I'm Gina Smith

Salamander-inspired therapy helps cure injured vets (CNN)

This is a weird and interesting science story. Click here.

More on the Large Hadron Collider. Yikes!

More on the CERN collider that some physicists say will destroy the world ... from today's LA Times. You think they'll ever release the exact date they've set to turn on this thing? Definitely something to calendar.

GENEVA -- Michelangelo L. Mangano, a respected particle physicist who helped discover the top quark in 1995, now spends most days trying to convince people that his new machine won't destroy the world.

"If it were just crackpots, we could wave them away," the physicist said in an interview at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known by its French acronym, CERN. "But some are real physicists."

What the critics are in such a lather about is the $8-billion Large Hadron Collider, a massive assemblage of iron, steel and superconducting wire 300 feet underground in a 17-mile-long circular tunnel on the Franco-Swiss border.

The most complex piece of scientific equipment ever built, the collider will send particles crashing into each other at just a wink shy of the speed of light, generating energies more powerful than the sun.

Scientists like Mangano believe that this instrument, when it begins operating as early as this summer, will peer into a looking-glass world that could contain entrances to extra dimensions and super-massive partners of the familiar particles that make up our world. One creature that must be hiding there, the scientists say, is the Higgs particle, one of the most exotic undiscovered objects since the yeti.

Critics think the collider could also spawn a black hole that will swallow Earth.

That could be just an appetizer. Once the collider got going, according to the doomsday scenario, it could gobble up distant stars like a child popping Skittles.

Mangano, who is part of the CERN group studying the safety of the collider, doesn't deny the scant possibility that the collider could yield a mini-black hole.

By smashing protons and lead ions together at energies reaching 14 trillion electron volts, the Large Hadron Collider will dwarf the world's other atom-smashers, including the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory's mighty Tevatron in Batavia, Ill.

But that energy, Mangano hastened to add, would be concentrated in a space thinner than a human hair. Any black hole would be so tiny that it wouldn't be able to get its teeth around a bit of local chevre cheese, let alone the world.

Still, if a black hole were produced at all, "that would be an extremely spectacular result," he said, a half-smile creeping across his face.

Particle physics

Deep in a dim cavern, UCLA physicist Bob Cousins scrambled onto a catwalk straddling the six-story detector known as the Compact Muon Solenoid, then darted up two flights of stairs to another catwalk, where the guts of the machine materialized out of the half-light.

It looked a little like the inside of a computer suffering from a severe case of gigantism. Plates, shields and pipes jutted everywhere. Thick knots of cable extended from the side like mounds of heavy rope on an 18th century whaling ship.

"This detector was assembled at the surface and lowered in 15 pieces," Cousins said, pointing to a wide opening above the detector that reached to the European sky high above.

The heaviest piece weighed 4 million pounds. It took 10 hours to lower the middle section. At the center of this section is a bulbous extension that makes the behemoth look like the world's biggest television picture tube. This single piece of the collider contains more iron than the Eiffel Tower.

It was all built to probe a beam of particles thinner than a blade of grass.

Decades ago, scientists figured out that atomic nuclei were made up of smaller things than protons and neutrons.

To find those pieces, 20th century physicists came up with an idea that would appeal to most 9-year-old boys with a new toy: "Let's smash it and see what happens."

Early colliders, like the 9-inch cyclotron created at UC Berkeley in 1931, sent particles down a circular drag strip and crashed them into a target to see what flew out.

Will a new particle accelerator destroy the world? (New York Times)

You couldn't pay me to make this stuff up. Abstract from the New York Times today below, full article at this link.

More fighting in Iraq. Somalia in chaos. People in this country can’t afford their mortgages and in some places now they can’t even afford rice.

None of this nor the rest of the grimness on the front page today will matter a bit, though, if two men pursuing a lawsuit in federal court in Hawaii turn out to be right. They think a giant particle accelerator that will begin smashing protons together outside Geneva this summer might produce a black hole or something else that will spell the end of the Earth — and maybe the universe.

Scientists say that is very unlikely — though they have done some checking just to make sure.

The world’s physicists have spent 14 years and $8 billion building the Large Hadron Collider, in which the colliding protons will recreate energies and conditions last seen a trillionth of a second after the Big Bang. Researchers will sift the debris from these primordial recreations for clues to the nature of mass and new forces and symmetries of nature.

Attention amateur telescope owners!

