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Volcanic blasts hint that Mercury is a migrant planet
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GLOBAL WARMING IMAGES/REX
THE very compound that keeps plants standing tall has been redesigned to make them easier to break down and turn into fuel. Biofuels are made from plants such as corn, and using them instead of oil should cut climate change. But at the moment we can only get fuel from easily digestible bits of plants, such as corn kernels. The rest of the plant gets wasted. The stumbling block is lignin, a chain-like molecule that gives wood its rigidity and is hard to digest. John Ralph at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and colleagues found a gene from a herb called Chinese angelica that changes lignin production. They added the gene to poplar trees, and found they could extract nearly double the amount of sugar from the modified plants compared with unmodified plants, suggesting the lignin was breaking down more easily (Science, doi.org/r6s). If it scales up, the method could lead to more eco-friendly biofuels. “The energy crop of the future will likely have this integrated into it,” says Jay Keasling of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. “It’s definitely a breakthrough,” says Björn Sundberg of Swedish wood pulping giant Stora Enso. He says it could also lead to new kinds of products made from wood.
Dysentery parasites love chomping on the cells of the gut IT’S a killer amoeba. More than 100,000 people die each year from amoebic dysentery, mostly in developing countries where sanitation is poor. But no one knew precisely how the bug attacks the gut. Now Katherine Ralston and William Petri of the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, have found that Entamoeba histolytica has a unique – and gruesome – strategy. It gnaws away at the gut wall, ripping chunks off living cells, chewing them up and spitting them out.
It’s “purely malevolent”, says Michael Blennerhassett of Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada, who was not involved in the study. “This is a previously unsuspected method of attack.” Ralston and Petri labelled mouse intestines using fluorescent dyes, in order to follow their fate. Most amoebas kill cells by attaching themselves to them, but E. histolytica tears at its targets (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/ nature13242). “We saw that the amoeba ingested bites of the fluorescent membranes of the
intestinal cells,” says Ralston. “They are impressively ravenous.” If E. histolytica is constantly grazing throughout the gut, it may be able to lurk inside a host for years without causing enough damage to lead to inflammation or disease. “The way it samples bits and pieces of the cell without ingesting it suggests this may be going on all the time, and only when a certain balance is broken does the disease set in,” says Kris Chadee, a microbiologist from the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada. MAURO BOTTARO/ANZENBERGER/EYEVINE
Tweaked trees offer fuel bounty
Blasts could make Mercury a migrant LIKE its traveller god namesake, the planet Mercury is hard to pin down. Volcanic blasts that rocked it for aeons don’t mesh with theories of how it formed. Such blasts happen on Earth when lava boils water and volatile compounds underground, and they smash through the surface. Mercury is closer to the sun, so any volatiles within it should have boiled off as it formed 4.5 billion years ago. But during fly-bys in 2008, the Messenger probe saw volcanic ash deposits and telltale vents. Still, the blasts could have occurred just after Mercury’s birth. Now, Timothy Goudge of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, and his colleagues have analysed images taken when the probe began orbiting Mercury in 2011. Some vents were more eroded – by material flung up by impacts, say – than others, so they can’t all have formed at the same time. Most of the vents were inside impact craters, which can be dated, suggesting that the blasts occurred between 3.5 and 1 billion years ago (Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets, doi.org/r63). The results raise the possibility that Mercury formed further out and migrated in towards the sun.
Even pros find it hard to spot a Strad COULD you tell a new violin from a 300-year-old Italian Stradivarius? If not, you’re in good company: neither can the very best violin soloists. To investigate whether older violins deserve their reputation for being superior, Claudia Fritz and colleagues at the Jean Le Rond d’Alembert Institute in Paris asked 10 musicians to try six new and six old violins, including five by Antonio Stradivari. While wearing modified welder’s goggles and under dim light, they played each violin in a rehearsal room and a 300-seat concert hall. The new violins were also given
antique touches to disguise them. Asked to choose a violin to replace their own for a hypothetical concert tour, six of the musicians chose new ones. The whole group did no better than chance in picking out which violins were old and which new, but tended to rate newer ones as more playable (PNAS, DOI: 10.1073/ pnas.1323367111). The results build on a similar study a few years ago that took place in a hotel room. This time the musicians were top-level soloists and had more time to test a wider selection of violins, in more relevant settings.
