Nasa to turn ISS into coldest spot in the universe

By, TNN | Feb 22, 2013, 06.18 AM IST
READ MORE NASA|Jet Propulsion Laboratory|International Space Station|coldest spot in the universe|Universe
Nasa to turn ISS into coldest spot in the universe
This hitherto unknown project, known as the Cold Atom Laboratory (CAL), is being led by an Indian woman, Anita Sengupta, who hails from West Bengal.
MUMBAI: Nasa's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) at Pasadena in California is developing an experiment which will make the International Space Station (ISS) the coldest spot in the universe, quite literally.


Interestingly, this hitherto unknown project, known as the Cold Atom Laboratory (CAL), is being led by an Indian woman, Anita Sengupta, who hails from West Bengal. Prior to this she led the supersonic parachute development for the highly successful Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) mission which landed the Curiosity rover on the Red Planet on August 6, 2012.

In an email interview to TOI, Anita, who is planning to visit India later this year, explained that the main role of the new laboratory, which will become a part of the ISS in 2016, will be to explore new quantum physics in an extremely cold temperature regime that cannot be explored in earth-based laboratories.

"It is a regime where matter ceases to behave like particles , but instead like a wave,'' she said, while pointing out that it may be representative of the way matter was at the formation of the universe. "This is a very exciting fundamental physics experiment that will make the ISS the coldest spot in the universe , quite literally. We will see new physics only enabled by the microgravity environment of the ISS,'' she said.

The 17-nation ISS operates in the low earth orbit at an altitude of about 370km.

"We started the development in October 2012 and will launch roughly in April 2016. We are in the design phase now. It will be installed by astronauts into the ISS and operated remotely by us at JPL,'' she stated. According to her, CAL is likely to be launched by the Dragon cargo vehicle.

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Deadly new virus is well adapted to infect humans, study finds

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A security force personnel takes pictures of a Naga Sadhu on the banks of the river Ganges at the ongoing Kumbh Mela in Allahabad February 15, 2013. REUTERS/Jitendra Prakash

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By Kate Kelland, Health and Science Correspondent
LONDON | Tue Feb 19, 2013 10:45am IST
(Reuters) - A new virus that emerged in the Middle East last year and has killed five people is well adapted to infecting humans but could potentially be treated with drugs that boost the immune system, scientists said on Tuesday.
The virus, called novel coronavirus or NCoV, is from the same family as the common cold and as SARS, or Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome. There have been 12 confirmed cases worldwide - including in Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Britain - and five patients have died.
In one of the first published studies about NCoV, which was unknown in humans until it was identified in September 2012, researchers said it could penetrate the lining of passageways in the lungs and evade the immune system as easily as a cold virus can.
This shows it "grows very efficiently" in human cells and suggests it is well-equipped for infecting humans, said Volker Thiel of the Institute of Immunobiology at Kantonal Hospital in Switzerland, who led the study.
NCoV was identified when the World Health Organisation issued an international alert in September saying a completely new virus had infected a Qatari man in Britain who had recently been in Saudi Arabia.
Coronaviruses are a family of viruses that includes those that cause the common cold as well as the one that caused SARS - which emerged in China in 2002 and killed about a 10th of the 8,000 people it infected worldwide.
Symptoms of both NCoV and SARS include severe respiratory illness, fever, coughing and breathing difficulties. Of the 12 cases confirmed so far, four were in Britain, one was a Qatari patient in Germany, two were in Jordan and five in Saudi Arabia.
POSSIBLE TREATMENT
Scientists are not sure where the virus comes from, but say one possibility is it came from animals. Experts at Britain's Health Protection Agency say preliminary scientific analysis suggests its closest relatives are bat coronaviruses.
What is also unclear is what the true prevalence of the virus is - since it is possible that the 12 cases seen so far are the most severe, and there may be more people who have contracted the virus with milder symptoms so are not picked up.
"We don't know whether the cases (so far) are the tip of the iceberg, or whether many more people are infected without showing severe symptoms," said Thiel, who worked with a team of scientists from the Netherlands, Switzerland, Germany and Denmark. "We don't have enough cases to have a full picture of the variety of symptoms."
Thiel said that although the virus may have jumped from animals to humans very recently, his research showed it was just as well adapted to infecting the human respiratory tract as other coronaviruses like SARS and the common cold viruses.
The study, published in mBio, an online journal of the American Society for Microbiology, also found that NCoV was susceptible to treatment with interferons, medicines that boost the immune system and which are also successfully used to treat other viral diseases like Hepatitis C.
This opens up a possible mode of treatment in the event of a large-scale outbreak, the scientists said.
Thiel said that with the future of the virus uncertain, it was vital for laboratories and specialists around the world to cooperate swiftly to find out more about where it came from, how widespread it was, and how infectious it might be.
"So far it looks like the virus is well contained, so in that sense I don't see any reason for increased fear," he said. (Editing by Pravin Char)
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New US brain wave: Unlocking the mind

ByJohn Markoff, NYT News Service | Feb 19, 2013, 06.37 AM IST
READ MORE human genome project|Harvard Universityarvard University|H Barack Obama|Barack Obama
WASHINGTON: The Obama administration is planning a decade-long scientific effort to examine the workings of the human brain and build a comprehensive map of its activity, seeking to do for the brain what the Human Genome Project did for genetics.

The project, which the administration has been looking to unveil as early as March, will include federal agencies, private foundations and teams of neuroscientists and nanoscientists in a concerted effort to advance the knowledge of the brain's billions of neurons and gain greater insights into perception, actions and, ultimately, consciousness . Scientists with the highest hopes for the project also see it as a way to develop the technology essential to understanding diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's , as well as to find new therapies for a variety of mental illnesses. Moreover, the project holds the potential of paving the way for advances in artificial intelligence.

The project, which could ultimately cost billions of dollars, is expected to be part of the president's budget proposal next month. And, four scientists and representatives of research institutions said they had participated in planning for what is being called the Brain Activity Map project. The details are not final, and it is not clear how much federal money would be proposed or approved for the project in a time of fiscal constraint or how far the research would be able to get without federal financing. In his state of the union address, Obama cited brain research as an example of how the government should "invest in the best ideas" .

"Every dollar we invested to map the human genome returned $140 to our economy — every dollar," he said. "Today our scientists are mapping the human brain to unlock the answers to Alzheimer's . They're developing drugs to regenerate damaged organs , devising new materials to make batteries 10 times more powerful. Now is not the time to gut these job-creating investments in science and innovation."

The initiative, if successful, could provide a lift for the economy . "The Human Genome Project was on the order of about $300 million a year for a decade," said George M Church, a Harvard University molecular biologist who helped create that project . "If you look at the total spending in neuroscience and nanoscience that might be relative to this today, we are already spending more than that. We probably won't spend less money, but we will probably get a lot more bang for the buck." Scientists said they hoped that federal financing would be more than $300 million a year.
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