Mark next Tuesday at 12:33 PST on your calendar for this one. And grab a telescope. I love this stuff.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A small asteroid will travel relatively near to Earth next week, giving astronomers a rare opportunity for a close-up look.

Asteroid 2007 TU24 was first seen in October and is on a trajectory to pass Earth outside the Moon's orbit at a distance of 334,000 miles on Tuesday at 3:33 a.m.

NASA said it will not be visible to the naked eye but amateur astronomers with modest-sized telescopes should be able to spot it.

NASA said the asteroid is anywhere between 500 feet and 2,000 feet long, and there is no chance it could hit the planet.

Astronomers at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico will be taking as close a look as they can as the building-sized object hurtles past.

"We don't yet know anything about this asteroid," Mike Nolan, head of radar astronomy at the Puerto Rico observatory, said in a statement.

He said such objects frequently pass near Earth, perhaps one every five years or so, but such advance notice is rare.

TU24 is one of an estimated 7,000 so-called near-Earth objects.

"We have good images of a couple dozen objects like this, and for about one in 10, we see something we've never seen before," said Nolan. "We really haven't sampled the population enough to know what's out there."

You come from dust, black hole dust. Now you know. (AP Science)

This AP Science story ran in today's Chronicle today. Astronomers said they knew planets and everything and everyone came from dust -- star dust -- and now they say that star dust came from black holes. Damn, I love astronomy. Excerpt below.

Astronomers have taken a baby step in trying to answer the cosmic question of where we come from.

Planets and much on them, including humans, come from dust — mostly from dying stars. But where did the dust that helped form those early stars come from?

A NASA telescope may have spotted one of the answers. It's in the wind bursting out of super-massive black holes.

The Spitzer Space Telescope identified large quantities of freshly made space dust in a quasar about 8 billion light years from here.

Astronomers used the telescope to break down the wavelengths of light in the quasar to figure out what was in the space dust. They found signs of glass, sand, crystal, marble, rubies and sapphires, said Ciska Markwick-Kemper of the University of Manchester in England. She is the lead author of a study that will be published later this month in Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Dust is important in the cooling process to make stars, which are predominantly gas. The leftover dust tends to clump together to make planets, comets and asteroids, said astronomer Sarah Gallagher, a study co-author at the University of California Los Angeles.

"In the end, everything comes from space dust," Markwick-Kemper said. "It's putting all the pieces of the puzzle together to figure out where we came from."

Astronomers figure that the planets that formed in the past several billion years — and those away from quasars — came from dust that was belched from dying stars. That's what happened with Earth.

That still leaves a question about where the dust from the first couple billion years of the universe came from, which helped form early generations of star systems.

"It's formed in the wind," of the black holes, Markwick-Kemper said. Gas molecules collide in the searing heat of the quasar, which is thousands of degrees Fahrenheit, and form clusters.

"These clusters grow bigger and bigger until you can call them dust grains," she said.

Scientists who weren't part of the study hailed the work.

Cornell University astronomer Dan Weedman, the former director of NASA's astrophysics division, said the study was an important step in answering a fundamental mystery of the early universe.

Throw out the Prozac. (Reuters)

And get moving! A feel-good story from Reuters today, excerpted below.

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Regular exercise may work as well as medication in improving symptoms of major depression, researchers have found.

In a study of 202 depressed adults, investigators found that those who went through group-based exercise therapy did as well as those treated with an antidepressant drug. A third group that performed home-based exercise also improved, though to a lesser degree.

Importantly, the researchers found, all three groups did better than a fourth group given a placebo -- an inactive pill identical to the antidepressant.

While past studies have suggested that exercise can ease depression symptoms, a criticism has been that the research failed to compare exercise with a placebo. This leaves a question as to whether the therapy, per se, was responsible for the benefit.

The new findings bolster evidence that exercise does have a real effect on depression, according to the researchers.

Doctors may not start widely prescribing exercise as a depression treatment just yet. But for patients who are motivated to try exercise, it could be a reasonable option, the study authors say.

"If exercise were a drug, I'm not sure that it would receive FDA approval at this time," noted study author Dr. James A. Blumenthal, a professor of medical psychology at Duke University Medical Center in Durham, North Carolina.

"But," he told Reuters Health, "there is certainly growing evidence that exercise may be a viable alternative to medication, at least among those patients who are receptive to exercise as a potential treatment for their depression."

