The Y-chromosome is present only in men.(Google Photo)

Scientists at the Centre for Cellular and Molecular Biology (CCMB) here have demonstrated that junk DNA in human Y-chromosome control the function of a gene located in another chromosome, NewKerala wrote.
For long, the scientific community believed that 97 percent of DNA material is junk and has no specific role to play in the functioning of organs.
“The study, published in the international journal Genome Research, will open up a new approach to unravel the function of the non-coding DNA in our genome,“ CCMB Director Lalji Singh, who led the research effort, told reporters here today.
The Y-chromosome is present only in men. Two-thirds of it contains repetitive DNA that has been thought of as junk or useless.
However, the CCMB study clearly demonstrated that the Y-chromosomal junk DNA interacts and controls the function of a gene located in another chromosome that is not limited to a sex.
“The study shows unequivocal evidence, for the first time, that 40 mega base repeat block of the Y-chromosome, which was earlier perceived as junk DNA, is transcribed into RNA and controls the expression of a protein by a mechanism described as trans-splicing,“ Singh said.

Researchers agree that the spokes are made of dust grains that have become electrically charged and are pushed up out of the rings in long streamers by electrostatic repulsion. (NASA Photo)

The mysterious spokes in Saturn’s rings may be created by massive thunderstorms in the planet’s atmosphere, Nature.com wrote. If the theory is right, these faint features are the signature of awesome events: lightning strokes ten thousand times more energetic than those on Earth, releasing beams of electrons that surge up from Saturn’s surface to whack into the rings and blast out jets of electrically charged dust.
The idea, proposed by Geraint Jones of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Katlenburg-Lindau, Germany, and his colleagues in Geophysical Research Letters1, remains speculative. No one has ever seen storm-induced electron beams on Saturn. But the researchers say that the theory would explain some puzzling features of the spokes, and that it fits with what is known about the effects of thunderstorms on Earth.
The spokes of Saturn’s rings were first discovered by the Voyager I and II spacecraft when they passed close to the gas giant planet in 1980 and 1981. The spokes are “a very complex phenomenon, and a difficult thing to untangle“, says Carolyn Porco of the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado, who was the first person to work on these mysterious features back in the Voyager days.
The spokes appear as bright or dark streaks about 100 km wide and up to 20,000 km long that cross the rings, making them look as though they have been smeared by a giant finger. They are transient, building up over a period of a few hours and then disappearing again several hours later. And they aren’t always there at all: between 1998 and 2004, when NASA’s Cassini spacecraft reached the planet, there was no sign of any. Spokes reappeared in September 2005, when Cassini took snapshots of them.
Researchers agree that the spokes are made of dust grains that have become electrically charged and are pushed up out of the rings in long streamers by electrostatic repulsion. But they don’t know what causes the charging.

Charged Collision
One theory is that this happens when meteorites plough into the rings and whip up a cloud of charged plasma, which then charges up the rings’ dust particles. But this, says Jones, can’t explain why the spokes build up gradually--it’s implausible that several meteorites would strike the rings in the same place in close succession.
An alternative explanation is based on the way that thunderstorms on Earth can generate electron beams in the upper atmosphere. While regular lightning bolts travel between clouds and the ground below, high-energy particles streaming from space called cosmic rays can trigger electron discharges above the clouds. These electrons stream outwards into space along the field lines of the Earth’s magnetic field. This can produce flashes of gamma rays as well as glowing atmospheric features called sprites.
Thunderstorms are also known to happen within the thick atmosphere of Saturn, and Jones and colleagues say that these are likely to have the same effect--cosmic rays coming in towards Saturn should likewise form outgoing electron beams that could hit the rings, charging up dust grains.

A team of US scientists has discovered two new subatomic particles that are rare but important relatives of the proton and neutron, UPI said.
Team leader Petar Maksimovic, an assistant professor of physics at Johns Hopkins University, said the two exotic particles are members of what is called the ’baryonic’ family--so-called for the Greek word ’barys,’ which means heavy.
’Baryons are particles that contain three quarks, which are the fundamental building blocks of matter,’ he said.
The simplest baryons are the proton and neutron, which make up the nuclei of atoms of ordinary matter.
Containing the second-heaviest quark--called ’the bottom quark’--the new particles are the heaviest baryons found yet. Maksimovic said his team had to comb through 100 trillion proton-antiproton collisions at the Tevatron, the world`s most powerful particle accelerator, at Fermilab in Illinois, to find about 240 Sigma-sub-b candidates. The new particles are extremely short-lived, decaying within a tiny fraction of a second.
’Little by little, we are compiling an ever-clearer picture of how quarks build matter and how subatomic forces hold quarks together and tear them apart,’ said Maksimovic.

