Spring colors on the southern polar cap on Mars.

Anyone connected by Internet can now see planet Mars better than at any time in history, through the eye of HiRISE, the most powerful camera ever to orbit another planet.
According to Science Daily, a University of Arizona-based team that runs the High Resolution Imaging Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has just released more than 1,200 Mars images to the Planetary Data System, the U.S. space agency’s mission data archive.
Not only has the team released 1.7 Terabytes of HiRISE data--the largest single dataset ever delivered to NASA’s space mission data library--but also a user-friendly way for the public to easily see HiRISE images.
Thanks to tools available on HiRISE’s new Webpage at http://hirise.lpl.arizona.edu, any Internet user can quickly pull up and explore the same remarkable images that both thrill and confound scientists.
“These images must contain hundreds of important discoveries about Mars,“ HiRISE Principal Investigator Alfred McEwen of UA’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory said. “We just need time to realize what they are.“
The HiRISE camera takes images of 3.5-mile-wide (6 km) swaths as the orbiter flies at about 7,800 mph between 155 and 196 miles (250 to 316 km) above Mars’ surface. For at least the next 18 months, HiRISE will collect thousands of color, black-and-white and stereo images of the Martian surface, resolving features as small as 40 inches across, covering about one percent of the planet.
The team based at UA’s HiRISE Operations Center (HiROC) began releasing selected images on the Internet when science operations began in November 2006. Team members began reprocessing all the images taken up to March 25, 2007, using improved calibration, or image correction techniques, in April.
HiRISE communications team member Yisrael Espinoza said he designed the new HiRISE Website to be image-driven. Visitors can take a quick look at an image, or see a larger browse version, or the full-resolution version according to how interested they are in a particular picture. The full-resolution version will launch the IAS Viewer once users have downloaded the free software onto their computers.
The Planetary Data System (PDS) is also online at http://pds.jpl.nasa.gov, used by scientists, students, textbook writers and a growing number of others who follow the latest planetary discoveries.

In a dramatic case of microbial sleuthing, US scientists said they have discovered a new, potentially deadly strain of bacteria previously unknown to medicine.
AFP says the bacteria was found in a 43-year-old American woman who had traveled across Peru for three weeks and suffered from symptoms similar to typhoid fever or malaria. The woman has since recovered.
Named Bartonella rochalimae, the new species is a close relative of a microbe that sickened thousands of soldiers during the First World War with what became known as trench fever, spread through body lice.
It is also related to a bacteria identified 10 years ago during the AIDS epidemic in San Francisco as the cause of cat scratch disease, which infects 25,000 people a year in the United States.
It was this previous work on cat scratch disease related to AIDS that helped experts at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention isolate the new bacteria found in the female traveler.
The findings are published in the New England Journal of Medicine.
The new discovery is the sixth species identified that can infect humans, said Dr. Jane Koehler, professor of infectious diseases at UCSF and senior author of the paper.
In 1987, Koehler encountered her first patient infected with Bartonella at the AIDS Clinic at San Francisco General Hospital.
In 1997, her team discovered that the Bartonella henselae bacterium causes cat scratch disease. Symptoms include swollen lymph nodes and fever after a person is scratched by a cat.
The new bacterium is treated with a different antibiotic that those used for cat scratch disease.

Yoga develops flexibility and muscular endurance by allowing the muscles to be stretched and strengthened.

The potential for yoga to be used to treat low back pain is being investigated by researchers.
Millions of people suffer from chronic low back pain, and existing treatments have only a limited effect.
A team of academics, yoga teachers and practitioners have joined forces to find out if a 12-week course of yoga can make a difference.
According to BBC, the Arthritis Research Campaign-backed project will assess moves from the two most popular types of yoga, lyengar yoga and hatha yoga.
More than 260 people between the ages of 18 and 65 who have had back pain in the past 18 months will be recruited for the trial.
Recent, small studies in the US have shown that yoga can be helpful for back pain sufferers.
But David Torgerson, director of the University of York Clinical trials Unit, and Jennifer Klaber Moffett, deputy director of the Institute of Rehabilitation at the University of Hull, believe a bigger study is needed to unequivocally establish the benefits.
Professor Torgerson said: “Yoga offers a combination of physical exercise with mental focus that may make it a suitable therapy for the treatment of low back pain.
“If the trial shows yoga to be effective then this low-cost treatment will have a considerable impact in the quality of life of patients with back pain.“
Half the participants will take part in yoga classes, and the other half will receive the usual care.
They will be assessed at the end of the classes, then six months and a year later to see if there are any longer-term benefits.
The yoga classes will be carefully structured for people who are complete novices and will not involve any difficult poses.
They will be graduated over the 12-week period, starting off gently and becoming more demanding, with a combination of stretches, bends, lying sitting, standing and relaxing poses.

