New Malaria and Cholera vaccine?

A University of Central Florida biomedical researcher has developed what promises to be the first low-cost dual vaccine against malaria and cholera.
There is no FDA approved vaccine to prevent malaria, a mosquito-borne illness that kills more than 1 million people annually. Only one vaccine exists to fight cholera, a diarrheal illness that is common in developing countries and can be fatal. The lone vaccine is too expensive to prevent outbreaks in developing countries after floods, and children lose immunity within three years of getting the current vaccine.
The development team genetically engineered tobacco and lettuce plants to produce the vaccine. Researchers gave mice freeze-dried plant cells (orally or by injection) containing the vaccine. They then challenged the mice with either the cholera toxin or malarial parasite. The malaria parasite studies were completed in fellow UCF professor Debopam Chakrabarti's lab.
Untreated rodents contracted diseases quickly, but the mice who received the plant-grown vaccines showed long-lasting immunity for more than 300 days (equivalent to 50 human years).
Results from the National Institutes of Health-funded research are published in this month's Plant Biotechnology, the top-ranked journal in the field.
Clinical trials are needed. But if it works then it could be yet another example of plants delivering life-saving medicines.
Producing vaccines in plants is less expensive than traditional methods because it requires less labor and technology. And distribution to mass populations would be easy because it could be made into a simple pill, like a vitamin, which many people routinely take now. There is no need for expensive purification, cold storage, transportation or sterile delivery via injections.

Greece agrees with austerity

Greece has agreed the outline of a €24bn austerity package, including a three-year wage freeze for public sector workers, in return for a multibillion-euro loan from the eurozone and the International Monetary Fund, according to people familiar with the talks.
Final details of the measures, which were intended to slash the budget deficit by 10-11 percentage points of gross domestic product over the next three years, were still being worked out.
Negotiations with officials from the IMF, the European Commission and the European Central Bank are due to be completed at the weekend and the measures will be presented for approval by the Greek parliament next week.
The package also includes an increase in value-added tax, the second this year.

Greek two-year bond yields, which have an inverse relationship with prices, fell more than 3 percentage points to 12.74 per cent, while the stock market rose 7.14 per cent as confidence grew after it was reported on Wednesday that the EU and IMF were preparing a €120bn loan to bail out ­Athens.
Greece faces exceptionally strict monitoring by the EU and IMF because of its poor record of implementing previous economic reform programmes:
-Three-year reform programme
-Two to three percentage points increase in value-added tax
-Three-year public sector pay freeze; recruitment frozen
-Abolition of ‘13th and 14th monthly salary’ for public sector workers; 5 per cent cut in allowances
-No renewals for short-term public sector contracts
-Closure of more than 800 out-dated state entities
-Opening up of more than 60 ‘closed-shop’ professions
-Overhaul of pension system: raising average retirement age to 67 for men and women; cutting state corporation pensions.
-Privatisation: sales of state corporations; flotations on Athens stock exchange; sales and leasing of state-owned properties
George Papandreou, prime minister, was last week forced to activate the EU-IMF rescue package after three previous rounds of austerity measures failed to convince financial markets that Greece could bring its public finances under control.
On top of the wage freeze, public sector workers will lose their “13th and 14th month” salaries, paid at Christmas and Easter, and see further cuts in allowances.
Greece’s swollen public sector, which employs about 13 per cent of the workforce, will be gradually reduced through a recruitment freeze, the abolition of short-term contracts and closures of hundreds of outdated state entities.

Hubble's Deepest View to Date Unveils Never Before Seen Galaxies

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has broken the distance limit for galaxies and uncovered a primordial population of compact and ultra-blue galaxies that have never been seen before.

The deeper Hubble looks into space, the farther back in time it looks, because light takes billions of years to cross the observable universe.

This makes Hubble a powerful "time machine" that allows astronomers to see galaxies as they were 13 billion years ago, just 600 million to 800 million years after the Big Bang.

The data from Hubble's new infrared camera, the Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3), on the Ultra Deep Field (taken in August 2009) have been analyzed by no less than five international teams of astronomers. A total of 15 papers have been submitted to date by astronomers worldwide. Some of these early results are being presented by various team members on Jan. 6, 2010, at the 215th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Washington, D.C

The faintest galaxies are now showing signs of linkage to their origins from the first stars. They are so blue that they must be extremely deficient in heavy elements, thus representing a population that has nearly primordial characteristics.

The existence of these newly found galaxies pushes back the time when galaxies began to form to before 500-600 million years after the Big Bang. This is good news for astronomers building the much more powerful James Webb Space Telescope (planned for launch in 2014), which will allow astronomers to study the detailed nature of primordial galaxies and discover many more even farther away. There should be a lot for Webb to hunt for.

The deep observations also demonstrate the progressive buildup of galaxies and provide further support for the hierarchical model of galaxy assembly where small objects accrete mass, or merge, to form bigger objects over a smooth and steady but dramatic process of collision and agglomeration. It's like streams merging into tributaries and then into a bay.

