooperate to attract the attention of females or to ensure that they are successful in mating, but I don't know of any other male insects which exhibit post-mating teamwork like this," says Dr Steve Compton from the Faculty of Biological Sciences.

Fig trees are vital for rainforest ecosystems. Producing fruit all year, more birds and animals feed on them than on any other plant in the rainforest. There are more than 850 types of fig tree, each pollinated by a single uniquely adapted type of fig wasp.

The research team examined some 60,000 individual fig flowers in the laboratory, each containing either pollinating fig wasps or parasitic fig wasps. All figs contained many females but alongside these, some contained a single male and others contained several males.

The hatched young of both types mate with each other before the females attempt to escape, leaving the males to die inside the fig. "Neither type of fig wasp female is strong enough to make their own way out, so they need help from the males to do this," says Dr Compton.

Escape rates for pollinator wasps were consistently high and increased when more males were present. When only one parasitic fig wasp was present, it was just as successful as the pollinators in chewing an escape route after mating, but when several males were present, the success rates plummeted.

The study also suggests that the ability of males to cooperate is hampered by innate aggression. Of the two groups of fig wasps -- those that pollinate fig trees and non-pollinators, which are parasites of the tree -- only the parasitic wasps fight more for the right to mate with females, and this group were far less able to work together.

"It would seem that male parasitic fig wasps are unable to switch off the hard-wired aggression needed to successfully mate to cooperate with each other, even when their genetic investment is at stake," says Dr Compton. "Pollinators' teamwork may be prompted because of the likelihood of genetic connection to the mated females, but the parasitic fig wasps were in the same situation."

Dr Compton believes the successful collaboration between the pollinating male fig wasps studied is likely to be normal for all pollinator fig wasps. He hopes to study a highly aggressive species of pollinators, where males fight intensely, often to death. "This will shed light on whether the cooperation is present in all pollinators, or if aggressive behaviour is too difficult to switch off after mating," he says.

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Nazia Suleman, Shazia Raja, and Stephen G. Compton. Only pollinator fig wasps have males that collaborate to release their females from figs of an Asian fig tree. Biol. Lett., November 30, 2011 DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2011.1016

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Danish HIV patients can live as long as the general population when treated optimally

ScienceDaily (Dec. 1, 2011) — Researchers who have been following Danish HIV patients for more than fifteen years now see that the patients may live as long as other Danes if they take their medicine.

"It is my impression that patients often ask themselves a range of questions: 'What are my long-term prospects? Will I be dead in five years' time? Will the disease cause brain damage? Will I have heart trouble'?" says Professor Niels Obel, the University of Copenhagen and Rigshospitalet. He continues:

"Fortunately we are well-equipped to answer such questions in Denmark because we record an exceptional amount of data which we can use to shed light on the long-term effects of disease. This also goes for Danish HIV patients, and it is marvellous to be able to tell them that actually their prospects are quite bright."

Professor Nobel heads up the Danish Cohort Study that has provided the basis for the new results published in PLoS One.

HIV patients enter therapy pathway sooner

Via such thorough data collection, the Danish national health board provides researchers with a unique opportunity to follow particular groups of patients over an extended period. The Danish HIOV cohort study is following every HIV positive patient in Denmark and Greenland, for example, including children and adults who have only been in contact with a treatment centre once since 1995.

PHD students Marie Helleberg, Casper Ried and Frederik Engsig analyse data from the Danish HIV Cohort.

Professor Obel and his colleagues publish an annual report on the condition of the HIV Cohort. The 2011 edition shows that far more men are still being infected by HIV than women (76 per cent to 24 per cent), that the most frequent path of infection is heterosexual contact (46 per cent) and homosexual contact (44 per cent), and that patients are not as ill on diagnosis (they have higher CD 4 cell counts).

"This is probably because newly infected patients visit their GPs sooner and are diagnosed earlier than they used to be," Professor Obel says.

HIV infections are chronic. Almost thirty years on since the first documented cases, we still do not have a vaccine or a cure, because HIV continually mutates and enters our DNA, where drugs cannot reach it.

So an HIV diagnosis means that patients will require treatment for the rest of their lives. However, the latest figures show that the life expectancy of optimally-treated patients is not adversely affected by taking the drugs or by the disease itself.