DNA research traces Phoenician past in Middle East. (Reuters)

I love this story. DNA research is blurring religious boundaries in Lebanon and elsewhere in the Middle East. Story excerpted below.

BYBLOS, Lebanon (Reuters) - A Lebanese scientist following the genetic footprint of the ancient Phoenicians says he has traced their modern-day descendants, but stumbled into an old controversy about identity in his country.

Geneticist Pierre Zalloua has charted the spread of the Phoenicians out of the eastern Mediterranean by identifying an ancient type of DNA which some Lebanese, Syrians and Palestinians share with Maltese, Spaniards and Tunisians.

A seafaring civilization which reached its zenith between 1200 and 800 BC, the Phoenicians' earliest cities included Byblos, Tyre and Sidon on Lebanon's coast.

But their link to Lebanon, whose borders were drawn as recently as 1920, has long been a subject of controversy in a country split between an array of religious communities. "Negotiating these waters is a very delicate job," Zalloua said.

Seeking to set themselves apart from their Muslim compatriots, some Lebanese Christians have drawn on the Phoenician past to try to forge an identity separate from the prevailing Arab culture.

"Whenever I use the word 'Phoenician', people say 'this guy is trying to say we are not Arabs'," said Zalloua, himself a Christian. But after five years of research, the scientist says his work has shown what Lebanese have in common. "We had a great history -- let's look at it," he said.

The genetic marker which identifies descendants of the ancient Levantines is found among members of all of Lebanon's religious communities, he said. "It's a story that can actually unite Lebanon much more than anything else."

The marker, known as the J2 haplogroup, was found in an unusually high proportion among Lebanese, Palestinians and Syrians tested by Zalloua during more than five years of research. He tested 1,000 people in the region.

The world's oldest human footprint! (reuters)

CAIRO (Reuters) - Egyptian archaeologists have found what they said could be the oldest human footprint in history in the country's western desert, the Arab country's antiquities' chief said on Monday.

"This could go back about two million years," said Zahi Hawass, the secretary general of the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities. "It could be the most important discovery in Egypt," he told Reuters.

Archaeologists found the footprint, imprinted on mud and then hardened into rock, while exploring a prehistoric site in Siwa, a desert oasis.

Scientists are using carbon tests on plants found in the rock to determine its exact age, Hawass said.

Khaled Saad, the director of prehistory at the council, said that based on the age of the rock where the footprint was found, it could date back even further than the renowned 3-million year-old fossil Lucy, the partial skeleton of an ape-man, found in Ethiopia in 1974.

Most archaeological interest in Egypt is focused on the time of the pharaohs.

Previously, the earliest human archaeological evidence from Egypt dated back around 200,000 years, Saad said.

Ken Wilber's got a blog.

If you know his books or philosophy, you might not be surprised that Wilber has a blog.

Scientists discover a protein link between Alzheimers and blindness.

Interesting article about an Alzheimers-blindness link. I suspect that as scientists continue to unravel proteomics and genomics, we will find many such links. I recently read about a link between thyroid diseases and ovarian cancer. Finding a protein attached to a particular disease or diseases is exciting because it potentially allows drug companies to come up with a medication that interferes with that protein.

At any rate, an excerpt of the story is below.

LONDON (Reuters) - A protein that damages tissue in the brains of Alzheimer's patients is also the main cause of blindness worldwide, British researchers said in a new finding that may lead to better treatment for both diseases.

In a study published in the U.S. journal, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, on Monday the scientists said the same protein, beta-amyloid, which plays a key role in the brain-wasting illness also causes nerve cell damage in the eye from blindness-inducing glaucoma.

Recent studies have suggested connections between Alzheimer's and glaucoma and the new finding bolsters that evidence, said Francesca Cordeiro, a glaucoma specialist at London's University College and leader of the study.

"This is the first time anybody has provided evidence that the same protein in Alzheimer's causes retinal nerve cell loss," she said in a telephone interview.

Scientists do not know what causes glaucoma which affects some 65 million people worldwide.

Most treatments seek to lower the build-up in pressure from fluids in the eye, but the treatment does not work for as many as 30 percent of glaucoma patients, Cordeiro said.

She hoped the study of laboratory rats would lead to an alternative treatment for humans one day.

After the team identified the protein link between the two diseases, they administered a combination of experimental Alzheimer's drugs to laboratory rats, Cordeiro said.