LIFE ON OTHER PLANETS - A REALITY?

Experts examining results from the Kepler telescope have identified more than 1,200 planets in orbit around distant stars, 54 of which are a similar size to Earth and in habitable zones from their suns.

The research follows several recent discoveries which point to the possibility of life on other planets.

Last year, Nasa scientists claimed they had found vital clues which appeared to indicate that primitive aliens could be living on Titan, one of Saturn’s biggest moons.

Data from Nasa's Cassini probe revealed the complex chemistry on the surface of Titan, which experts say is the only moon around the planet to have a dense atmosphere.

Experts suggested that life forms may have been breathing in the planet’s atmosphere and also feeding on its surface’s fuel.

 

LIFE BEGAN WITH MEGA ORGANISM LUCA?

ONCE upon a time, 3 billion years ago, there lived a single organism called LUCA. It was enormous: a mega-organism like none seen since, it filled the planet's oceans before splitting into three and giving birth to the ancestors of all living things on Earth today.

This strange picture is emerging from efforts to pin down the last universal common ancestor - not the first life that emerged on Earth but the life form that gave rise to all others.

The latest results suggest LUCA was the result of early life's fight to survive, attempts at which turned the ocean into a global genetic swap shop for hundreds of millions of years. Cells struggling to survive on their own exchanged useful parts with each other without competition - effectively creating a global mega-organism.

It was around 2.9 billion years ago that LUCA split into the three domains of life: the single-celled bacteria and archaea, and the more complex eukaryotes that gave rise to animals and plants . It's hard to know what happened before the split. Hardly any fossil evidence remains from this time, and any genes that date that far back are likely to have mutated beyond recognition.

That isn't an insuperable obstacle to painting LUCA's portrait, says Gustavo Caetano-Anollés of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. While the sequence of genes changes quickly, the three-dimensional structure of the proteins they code for is more resistant to the test of time. So if all organisms today make a protein with the same overall structure, he says, it's a good bet that the structure was present in LUCA. He calls such structures living fossils, and points out that since the function of a protein is highly dependent on its structure, they could tell us what LUCA could do.

"Structure is known to be conserved when sequences aren't," agrees Anthony Poole of the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, though he cautions that two very similar structures could conceivably have evolved independently after LUCA.

To reconstruct the set of proteins LUCA could make, Caetano-Anollés searched a database of proteins from 420 modern organisms, looking for structures that were common to all. Of the structures he found, just 5 to 11 per cent were universal, meaning they were conserved enough to have originated in LUCA (BMC Evolutionary Biology, DOI: 10.1186/1471-2148-11-140).

By looking at their function, he concludes that LUCA had enzymes to break down and extract energy from nutrients, and some protein-making equipment, but it lacked the enzymes for making and reading DNA molecules.

This is in line with unpublished work by Wolfgang Nitschke of the Mediterranean Institute of Microbiology in Marseille, France. He reconstructed the history of enzymes crucial to metabolism and found that LUCA could use both nitrate and carbon as energy sources. Nitschke presented his work at the UCL Symposium on the Origin of Life in London on 11 November.

If LUCA was made of cells it must have had membranes, and Armen Mulkidjanian of the University of Osnabrück in Germany thinks he knows what kind. He traced the history of membrane proteins and concluded that LUCA could only make simple isoprenoid membranes, which were leaky compared with more modern designs (Proceedings of the International Moscow Conference on Computational Molecular Biology, 2011, p 92).

LUCA probably also had an organelle, a cell compartment with a specific function. Organelles were thought to be the preserve of eukaryotes, but in 2003 researchers found an organelle called the acidocalcisome in bacteria. Caetano-Anollés has now found that tiny granules in some archaea are also acidocalcisomes, or at least their precursors. That means acidocalcisomes are found in all three domains of life, and date back to LUCA (Biology Direct, DOI: 10.1186/1745-6150-6-50).

So LUCA had a rich metabolism that used different food sources, and it had internal organelles. So far, so familiar. But its genetics are a different story altogether.

For starters, LUCA may not have used DNA. Poole has studied the history of enzymes called ribonucleotide reductases, which create the building blocks of DNA, and found no evidence that LUCA had them (BMC Evolutionary Biology, DOI: 10.1186/1471-2148-10-383). Instead, it may have used RNA: many biologists think RNA came first because it can store information and control chemical reactions (New Scientist, 13 August, p 32).

The crucial point is that LUCA was a "progenote", with poor control over the proteins that it made, says Massimo Di Giulio of the Institute of Genetics and Biophysics in Naples, Italy. Progenotes can make proteins using genes as a template, but the process is so error-prone that the proteins can be quite unlike what the gene specified. Both Di Giulio and Caetano-Anollés have found evidence that systems that make protein synthesis accurate appear long after LUCA. "LUCA was a clumsy guy trying to solve the complexities of living on primitive Earth," says Caetano-Anollés.

Cure for Type 1 Diabetics?

ScienceDaily (June 21, 2010) — Researchers have developed an experimental cure for Type 1 diabetes, a disease that affects about one in every 400 to 600 children and adolescents.