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Niels Obel, Lars Haukali Omland, Gitte Kronborg, Carsten S. Larsen, Court Pedersen, Gitte Pedersen, Henrik Toft Sørensen, Jan Gerstoft. Impact of Non-HIV and HIV Risk Factors on Survival in HIV-Infected Patients on HAART: A Population-Based Nationwide Cohort Study. PLoS ONE, 2011; 6 (7): e22698 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0022698

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Some atheist scientists with children embrace religious traditions, according to new research

ScienceDaily (Dec. 1, 2011) — Some atheist scientists with children embrace religious traditions for social and personal reasons, according to research from Rice University and the University at Buffalo -- The State University of New York (SUNY).

The study also found that some atheist scientists want their children to know about different religions so their children can make informed decisions about their own religious preferences.

"Our research shows just how tightly linked religion and family are in U.S. society -- so much so that even some of society's least religious people find religion to be important in their private lives," said Rice sociologist Elaine Howard Ecklund, the study's principal investigator and co-author of a paper in the December issue of the Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion.

The researchers found that 17 percent of atheists with children attended a religious service more than once in the past year.

The research was conducted through interviews with a scientifically selected sample of 275 participants pulled from a survey of 2,198 tenured and tenure-track faculty in the natural and social sciences at 21 elite U.S. research universities. Approximately half of the original survey population expressed some form of religious identity, whereas the other half did not.

The individuals surveyed cited personal and social reasons for integrating religion into their lives, including:

Scientific identity -- Study participants wish to expose their children to all sources of knowledge (including religion) and allow them to make their own choices about a religious identity.Spousal influence -- Study participants are involved in a religious institution because of influence from their spouse or partner.Desire for community -- Study participants want a sense of moral community and behavior, even if they don't agree with the religious reasoning.

Ecklund said one of the most interesting findings was discovering that not only do some atheist scientists wish to expose their children to religious institutions, but they also cite their scientific identity as reason for doing so.

"We thought that these individuals might be less inclined to introduce their children to religious traditions, but we found the exact opposite to be true," Ecklund said. "They want their children to have choices, and it is more consistent with their science identity to expose their children to all sources of knowledge."

One study participant raised in a strongly Catholic home said he came to believe later that science and religion were not compatible. He said what he wants to pass on to his daughter -- more than the belief that science and religion are not compatible -- is the ability to make her own decisions in a thoughtful, intellectual way.

"I … don't indoctrinate her that she should believe in God," the study participant said. "I don't indoctrinate her into not believing in God." He said he sees himself as accomplishing this by exposing her to a variety of religious choices, including Christianity, Islam, Buddhism and others.

Ecklund said the study's findings will help the public better understand the role that religious institutions play in society.

"I think that understanding how nonreligious scientists utilize religion in family life demonstrates the important function they have in the U.S.," she said.

Ecklund is the author of "Science vs. Religion: What Scientists Really Think,"published by Oxford University Press last year.

The paper was co-authored by University at Buffalo SUNY sociologist Kristen Schultz Lee. A grant from the John Templeton Foundation and funding from Rice supported the research.

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Elaine Howard Ecklund, Kristen Schultz Lee. Atheists and Agnostics Negotiate Religion and Family. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Volume 50, Issue 4, pages 728%u2013743, December 2011 DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-5906.2011.01604.x

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Stronger corn? Take it off steroids, make it all female

ScienceDaily (Nov. 30, 2011) — A Purdue University researcher has taken corn off steroids and found that the results might lead to improvements in that and other crops.

Burkhard Schulz, an assistant professor of horticulture and landscape architecture, wanted to understand the relationship between natural brassinosteroids -- a natural plant steroid hormone -- and plant architecture, specifically plant height. Schulz said corn could benefit by becoming shorter and sturdier, but the mechanisms that control those traits are not completely understood.

"It is essential to change the architecture of plants to minimize how much land we need to produce food and fuels," said Schulz, whose findings are published in the early online version of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "If you can find a natural mutation or mechanism that gives you what you need, you are much better off than using transgenic techniques that could be difficult to get approval for."

Schulz found that when maize loses the ability to produce brassinosteroids, it becomes a dwarf, as he suspected. But another feature caught him off guard: The plants without the naturally occurring steroids could not make male organs -- they had kernels where the tassels should be.

That could be a cost-saving discovery for the seed industry. Hybrid seed producers must painstakingly remove the male pollen-producing tassels from each plant so that they do not pollinate themselves. Schulz said maize plants that produce only female organs would eliminate the detasseling step.

"This would be the perfect mutation for hybrid seed production," Schulz said. "There is no way these plants could produce pollen because they do not have male flowers."

Schulz used a multistep process to determine brassinosteroids' role in height and, later, sex determination. He wanted to ensure that light and the addition of gibberelic acid, a hormone that promotes cell growth and elongation, would not eliminate the dwarfism.

