Sequencing Neandertal genome in two years

I am sure the 454 Life Sciences people are smart enough to invent the high-throughput DNA sequencing technology. More impressively, they are going to sequence the entire genome of Neanderthal in two years using this 454 sequencing. How cool it is to use new techniques to solve historic puzzles!

Ants dancing in the air

Researchers at Berkeley published on PNAS the fastest action in the animal kindom: ants snaps shut its teeth at an amazing speed of 64 meters per second! (See report on New Scientist). In stead of bitting, the super-fast snap can be also used to catapult the ants themselves to safety. See the two movies in the article---nothing can be more fun than the slow motion of flying ants!

Solution found for carbon dioxide emission?

We have heard many crazy ideas to abide Kyoto Protocol, a set of CO₂ emission caps for different countries. One way is to find storages for the CO₂ we are producing. Say, underground old mines have been proposed, but a big earthquake could release the CO₂ in days and cause an environmental disaster. Researchers from Harvard, MIT, and Columbia brought up a very good idea: injecting CO₂ into deep-sea sediments (see their PNAS paper "Permanent carbon dioxide storage in deep-sea sediments"): “At the high pressures and low temperatures common in deep-sea sediments, CO₂ resides in its liquid phase and can be denser than the overlying pore fluid, causing the injected CO₂ to be gravitationally stable.” How much can we store? “The total CO₂ storage capacity within the 200-mile economic zone of the U.S. coastline is enormous, capable of storing thousands of years of current U.S. CO₂ emissions.” Besides, the gas will stay there forever unless an asteroids hit us.

Having too much time? Try Stardust@Home.

Have you ever worked on image pattern recognition? Forget about it. One of the most ambitious space exploring projects, Stardust, prefers people’s eyeballs then computers to find tiny interstellar dusts captured in an aerogel collector returned from deep space. NASA’s Stardust group digitally scanned the entire aerogel with microscopes. Volunteers of Stardust@Home can view the huge image database to find the small particles. The reward is: the dusts will be named after the founders. Even more, the finder of the first dust will be a co-author of their paper. Gosh, that could be a Nature or Science paper. I can envision a big group of grad students give up their research and staring at monitors. There might be a temporary drought in academic activities. Ok, bye now. I’ll login Stardust@Home to look for my joechao#1 dust.

(Ps. See related reports at space.com and New Scientist.)