Cotton, for thousands of years one of the most important crops for clothing and shelter, might also become a source of food. A chemical called gossypol makes cottonseed inedible for humans, though some of it is used in feed for cattle, which are less affected by the toxin. Now, researchers at Texas A&M University have genetically modified cotton to produce seeds with little or no gossypol, PopularScidnce said.
It’s a step they say could help provide valuable protein to millions of people. Their findings are reported in Tuesday’s issue of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Keerti Rathore of the university’s Institute for Plant Genomics and Biotechnology, said the modified plants continue to have gossypol in their stems and leaves where it helps resist insects, but the chemical is significantly reduced in the seed.
Worldwide, 44 million tons of cottonseed is produced annually. It is grown in 80 countries and the seeds are 23 percent protein, Rathore said.
They are pressed for oil, and in the United States about half of the remaining meal goes into animal feed, he explained.
But, with the gossypol removed, the meal can be ground into flour and used in cooking, he said.
Rathore said he hasn’t tasted the cottonseed meal, but added that researchers who had bred a different gossypol-free cottonseed had, and reported that tasted good.
Unfortunately, he said, that earlier version removed gossypol from all parts of the plant, which was then attacked by a variety of insects.
Jodi Scheffler, a research geneticist at the Agriculture Department’s Agricultural Research Service center in Stoneville, Miss., said the development has potential.
“It definitely gives us new hope,“ said Scheffler, who was not part of Rathore’s research team.
“This is an age-old problem,“ she explained, the protein contained in cottonseed is good, but cannot be used by people or most animals because it contains this toxin.
The potential problems that have to be worked out, she said, are determining whether the genetic change is stable through generations, and overcoming regulatory and public acceptance problems that can face any genetically modified foods.
One of the reasons it is important is for regions such as West Africa, where many small farmers grow cotton as a cash crop and would like to be able to use the seed to feed themselves and their livestock, she added.
Rathore’s research was funded by the Texas Cotton Biotechnology Initiative, Cotton Inc., and the Texas Agricultural Experiment Station.

In an Austrian study, marathon runners had more atypical moles and other skin lesions suggestive of a risk for skin cancer than did a comparison group of age- and sex-matched controls, NewKerala reported.
Marathon running has become increasingly popular in recent years, according to background information in the article. While regular exercise is associated with improved health, some evidence suggests that endurance exercise--including marathon running--may be linked to skin cancer and other severe illnesses. During training and competition, marathon runners are exposed to high levels of ultraviolet (UV) radiation, the most important environmental risk factor for the skin cancer melanoma. Endurance exercise also may suppress the immune system and increase the risk for malignant melanoma.
Christina M. Ambros-Rudolph, M.D., and colleagues at the Medical University of Graz, Austria, evaluated 210 marathon runners, 166 men and 44 women age 19 to 71 years, for skin cancer risk factors. The runners were recruited at a local marathon and asked questions about their training, including weekly intensity, what type of clothing they typically wore and whether or not they used sunscreen. A group of 210 controls, matched to the runners by age and sex, were recruited at a skin cancer screening campaign. All participants underwent a skin cancer examination and completed a comprehensive questionnaire about personal and family history of skin cancer, changes in skin lesions, sun sensitivity, sunburn frequency and physical characteristics such as skin and eye color.
Controls exhibited higher sun sensitivity than marathon runners, reflected by a larger number of individuals with blue, green or gray eyes and more sensitive skin types. However, the marathon runners had more atypical nevi (moles) and more solar lentigines (small, flat pigmented lesions, sometimes referred to as “liver spots“), higher numbers of which indicate a greater risk for malignant melanoma. These features were more pronounced in those with more intense training regimens. Twenty-four individuals in the marathon running group and 14 in the control group were referred to dermatologists for skin lesions suggestive of non-melanoma skin cancer. Among the marathon group, there was a higher referral rate among those with the highest training intensity.
Seventy-eight (37.1 percent) of the runners ran up to 40 kilometers (about 25 miles) per week, while 101 (48.1 percent) ran 40 to 70 kilometers (25 to 44 miles) per week and 31 (14.8 percent) logged more than 70 kilometers weekly.
These sun-exposure risk factors, in addition to possible weakening of the immune system caused by extreme training, may increase athletes’ skin cancer risk. “In short, until further sport-physiologic studies elucidate in detail the potential association between exercise-induced immunosuppression and malignant melanoma, runners should be alerted to the crucial role of UV radiation in the development of malignant melanoma and non-melanoma skin cancer,“ the authors conclude.

For the first time, a team of US scientists recorded what happens before, during and after an underwater volcanic eruption, Google said.
Because of the scientific equipment in place, researchers were able to record geological, biological and geophysical information of the eruption, said Mike Perfit, a professor of geology at the University of Florida. “We have seen ... eruptions before, but we had never been there to monitor them like this,“ Perfit said in a news release.
“We’ll be lucky if we catch another event like this in my lifetime.“
The Pacific Ocean eruption occurred earlier this year about 400 miles west of Mexico along a volcanic mountain range called East Pacific Rise. Two-thirds of the Earth’s surface was formed at mid-ocean ridges but the formation processes were “poorly understood because they occur far beneath the ocean surface“ until now, researchers said in their report.