Exotic Foods

Archive for August, 2012

Mars rover Curiosity is on the move – and its first destination on the Red Planet has a namesake deep in the Scottish Highlands.

The robot is heading for Glenelg, an area of intriguing rocky terrain which it will visit twice on its journey to and from the Martian mountain, Mount Sharp.

This coming and going inspired the rover team to use a palindrome – a word which reads the same forwards and backwards – when it chose the name Glenelg.

So how do the two Glenelgs compare?

Getting there: Curiosity spent eight months tucked inside a spacecraft on the 570 million km journey from Earth to Mars.

The trip through space was fraught with risk. Two-thirds of all missions to the Red Planet have failed, with many lost on entry into the thin but unforgiving Martian atmosphere.

Now the rover is moving on the planet's surface, it will take it a week to reach the Martian Glenelg.

Getting to the Earth-bound Glenelg can also be a challenge.

Between April and mid-October, the mainland community can be reached from Skye in a short crossing of the Kyle Rhea strait using the aged car ferry, Glenachulish.

By road, travellers must take the twisting single track road that climbs to more than 1,000ft over Bealach Ratagan, one of the highest mountain passes in the UK.

The road seems a daunting prospect in winter, but according to the wife of a local crofter interviewed by BBC Scotland earlier this year "the newspapers always get delivered".

The journey from Inverness, the nearest city, takes two hours.

What is it like?: Scientists and the public have been wowed by several images of Mars already sent back by Curiosity.

The Nasa team wants the rover to visit the area dubbed Glenelg because it appears to be an intersection of three distinct types of rock terrain.

Joy Crisp, a deputy project scientist on the mission, said: "When we finally get to Glenelg, we want to study the outcrop there and take a look at the contacts between the three different terrain types.

"Maybe there is where we'll decide to do our first drilling into rock."

The goal of Curiosity's mission is to determine whether Mars has ever had the conditions to support life.

Earth's Glenelg is a small, leafy settlement of white-painted houses.

The community sits on Glenelg Bay and has views across the Kyle Rhea strait to Skye and the island's mountains.

The surrounding area is packed with evidence of past life in the Highlands.

These include the ruins of Bernera Barracks. Built in the 18th Century, it provided a base for government troops patrolling against rebellious Jacobite sympathisers in the surrounding hills and glens.

In nearby Gleann Beag stand the ruins of Dun Telve and Dun Troddan, the fortress-like stone homesteads of Iron Age farmers.

Reaction to mission: Residents of Scotland's Glenelg have been highlighting the rover's mission on their community website.

Nothing has been heard so far from any Martians.

Astronomers have found evidence for a planet being devoured by its star, yielding insights into the fate that will befall Earth in billions of years.

The team uncovered the signature of a planet that had been "eaten" by looking at the chemistry of the host star.

They also think a surviving planet around this star may have been kicked into its unusual orbit by the destruction of a neighbouring world.

Details of the work have been published in Astrophysical Journal Letters.

The US-Polish-Spanish team made the discovery when they were studying the star BD+48 740 – which is one of a stellar class known as red giants. Their observations were made with the Hobby Eberly telescope, based at the McDonald Observatory in Texas.

Rising temperatures near the cores of red giants cause these elderly stars to expand in size, a process which will cause any nearby planets to be destroyed.

"A similar fate may await the inner planets in our solar system, when the Sun becomes a red giant and expands all the way out to Earth's orbit some five billion years from now," said co-author Prof Alexander Wolszczan from Pennsylvania State University in the US.

The first piece of evidence for the missing planet comes from the star's peculiar chemical composition.

Spectroscopic analysis of BD+48 740 revealed that it contained an abnormally high amount of lithium, a rare element created primarily during the Big Bang 14 billion years ago.

Lithium is easily destroyed in stars, so its high abundance in this ageing star is very unusual.

"Theorists have identified only a few, very specific circumstances, other than the Big Bang, under which lithium can be created in stars," Prof Wolszczan explained.

"In the case of BD+48 740, it is probable that the lithium production was triggered by a mass the size of a planet that spiralled into the star and heated it up while the star was digesting it."