These galaxies are as small as 1/20th the Milky Way's diameter, the masses are just 1 percent of those of the Milky Way. The results show that these galaxies at 700 million years after the Big Bang must have started forming stars hundreds of millions of years earlier, pushing back the time of the earliest star formation in the universe.

The teams are finding that the number of galaxies per unit of volume of space drops off smoothly with increasing distance, and also found that the galaxies become surprisingly blue intrinsically.

The ultra-blue galaxies are extreme examples of objects that appear so blue because they may be deficient in heavier elements, and as a result, quite free of the dust that reddens light through scattering.

Hubble's WFC3/IR camera was able to make deep exposures to uncover new galaxies at roughly 40 times greater efficiency than its earlier infrared camera that was installed in 1997. The WFC3/IR brought new infrared technology to Hubble and accomplished in four days of observing what would have previously taken almost half a year for Hubble to do.

200,000 Degree Star Found at Center of NGC 6302

Astronomers at The University of Manchester's Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics have discovered one of the hottest stars in the Galaxy - with a surface temperature of around 200,000 degrees, it is 35 times hotter than the Sun. Despite numerous attempts by astronomers across the world, the mysterious dying star at the heart of NGC 6302, the Butterfly nebula - one of the brightest and most beautiful of the planetary nebulae - has never been seen before. NGC 6302 lies within our Milky Way galaxy, roughly 3,800 light-years away in the constellation Scorpius. The glowing gas is the star's outer layers, expelled over about 2,200 years. The "butterfly" stretches for more than two light-years, which is about half the distance from the Sun to the nearest star, Alpha Centauri.The central star, which up to now could not be seen because it is hidden within a doughnut-shaped ring of dust, appears as a dark band pinching the nebula in the center. The thick dust belt constricts the star's outflow, creating the classic "bipolar" or hourglass shape displayed by some planetary nebulae.

The star's surface temperature is estimated to be about 200,000 degrees Fahrenheit, making it one of the hottest known stars in our galaxy. Spectroscopic observations made with ground-based telescopes show that even the gas surrounding the star is roughly 36,000 degrees Fahrenheit, which is unusually hot compared to typical planetary nebulae."This star was so hard to find because it is hidden behind a cloud of dust and ice in the middle of the nebula.

Using the recently refurbished Hubble Space Telescope (HST), a team of astronomers have shed new light on the nebula with a set of spectacular images. The images were taken to show off the new improved HST after it began work again in September this year. The Manchester astronomers were amazed to find that the images unexpectedly revealed the missing central star.

Astronomer's said "It's extremely important to understand planetary nebulae such as the Bug Nebula, as they are crucial to understanding our own existence on Earth". That is because the elements necessary for life, especially carbon, are created inside stars, and ejected into space as part of these planetary nebulae. Planets such as the Earth form from small dust particles, which also form within planetary nebulae. The cloud of dust and ice in the Bug Nebula contains the seeds of a future generation of planets." Finding the star was made possible by the Space Shuttle's final servicing mission of the HST, earlier this year. During the mission, astronauts installed the new Wide Field Camera 3 which was used to take these images. "How a star ejects a nebula like this is still a mystery. It seems most stars, including the Sun, will eject as much as 80 per cent of their mass when they finally run out of nuclear fuel at the end of their lives. Material that then goes on to help form the next generation of stars and planets.

These observations have shown that the star at the heart of the Bug Nebula is only about 2/3 as heavy as the Sun, but was several times heavier before it threw off its outer layers to form the nebula which had previously hidden it from our view.

Something Big is Lurking Beyond the Visible Edge of Our Universe

Using data from NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP), scientists have identified an unexpected motion in distant galaxy clusters. The cause, they suggest, is the gravitational attraction of matter that lies beyond the observable universe.

"The clusters show a small but measurable velocity that is independent of the universe's expansion and does not change as distances increase, We never expected to find anything like this."

Hot X-ray-emitting gas in a galaxy cluster scatters photons from the cosmic microwave background. Clusters don't precisely follow the expansion of space, so the wavelengths of scattered photons change in a way that reflects each cluster's individual motion.

This results in a minute shift of the microwave background's temperature in the cluster's direction. Astronomers refer to this change as the kinematic Sunyaev-Zel'dovich (SZ) effect.

A related distortion, known as the thermal SZ effect, has been observed in galaxy clusters since the 1980s. But the kinematic version is less than one-tenth as strong and has not been detected in any cluster.

In 2000, Kashlinsky and Fernando Atrio-Barandela from the University of Salamanca, Spain, showed that astronomers could, in essence, amplify the effect isolating the kinematic SZ term. The trick, they found, is to study large numbers of clusters.

The astronomers teamed to identify some 700 X-ray clusters that could be used to find the subtle spectral shift. This sample includes objects up to 6 billion light-years -- or nearly half of the observable universe -- away.

Using the cluster catalog and WMAP's three-year view of the microwave background, the astronomers detected bulk cluster motions of nearly 2 million miles per hour. The clusters are heading toward a 20-degree patch of sky between the constellations of Centaurus and Vela.

