NASA’s haunting Jack-O-Lantern sun

NASA’s haunting Jack-O-Lantern sun

 

Happy early Halloween.
NASA released an image of the sun this weekend looking more like a pumpkin than a star. The image, produced by NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio, combines pictures of the sun in two different wavelengths of light (171 and 193 angstroms) that are typically colored gold and yellow. The resulting composite photo creates something that looks like the face of a Jack-O-Lantern.
The process is explained here.

The brighter spots in the image are the “active regions,” which “emit more light and energy,” according to NASA. They’re “markers of an intense and complex set of magnetic fields hovering in the sun’s atmosphere, the corona.”

That’s one really creepy sun.

Diabetes research: good news for caffeine addicts?

PARIS: People who boosted their coffee intake by "moderate to large" doses in a US-based study had a lower risk for adult-onset diabetes than those with stable consumption, researchers said Friday.

An analysis of studies that tracked the diet and lifestyles of more than 120,000 health sector workers, showed that those who increased their daily caffeine dose by about 1.5 cups a day over a four-year period had an 11-percent lower chance in the subsequent four years of developing type 2 diabetes, the team found.

This was in comparison to those whose intake remained constant.

"Furthermore, those who had moderate to large decreases in intake (about two cups a day) had an 18 percent higher risk," a research team in Diabetologia, the journal of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes.

"Changes in coffee consumption habit appear to affect diabetes risk in a relatively short amount of time," concluded the team led by Shilpa Bhupathiraju of the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston.

Those with the highest coffee consumption, three cups or more per day, had the lowest risk of type 2 diabetes -- 37 percent lower than those who consumed a cup or less per day, said the paper, backing other studies that linked coffee to lower diabetes risk.

The findings were based on monitoring more than 95,000 women enrolled in two nurses´ health studies in the United States, and nearly 28,000 male participants in a separate health professionals´ study.

It measured their consumption patterns for four years, and then looked at subsequent diagnoses of type 2 diabetes.

The outcome may reflect a "true change in risk", but may also be explained by people cutting out coffee after being diagnosed with conditions like high blood pressure or elevated cholesterol associated with risk for type 2 diabetes, said the study authors.

Experts who analysed the new research for the Science Media Centre, said the team had merely evaluated potential short-term benefits and provided no evidence that long-term coffee intake lowered diabetes risk.

The research measured changes in consumption rather than absolute intake, said the analysts.

"No recommendations for coffee intake can be derived from this paper," said a summary, adding the statistical analysis of the data was "potentially misleading".

The researchers had found that neither changes in consumption of tea, nor of decaffeinated coffee, was associated with risk of type 2 diabetes -- a high blood sugar disease often linked to obesity. (AFP)

Japan lab says stem cell research falsified

 

AP RIKEN research institute president Ryoji Noyori, second from right, checks papers before he answers a reporter's question during a press conference in Tokyo on March 14, 2014.

A Japanese government-funded laboratory said on Tuesday it found that data in a widely heralded stem cell research paper was falsified, holding the lead researcher responsible for the fabrication.

The research results from the Riken Centre for Development Biology in Kobe, western Japan, were seen as a possible groundbreaking method for growing tissue to treat illnesses such as diabetes and Parkinson’s disease using a simple lab procedure.

Scientists at the institute said significant discrepancies in research published in January in scientific journal Nature stemmed from falsified data. They said researcher Haruko Obokata, the lead author of the paper in Nature, had manipulated or falsified images of DNA fragments used in the research.

“The manipulation was used to improve the appearance of the results,” said Shunsuke Ishii, the head of the committee set up to investigate allegations the research was fraudulent.

The scientists said three other co-authors of the papers had not falsified the data but were still “gravely responsible” for failing to fully verify the research findings. The discrepancies in the data showed up as anomalous lines in an image of DNA fragments.

Researchers in Boston and Japan conducted the experiments in using a simple procedure to turn ordinary cells from mice into stem cells by exposing cells from spleens of newborn mice to a more acidic environment than they are used to.

The researchers said cells from other tissue of newborn mice appeared to go through the same change, which could be triggered by exposing cells to any of a variety of stressful situations.

Scientists hope to harness stem cells to replace defective tissue in a wide variety of diseases. Making stem cells from a patient would eliminate the risk of transplant rejection.

The panel would not comment on whether the modified cells, dubbed STAP cells, exist. STAP is short for stimulus-triggered acquisition of pluripotency cells.

“That was not my mission,” Mr. Ishii said.