Schulz gathered known mutants of maize with short mesocotyls, the first node on a corn stalk. He suspected that even dwarf plants that produced brassinosteroids would have elongated mesocotyls if grown in the dark as they stretched for light, a trait typical of all brassinosteroid mutants. He also added gibberellic acid to the plants to ensure that a deficiency of that hormone was not causing the dwarfism.

The dwarf plants that did not grow in the dark or with the addition of the gibberellic acid were compared to regular maize plants that had been dwarfed by subjecting them to a chemical that disrupts the creation of brassinosteroids. Both exhibited short stalks with twisted leaves and showed the feminization of the male tassel flower.

Schulz then used information that was already known from the research plant Arabidopsis about genes that control brassinosteroid production. He found the same genes in the maize genome.

In the dwarf maize plants, those genes were mutated, disrupting the biosynthesis of the steroids. A chemical analysis showed that the compounds produced along the pathway of gene to steroid were greatly diminished in the maize dwarfs. Cloning of the gene revealed that an enzyme of the brassinosteroid pathway was defective in the mutant plants. A related enzyme in humans has been reported as essential for the production of the sex steroid hormone testosterone. Mutations in this enzyme in humans also resulted in feminization.

While Schulz expected brassinosteroids to affect plant height, he said he did not expect those steroids to affect sex determination.

"We don't know if this is a special case for corn or if this is generally the same in other plants," he said. "If it is the same in other plants, it should be useful for creating plants or trees in which you want only males or females."

Gurmukh Johal, a professor of botany and plant pathology and collaborator on the research, identified the mutant used in the research, nana plant1, years ago. He said better understanding the steroid-production pathways could be important to strengthening maize plants and increasing yields.

"Maize produces too much pollen and it actually wastes a lot of energy on that," Johal said. "This implies that by using this gene or the pathway it controls, we could manipulate the plants to improve their quality."

Schulz said he would look at other plants, such as sorghum, to determine if the same genes and pathways control sex determination and height.

The project was an international collaboration with George Chuck from the Plant Gene Expression Center at the University of California Berkeley, Shozo Fujioka of RIKEN Advanced Science Institute in Japan, Sunghwa Choe of Seoul National University in South Korea, and Devi Prasad Potluri of Chicago State University.

The National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Agriculture funded the research.

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The above story is reprinted from materials provided by Purdue University. The original article was written by Brian Wallheimer.

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Thomas Hartwig, George S. Chuck, Shozo Fujioka, Antje Klempien, Renate Weizbauer, Devi Prasad V. Potluri, Sunghwa Choe, Gurmukh S. Johal, Burkhard Schulz. Brassinosteroid Control of Sex Determination in Maize. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2011

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Trail of 'stone breadcrumbs' reveals the identity of one of the first human groups to leave Africa

ScienceDaily (Nov. 30, 2011) — A series of new archaeological discoveries in the Sultanate of Oman, nestled in the southeastern corner of the Arabian Peninsula, reveals the timing and identity of one of the first modern human groups to migrate out of Africa, according to a research article published in the open-access journal PLoS ONE.

An international team of archaeologists and geologists working in the Dhofar Mountains of southern Oman, led by Dr. Jeffrey Rose of the University of Birmingham, report finding over 100 new sites classified as "Nubian Middle Stone Age (MSA)." Distinctive Nubian MSA stone tools are well known throughout the Nile Valley; however, this is the first time such sites have ever been found outside of Africa. According to the authors, the evidence from Oman provides a "trail of stone breadcrumbs" left by early humans migrating across the Red Sea on their journey out of Africa. "After a decade of searching in southern Arabia for some clue that might help us understand early human expansion, at long last we've found the smoking gun of their exit from Africa," says Rose. "What makes this so exciting," he adds, "is that the answer is a scenario almost never considered." These new findings challenge long-held assumptions about the timing and route of early human expansion out of Africa.

Using a technique called Optically Stimulated Luminescence (OSL) to date one of the sites in Oman, researchers have determined that Nubian MSA toolmakers had entered Arabia by 106,000 years ago, if not earlier. This date is considerably older than geneticists have put forth for the modern human exodus from Africa, who estimate the dispersal of our species occurred between 70,000 and 40,000 years ago. Even more surprising, all of the Nubian MSA sites were found far inland, contrary to the currently accepted theory that envisions early human groups moving along the coast of southern Arabia. "Here we have an example of the disconnect between theoretical models versus real evidence on the ground," says co-author Professor Emeritus Anthony Marks of Southern Methodist University. "The coastal expansion hypothesis looks reasonable on paper, but there is simply no archaeological evidence to back it up.