What's more, this motion is constant out to at least a billion light-years. "Because the dark flow already extends so far, it likely extends across the visible universe,"

The finding flies in the face of predictions from standard cosmological models, which describe such motions as decreasing at ever greater distances.

Cosmologists view the microwave background - a flash of light emitted 380,000 years after the big bang - as the universe's ultimate reference frame. Relative to it, all large-scale motion should show no preferred direction.

Big-bang models that include a feature called inflation offer a possible explanation for the flow. Inflation is a brief hyper-expansion early in the universe's history. If inflation did occur, then the universe we can see is only a small portion of the whole cosmos.

WMAP data released in 2006 support the idea that our universe experienced inflation. Kashlinsky and his team suggest that their clusters are responding to the gravitational attraction of matter that was pushed far beyond the observable universe by inflation.

The next step is to narrow down uncertainties in the measurements.

Copenhagen

In 2012 the Kyoto Protocol to prevent climate changes and global warming runs out. To keep the process on the line there is an urgent need for a new climate protocol. At the conference in Copenhagen 2009 the parties of the UNFCCC meet for the last time on government level before the climate agreement need to be renewed.

Therefore the Climate Conference in Copenhagen is essential for the worlds climate and the Danish government and UNFCCC is putting hard effort in making the meeting in Copenhagen a success ending up with a Copenhagen Protocol to prevent global warming and climate changes.

Governmental representatives from 170 countries are expected to be in Copenhagen in the days of the conference accompanied by other governmental representatives, NGO's, journalists and others. In total 8000 people are expected to Copenhagen in the days of the climate meeting.

The conference in Copenhagen is the 15th conference of parties (COP15) in the Framework Convention on Climate Change. The recent meeting in United Nations Climate Change Conferences was held in December 2007 in Bali.

Data Confirms Water on the Moon

The argument that the moon is a dry, desolate place no longer holds water.Secrets the moon has been holding, for perhaps billions of years, are now being revealed to the delight of scientists and space enthusiasts alike.

NASA opened a new chapter in our understanding of the moon. Preliminary data from the Lunar CRater Observation and Sensing Satellite, or LCROSS, indicates that the mission successfully uncovered water during the Oct. 9, 2009 impacts into the permanently shadowed region of Cabeus cater near the moon’s south pole.

The impact created by the LCROSS Centaur upper stage rocket created a two-part plume of material from the bottom of the crater. The first part was a high angle plume of vapor and fine dust and the second a lower angle ejecta curtain of heavier material. This material has not seen sunlight in billions of years.

Permanently shadowed regions could hold a key to the history and evolution of the solar system, much as an ice core sample taken on Earth reveals ancient data. In addition, water, and other compounds represent potential resources that could sustain future lunar exploration.

Since the impacts, the LCROSS science team has been working almost nonstop analyzing the huge amount of data the spacecraft collected. The team concentrated on data from the satellite's spectrometers, which provide the most definitive information about the presence of water.

A spectrometer examines light emitted or absorbed by materials that helps identify their composition.

"Multiple lines of evidence show water was present in both the high angle vapor plume and the ejecta curtain created by the LCROSS Centaur impact. The concentration and distribution of water and other substances requires further analysis, but it is safe to say Cabeus holds water." The team took the known near infrared spectral signatures of water and other materials and compared them to the spectra collected by the LCROSS near infrared spectrometer of the impact.

The possibility of contamination from the Centaur also was ruled out." Additional confirmation came from an emission in the ultraviolet spectrum that was attributed to hydroxyl, one product from the break-up of water by sunlight. When atoms and molecules are excited, they release energy at specific wavelengths that are detected by the spectrometers.

A similar process is used in neon signs. When electrified, a specific gas will produce a distinct color. The ultraviolet visible spectrometer detected hydroxyl signatures just after impact that are consistent with a water vapor cloud in sunlight. Data from the other LCROSS instruments are being analyzed for additional clues about the state and distribution of the material at the impact site.

"The full understanding of the LCROSS data may take some time.

" LCROSS was launched June 18, 2009 as a companion mission to the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, or LRO, from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. After separating from LRO, the LCROSS spacecraft held onto the spent Centaur upper stage rocket of the launch vehicle, executed a lunar swingby and entered into a series of long looping orbits around the Earth.

After traveling approximately 113 days and nearly 5.6 million miles (9 million km), the Centaur and LCROSS separated on final approach to the moon. Traveling as fast as a speeding bullet, the Centaur impacted the lunar surface shortly after 4:31 a.m. PDT Oct. 9 with LCROSS watching with its onboard instruments.

Approximately four minutes of data was collected before the LCROSS itself impacted the lunar surface. Working closely with scientists from LRO and other observatories that viewed the impact, the LCROSS team is working to understand the full scope of the LCROSS data. LRO continues to make passes over the impact site to give the LCROSS team additional insight into the mechanics of the impact and its resulting craters.

What other secrets will the moon reveal? The analysis continues!