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Results of the research in a mouse model of Type 1 diabetes are being presented at The Endocrine Society's 92nd Annual Meeting in San Diego.
Using gene therapy, the team from Baylor College of Medicine in Houston tried to counter the two defects that cause Type 1 diabetes: autoimmune attack and destruction of the insulin-producing beta cells. They used nonobese diabetic mice, which spontaneously develop diabetes due to autoimmunity, just as humans do with Type 1 diabetes.
"A single treatment cured about 50 percent of the diabetic mice, restoring their blood sugar to normal so that they no longer need insulin injections," said study co-author Lawrence Chan, MD, DSc, chief of Baylor's diabetes, endocrinology and metabolism division.

Type 1 diabetes occurs when the body's immune system attacks and destroys the beta cells in the pancreas, the insulin "factory" of the body. The resulting near-complete deficiency of insulin -- the hormone that controls blood sugar -- leads to a buildup of high blood sugar and thus diabetes.
In past studies of their original gene therapy, Chan's group was able to stimulate new formation of beta cells in the liver and restore insulin production and normal blood sugar levels in more than 100 mice with chemically induced diabetes. However, in nonobese diabetic mice the treatment failed to reverse Type 1 diabetes because the mouse's immune system killed the newly formed beta cells, he said.
In this research, which was funded by the National Institute of Diabetes, Kidney and Digestive Diseases, Chan said they "added to the original gene therapy approach a protective gene that shields the newly formed beta cells from autoimmune attack." The added gene was for interleukin-10, an important regulator of the immune system. Past studies showed that interleukin-10 can prevent diabetes development in mice but cannot reverse the disease once it has developed because of the lack of beta cells.
However, when the researchers combined the gene therapy with interleukin-10 into a single intravenous injection, the treatment showed a complete reversal of diabetes in half of the mice during more than 20 months' follow-up. Although the therapy did not reverse autoimmunity throughout the body, it protected the new beta cells from the local destructive effect of autoimmunity, Chan explained.
"We developed a protective 'moat' around the new beta cells," he said. "We are now developing other strategies to try to fortify the newly formed beta cells and give them better weapons in addition to the moat, in order to increase the treatment's cure rate."
Why the gene therapy did not work in all the mice is unclear. However, Chan said the treated mice that did not have improvements in their blood sugar did gain weight and lived a little longer than untreated mice.

AIR FUELED CAR

Gasoline is already the fuel of the past. It might not seem that way as you fill up on your way to work, but the petroleum used to make it is gradually running out. It also pollutes air that's becoming increasingly unhealthy to breathe, and people no longer want to pay the high prices that oil companies are charging for it. Automobile manufacturers know all of this and have spent lots of time and money to find and develop the fuel of the future.
The search is on, but what will this fuel of the future be? Ready-made fuels like petroleum are becoming more difficult to find and automobile manufacturers are turning to greener energy sources like batteries. These batteries can be charged with energy and placed in a car where that energy can be released. As good as that idea might seem, some manufacturers think air could become an even better energy source.
Air? At first glance, the idea of running a car on air seems almost too good to be true. If we can use air as fuel, why think about using anything else? Air is all around us. Air never runs out. Air is nonpolluting. Best of all, air is free.
­­Unfortunately, air alone can't be used as a fuel. First, energy has to be stored in it by squeezing the air tightly using a mechanical air compressor. Once the compressed air is released, it expands. This expanding air can be used, for example, to drive the pistons that power an engine. The idea of using compressed air to power a vehicle isn't new: Early prototypes of an air-powered vehicle go back to the middle of the 19^th century, even before the invention of the internal combustion engine.
At least one manufacturer thinks that it's ready to sell air cars to the American public. If all goes well, these cars could be available in the United States relatively soon , Over the next few pages, we'll look at this technology, the reasons you may want to use it -- and a few reasons you might not.

NEW BREAK THROUGH -  FUEL FROM PLASTIC WASTE


We believe it is a big achievement of our scientists to produce petroleum products from waste plastics," IIP spokesman S K Sharma said here today.
GAIL, which has sponsored the entire project, is also exploring the economic viability of the project in order to produce the petroleum products on mass-scale, scientists said.
"The unique features of the technology is that liquid fuel, gasoline and diesel, meets Euro III fuel specifications and different products can be obtained from the same raw material simply by changing the catalysts and operating parameters," Sanat Kumar, a member of the research team, said.
Moreover, the process is completely environmental friendly as no toxic substances are emitted, he said, adding that almost 100 per cent conversion is achieved and formation of the residue is dependent upon the quality of the raw material and can be as low as less than 0.5 per cent in case of clean raw material.
"The process is suitable for small as well as large scale industries," said Shrikant Nanoti, another scientist involved in the project.
The exploration of feasibility of the project 'Waste Plastics to Fuels and Petrochemicals' was started in 2002 and it took almost four years to establish that the conversion of waste plastics, the safe disposal of which has become a world-wide problem, into fuel is possible.
The process involves pyrolysis of waste plastics at high temperatures for breaking molecules and catalytic conversion followed by condensation to liquefy to get gasoline or diesel or aromatics.
According to an estimate, the world-wide consumption of plastic is over 300 million tonnes and is increasing at a rate of 10-12 per cent annually. Polyolefinic plastic like polyethylene and polypropylene, which is the main raw material for producing petrol and other products, accounts for 65 to 70 per cent of the total consumption.
From one kg raw polyolefinic plastic, 650-700 ml petrol along with LPG or 850 ml diesel along with LPG or 450-500 ml aromatics along with LPG could be produced.