Genetics predict an expansion out of Africa after 70,000 thousand years ago, yet we've seen three separate discoveries published this year with evidence for humans in Arabia thousands, if not tens of thousands of years prior to this date." The presence of Nubian MSA sites in Oman corresponds to a wet period in Arabia's climatic history, when copious rains fell across the peninsula and transformed its barren deserts to sprawling grasslands. "For a while," remarks Rose, "South Arabia became a verdant paradise rich in resources -- large game, plentiful freshwater, and high-quality flint with which to make stone tools." Far from innovative fishermen, it seems that early humans spreading from Africa into Arabia were opportunistic hunters traveling along river networks like highways. Whether or not these pioneers were able to survive in Arabia during the hyperarid conditions of the Last Ice Age is another matter -- a mystery that will require archaeologists to continue combing the deserts of southern Arabia, hot on the trail of stone breadcrumbs.

The Dhofar Archaeological Project is conducted under the auspices of the Ministry of Heritage and Culture in Oman. The team is composed of an interdisciplinary group of researchers from the University of Birmingham and Oxford Brookes University, UK; Arizona State University and Southern Methodist University, USA; Institute of Archaeology, National Academy of Sciences, Ukraine; Institute of Archaeology of the Academy of Science, Czech Republic; University of Tübingen, Germany, and the University of Wollongong, Australia. The project is funded by research grants from the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Australian Research Council.

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Jeffrey I. Rose, Vitaly I. Usik, Anthony E. Marks, Yamandu H. Hilbert, Christopher S. Galletti, Ash Parton, Jean Marie Geiling, Viktor Cerný, Mike W. Morley, Richard G. Roberts. The Nubian Complex of Dhofar, Oman: An African Middle Stone Age Industry in Southern Arabia. PLoS ONE, 2011; 6 (11): e28239 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0028239

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Astronomers discover new exoplanet similar in size to Earth; Planet Kepler-21b found using space and ground-based observations

ScienceDaily (Nov. 30, 2011) — The NASA Kepler Mission is designed to survey a portion of our region of the Milky Way Galaxy to discover Earth-size planets in or near the "habitable zone," the region in a planetary system where liquid water can exist, and determine how many of the billions of stars in our galaxy have such planets. It now has another planet to add to its growing list.

A research team led by Steve Howell, of NASA's Ames Research Center, has shown that one of the brightest stars in the Kepler star field has a planet with a radius only 1.6 that of Earth's radius and a mass no greater that 10 Earth masses, circling its parent star with a 2.8-day period. With such a short period, and such a bright star, the team of over 65 astronomers -- which included David Silva, Ken Mighell and Mark Everett of the National Optical Astronomy Observatory (NOAO) -- needed multiple telescopes on the ground to support and confirm their Kepler observations. These included the 4-meter Mayall telescope and the WIYN telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory.

With a period of only 2.8 days, this planet, designated Kepler-21b, is only about 6 million kilometers away from its parent star. By comparison Mercury, the closest planet to the sun, has a period of 88 days and a distance from the sun almost ten times greater, or 57 million km. So Kepler 21b is far hotter than any place humans could venture. The team calculates that the temperature at the surface of the planet is about 1900 K, or 2960 F. While this temperature is nowhere near the habitable zone in which liquid water might be found, the planet's size is approaching that of Earth.

The parent star, HD 179070, is quite similar to our sun: its mass is 1.3 solar masses, its radius is 1.9 solar radii, and its age, based on stellar models, is 2.84 billion years (or a bit younger than the sun's 4.6 billion years). HD 179070 is spectral type F6 IV, a little hotter and brighter than the sun. By astronomical standards, HD 179070 is fairly close, at a distance from the sun of 352 light years. While it cannot be seen by the unaided eye, a small telescope can easily pick it out.

Part of the difficulty in detecting this planet is the realization, from the Kepler mission, that many stars show short period brightness oscillations. The effect of these must be removed from the stellar light in order to uncover the regular, but very small, dimming caused by the planet passing in front of the star. The Kepler mission observed this field for over 15 months, and the team combined the observations to enable them to detect this tiny, periodic signal. They also relied on spectroscopic and imaging data from a number of ground based telescopes.

The results of this work have been accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal.

NOAO is operated by Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy Inc. (AURA) under a cooperative agreement with the National Science Foundation.

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