12 April 2014 | NewScientist | 17
GLOBAL WARMING IMAGES/REX
THE very compound that keeps plants standing tall has been redesigned to make them easier to break down and turn into fuel. Biofuels are made from plants such as corn, and using them instead of oil should cut climate change. But at the moment we can only get fuel from easily digestible bits of plants, such as corn kernels. The rest of the plant gets wasted. The stumbling block is lignin, a chain-like molecule that gives wood its rigidity and is hard to digest. John Ralph at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and colleagues found a gene from a herb called Chinese angelica that changes lignin production. They added the gene to poplar trees, and found they could extract nearly double the amount of sugar from the modified plants compared with unmodified plants, suggesting the lignin was breaking down more easily (Science, doi.org/r6s). If it scales up, the method could lead to more eco-friendly biofuels. “The energy crop of the future will likely have this integrated into it,” says Jay Keasling of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. “It’s definitely a breakthrough,” says Björn Sundberg of Swedish wood pulping giant Stora Enso. He says it could also lead to new kinds of products made from wood.
Dysentery parasites love chomping on the cells of the gut IT’S a killer amoeba. More than 100,000 people die each year from amoebic dysentery, mostly in developing countries where sanitation is poor. But no one knew precisely how the bug attacks the gut. Now Katherine Ralston and William Petri of the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, have found that Entamoeba histolytica has a unique – and gruesome – strategy. It gnaws away at the gut wall, ripping chunks off living cells, chewing them up and spitting them out.
It’s “purely malevolent”, says Michael Blennerhassett of Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada, who was not involved in the study. “This is a previously unsuspected method of attack.” Ralston and Petri labelled mouse intestines using fluorescent dyes, in order to follow their fate. Most amoebas kill cells by attaching themselves to them, but E. histolytica tears at its targets (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/ nature13242). “We saw that the amoeba ingested bites of the fluorescent membranes of the
intestinal cells,” says Ralston. “They are impressively ravenous.” If E. histolytica is constantly grazing throughout the gut, it may be able to lurk inside a host for years without causing enough damage to lead to inflammation or disease. “The way it samples bits and pieces of the cell without ingesting it suggests this may be going on all the time, and only when a certain balance is broken does the disease set in,” says Kris Chadee, a microbiologist from the University of Calgary in Alberta, Canada. MAURO BOTTARO/ANZENBERGER/EYEVINE
Tweaked trees offer fuel bounty
Blasts could make Mercury a migrant LIKE its traveller god namesake, the planet Mercury is hard to pin down. Volcanic blasts that rocked it for aeons don’t mesh with theories of how it formed. Such blasts happen on Earth when lava boils water and volatile compounds underground, and they smash through the surface. Mercury is closer to the sun, so any volatiles within it should have boiled off as it formed 4.5 billion years ago. But during fly-bys in 2008, the Messenger probe saw volcanic ash deposits and telltale vents. Still, the blasts could have occurred just after Mercury’s birth. Now, Timothy Goudge of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, and his colleagues have analysed images taken when the probe began orbiting Mercury in 2011. Some vents were more eroded – by material flung up by impacts, say – than others, so they can’t all have formed at the same time. Most of the vents were inside impact craters, which can be dated, suggesting that the blasts occurred between 3.5 and 1 billion years ago (Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets, doi.org/r63). The results raise the possibility that Mercury formed further out and migrated in towards the sun.
Even pros find it hard to spot a Strad COULD you tell a new violin from a 300-year-old Italian Stradivarius? If not, you’re in good company: neither can the very best violin soloists. To investigate whether older violins deserve their reputation for being superior, Claudia Fritz and colleagues at the Jean Le Rond d’Alembert Institute in Paris asked 10 musicians to try six new and six old violins, including five by Antonio Stradivari. While wearing modified welder’s goggles and under dim light, they played each violin in a rehearsal room and a 300-seat concert hall. The new violins were also given
antique touches to disguise them. Asked to choose a violin to replace their own for a hypothetical concert tour, six of the musicians chose new ones. The whole group did no better than chance in picking out which violins were old and which new, but tended to rate newer ones as more playable (PNAS, DOI: 10.1073/ pnas.1323367111). The results build on a similar study a few years ago that took place in a hotel room. This time the musicians were top-level soloists and had more time to test a wider selection of violins, in more relevant settings.
12 April 2014 | NewScientist | 17