XIAM007 - Making Unique Observations in a Very Cluttered World: 09/19/11

Monday, 19 September 2011

Gamers Crack AIDS Puzzle That Stumped Scientists - In just three weeks -

In just three weeks, online gamers deciphered the structure of a retrovirus protein that has stumped scientists for over a decade, and a study out Sunday says their breakthrough opens doors for a new AIDS drug design.
The protein, called a protease, plays a critical role in how some viruses, including HIV, multiply. Intensive research has been underway to find AIDS drugs that can deactivate proteases, but scientists were hampered by their inability to crack the enzyme's structure.
Looking for a solution, researchers at the University of Washington turned to Foldit, a program created by the university a few years ago that transforms problems of science into competitive computer games, and challenged players to use their three-dimensional problem-solving skills to build accurate models of the protein.
With days, the gamers generated models good enough for the researchers to refine into an accurate portrayal of the enzyme's structure. What's more, the scientists identified parts of the molecule that are likely targets for drugs to block the enzyme.
"These features provide opportunities for the design of antiretroviral drugs, including anti-HIV drugs," the authors wrote.
Proteins are made up of long chains of amino acids that fold into complex shapes, but their structures are difficult even for computers to predict.
"We wanted to see if human intuition could succeed where automated methods had failed," said Firas Khatib, a lead author of the study, published in the journal Nature Structural & Molecular Biology.

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/health/2011/09/19/us-gamers-crack-puzzle-in-aids-research-that-stumped-scientists-for-years/?test=latestnews

British School Bans Makeup and Mirrors to Combat Vanity -

Teenage girls at a British secondary school have apparently become entranced by their own heavily made up reflections.

In order to prevent female students from spending school hours primping in the bathroom, Shelley College, a co-ed public school in northern England, has barred students from wearing make-up and spending time in front of the mirror.

According to the Today show, some students had been ignoring the school's old "discreet makeup only" rule, often wearing heavy makeup and spending far too much time socializing around bathroom mirrors. So the school has instituted a no-makeup policy for 13 to 16-year-old students and teachers have been doing daily checks to ensure that they're obeying. The mirrors in the bathroom have also been temporarily taken down, so that girls won't be tempted to congregate around them, obsessing over their appearances.

Read more: http://newsfeed.time.com/2011/09/19/british-school-bans-makeup-and-mirrors-to-combat-vanity/#ixzz1YQVIxTSu

World's biggest sperm bank tells redheads: Keep your semen, no one wants it... -

The world's largest sperm bank is telling redheads to keep their semen.

Demand for ginger-haired donors is so low that Cryos International says they needn't bother donating.

"There are too many redheads in relation to demand," Ole Schou, the director of Cryos, told the Danish newspaper, Ekstrabladet, according to London's Telegraph.

Men with scarlett manes sell "like hot cakes" in Ireland, Schou said, but that's about it.

"I do not think you choose a redhead, unless the partner - for example, the sterile male - has red hair, or because the lone woman has a preference for redheads," he said, the Telegraph reported. "And that's perhaps not so many, especially in the latter case."

Men with brown hair and brown eyes are very popular, Schou noted.

Cryos ships sperm to more than 65 countries around the world, and donors can score up to $500 for their semen.

‘Missing’ heat found deep in the ocean - New study explains why global surface temperatures don’t rise in a straight line -

Changes in ocean currents and circulation are capturing some of the sun’s incoming heat deep in the ocean, according to researchers with theNational Center for Atmospheric Research, who said their latest computer models account for some of the global warming heat that’s “missing” from land and sea surface temperature readings.

The heat is stored at depths below 1,000 feet and could lead to periods as long as 10 years when the rate of heating on the Earth’s surface flattens. The findings also suggest that several more intervals like this can be expected over the next century, even as the trend toward overall warming continues.

“We will see global warming go through hiatus periods in the future,” said NCAR’s Gerald Meehl, lead author of the study. “However, these periods would likely last only about a decade or so, and warming would then resume. This study illustrates one reason why global temperatures do not simply rise in a straight line.”

The research, by scientists at NCAR and the Bureau of Meteorology in Australia, will be published online on September 18 in Nature Climate Change. Funding for the study came from the National Science Foundation, NCAR’s sponsor, and the Department of Energy.

The 2000s were Earth’s warmest decade in more than a century of weather records. However, the single-year mark for warmest global temperature, which had been set in 1998, remained unmatched until 2010.

Yet emissions of greenhouse gases continued to climb during the 2000s, and satellite measurements showed that the discrepancy between incoming sunshine and outgoing radiation from Earth actually increased. This implied that heat was building up somewhere on Earth, according to a 2010 study published in Science by NCAR researchers Kevin Trenberth and John Fasullo.

The sprinkling of global warming deniers and skeptics in the science community latched on to the concept of “missing heat,” claiming that it somehow showed that the existing global warming models are flawed.

Now, the latest study by the NCAR climate scientists suggests that the oceans might be storing some of the heat that would otherwise go toward other processes, such as warming the atmosphere or land, or melting more ice and snow.

Observations from a global network of buoys showed some warming in the upper ocean, but not enough to account for the global build-up of heat. Although scientists suspected the deep oceans were playing a role, few measurements were available to confirm that hypothesis.

To track where the heat was going, Meehl and colleagues used a powerful software tool known as the Community Climate System Model, which was developed by scientists at NCAR and the Department of Energy with colleagues at other organizations. Using the model’s ability to portray complex interactions between the atmosphere, land, oceans, and sea ice, they performed five simulations of global temperatures.