The second piece of evidence discovered by the astronomers is the highly elliptical orbit of a newly discovered planet around the red giant star. The previously undetected world is at least 1.6 times as massive as Jupiter.

Co-author Andrzej Niedzielski of Nicolaus Copernicus University in Torun, Poland, said that orbits as eccentric as this one are uncommon in planetary systems around evolved stars.

"In fact, the BD+48 740 planet's orbit is the most elliptical one detected so far," he added.

Because gravitational interactions between planets are often responsible for such peculiar orbits, the astronomers suspect that the dive of the missing planet toward its host star before it became a giant could have given the surviving massive planet a burst of energy.

This boost would have propelled it into its present unusual orbit.

Team member Eva Villaver of the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid in Spain commented: "Catching a planet in the act of being devoured by a star is an almost improbable feat to accomplish because of the comparative swiftness of the process, but the occurrence of such a collision can be deduced from the way it affects the stellar chemistry.

"The highly elongated orbit of the massive planet we discovered around this lithium-polluted red giant star is exactly the kind of evidence that would point to the star's recent destruction of its now-missing planet."

Nearly a billion people use mobile phones in India and a network of broadcast masts helps to keep them talking.

The local telecom regulator has recommended that companies reduce their dependency on diesel and cut carbon emissions by 50% at all rural towers and 20% at urban towers.

They will tap into green energy sources like solar, wind and biogas, and provide a clean power source in remote areas.

Anil Raj of OMC Power says there is going to be a big shift in the way power is consumed in India.

"The existing paradigm is of having very large power plants and inefficient transmission networks," he says.

"So you generate power far away, then you bring it through transmission lines and distribute it here.

"That is changing. So what we are going to see now is that you generate and consume power locally."

The biggest challenge remains the commercial viability of green power.

But firms hope that tower companies can be the anchor clients in a remote location, and the extra energy can be distributed to the residential areas around them.

Mr Raj says the energy they produce will be shared between the telecom company and the local community, which will get small battery packs that can be used to light up a home or charge small appliances.

OMC Power hopes that by using a hybrid of techniques, it can keep the costs down as there will be little or no wastage.

Pegging prices will be important as the Indian telecom market is already suffering from falling revenues and cut-throat competition.

In an attempt to further develop the market, the country is expected to add another 300,000 towers over the next five years.

Unless an effective clean energy model is developed soon, many fear that fuel costs will bleed an industry that is already heavily in debt.

HONG KONG (Reuters) – A gene that raises rice yields by enhancing root growth and nutrient absorption in low quality soils has been identified in a species of rice in India and successfully introduced into other rice varieties, researchers reported on Thursday.

Scientists and rice breeders have known for years that Kasalath rice is unusually efficient at nutrient absorption, but only now have they succeeded in identifying the gene responsible for this important trait.

In a paper published in the journal Nature, they described how they identified the gene after analyzing part of the Kasalath DNA where it was thought to be located and comparing it with other rice varieties without the trait.

Using conventional breeding methods, they introduced the gene into a few rice types in Indonesia, the Philippines and Japan and found that it raised yields by up to 20 percent.

“We found a gene that enhances phosphorus uptake in low phosphorus conditions. We have been looking for it for many years,” said lead author Sigrid Heuer at the International Rice Research Institute in Manila.

Heuer said the superior breeding lines could be released to farmers in Indonesia in about 2-3 years. These have already been developed using conventional breeding methods — by pollinating the flowers of a native Indonesian rice species with pollen from the Kasalath.

“As for other Asian countries, we will get them to put the gene into their local varieties through conventional breeding,” said Heuer, adding that this would take about 4-5 years.

By using conventional breeding techniques, in this case, cross-pollination, there are no issues related to genetic modification. Food safety concerns and regulatory hurdles for transgenic rice — where a gene is physically inserted into plant DNA in a laboratory — can translate into years or even decades of testing before the strain reaches markets

The gene, PSTOL1, allows rice crops to thrive in soil that has low levels of phosphorus, a nutrient that promotes root growth, winter hardiness and hastens maturity. Plants deficient in phosphorus are often stunted.

“Fifty percent of world’s arable land is too low in phosphorus. It’s not like if you have this gene that the plants don’t need phosphorus anymore,” said Heuer.

“They (rice plants with the gene) may be able to exploit the soil a little better so the harvest is better. They may make better use of fertilizer because they can take it up more efficiently … If you have a bigger root system, then the plant can take it up better and they can have better access to the patches where the phosphorus is.”

(Editing by Chris Lewis)

Modern Indo-European languages – which include English – originated in Turkey about 9,000 years ago, researchers say.

According to the Ethnologue database, more than 100 language families exist.

The Indo-European family is one of the largest families – more than 400 languages spoken in at least 60 countries – and its origins are unclear.

The Steppes, or Kurgan, theorists hold that the proto-language originated in the Steppes of Russia, north of the Caspian Sea, about 5,000 years ago.

The Anatolia hypothesis – first proposed in the late 1980s by Prof Colin Renfrew (now Lord Renfrew) – suggests an origin in the Anatolian region of Turkey about 3,000 years earlier.

To determine which competing theory was the most likely, Dr Quentin Atkinson from the University of Auckland and his team interrogated language evolution using phylogenetic analyses – more usually used to trace virus epidemics.

Phylogenetics reveals relatedness by assessing how much of the information stored in DNA is shared between organisms.

Chimpanzees and humans have a common ancestor and share about 98% of their DNA. Because of this shared ancestry, they cluster together on phylogenetic – or family – trees.

Like DNA, language is passed down, generation to generation.

Although language changes and evolves, some linguists have argued that cognates describing the fundamentals of life – kinship (mother, father), body parts (eye, hand), the natural world (fire, water) and basic verbs (to walk, to run) – resist change.

These conserved cognates are strongly linked to the proto-language of old.

Dr Atkinson and his team built a database containing 207 cognate words present in 103 Indo‐European languages, which included 20 ancient tongues such as Latin and Greek.

Using phylogenetic analysis, they were able to reconstruct the evolutionary relatedness of these modern and ancient languages – the more words that are cognate, the more similar the languages are and the closer they group on the tree.

The trees could also predict when and where the ancestral language originated.

Looking back into the depths of the tree, Dr Atkinson and his colleagues were able to confirm the Anatolian origin.

To test if the alternative hypothesis – of a Russian origin several years later – was possible, the team used competing models of evolution to pitch Steppes and Anatolian theory against each other.

In repeated tests, the Anatolian theory always came out on top.

Commenting on the paper, Prof Mark Pagel, a Fellow of the Royal Society from the University of Reading who was involved in earlier published phylogenetic studies, said: "This is a superb application of methods taken from evolutionary biology to understand a problem in cultural evolution – the origin and expansion of the Indo-European languages.

"This paper conclusively shows that the Indo-European languages are at least 8-9,500 years old, and arose, as has long been speculated, in the Anatolian region of what is modern-day Turkey and spread outwards from there."

Commenting on the inclusion of ancient languages in the analyses, he added: "The use of a number of known calibration points from 'fossil' languages greatly strengthens the conclusions."

However, the findings have not found universal acceptance. Prof Petri Kallio from the University of Helsinki suggests that several cognate words describing technological inventions – such as the wheel – are evident across different languages.

He argues that the Indo-European proto-language diversified after the invention of the wheel, about 5,000 years ago.

On the phylogenetic methods used to date the proto-language, Prof Kallio added: "So why do I still remain sceptical? Unlike archaeological radiocarbon dating based on the fixed rate of decay of the carbon-14 isotope, there is simply no fixed rate of decay of basic vocabulary, which would allow us to date ancestral proto-languages.

"Instead of the quantity of the words, therefore, the trained Indo-Europeanists concentrate on the quality of the words."

Prof Pagel is less convinced by the counter-argument: "Compared to the Kurgan hypothesis, this new analysis shows the Anatolian hypothesis as the clear winner."