A team of Canadian surgeons got a shock when the patient they were operating on began shedding dark greenish-black blood, the Lancet reports.
The man emulated Star Trek’s Mr Spock--the Enterprise’s science officer who supposedly had green Vulcan blood.
In this case, the unusual colour of the 42-year-old’s blood was down to the migraine medication he was taking.
The man’s leg surgery went ahead successfully and his blood returned to normal once he had eased off the drug, BBC reported.
The patient had been taking large doses of sumatriptan--200 milligrams a day.
This had caused a rare condition called sulfhaemoglobinaemia, where sulphur is incorporated into the oxygen-carrying compound haemoglobin in red blood cells.
Describing the case in the Lancet, the doctors, led by Dr Alana Flexman from St Paul’s Hospital, Vancouver, wrote: “The patient recovered uneventfully, and stopped taking sumatriptan after discharge.
“When seen five weeks after his last dose, he was found to have no sulfhaemoglobin in his blood.“
The man had needed urgent surgery because he had developed a dangerous condition in his legs after falling asleep in a sitting position.
The surgeons performed urgent fasciotomies--limb-saving procedures which involve making surgical incisions to relieve pressure and swelling caused by the man’s condition, known as compartment syndrome.
In compartment syndrome, the swelling and pressure in a restricted space limits blood flow and causes localised tissue and nerve damage.
It is commonly caused by trauma, internal bleeding or a wound dressing or cast being too tight.

Cannabis can reduce allergic skin reactions, a new study suggests. The findings may lead to new drugs based on tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the active ingredient in the plant, to treat allergy and autoimmune disorders.
Andreas Zimmer at the University of Bonn in Germany, and colleagues created a group of mice that lack the receptor for endocannabinoids--forms of THC produced naturally in the body. The team noticed that the mice soon developed a severe skin allergy to the nickel in the metal tags the researchers had fastened to their ears, NewScientist.com reported.
Zimmer set up a series of experiments to test the anti-allergy effect of natural and synthetic THC compounds.
Endocannabinoids may be produced by the body to dampen the immune response and so prevent allergic reactions, Zimmer believes.
He found that skin cells exposed to synthetic THC release fewer cytokines, chemicals that attract immune cells to the site of infection or irritation.
Ramesh Ganju at the Harvard Cancer Center in Boston, Massachusetts, US, believes that a study he published in 2006 could also help explain what the European researchers found.
He revealed that dunking T cells--immune cells that flag foreign particles in the body and trigger allergy--into a solution containing synthetic THC caused them to become up to 70% less attracted to cytokine signals.
Ganju says that Zimmer’s findings provide further evidence that endocannabinoids “probably have a role in autoimmune diseases“.
Zimmer agrees, suggesting that people with inflammatory conditions such as asthma and eczema might not produce enough endocannabinoids or related cell receptors. He adds that one day therapies based on THC-like compounds might be used to treat such disorders.

Scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), along with colleagues at George Mason University and Kwangwoon University in Korea, have fabricated a memory device that combines silicon nanowires with a more traditional type of data-storage. Their hybrid structure may be more reliable than other nanowire-based memory devices recently built and more easily integrated into commercial applications.
As reported in a recent paper, the device is a type of “non-volatile“ memory, meaning stored information is not lost when the device is without power, UPI says.
So-called “flash“ memory (used in digital camera memory cards, USB memory sticks, etc.) is a well-known example of electronic non-volatile memory. In this new device, nanowires are integrated with a higher-end type of non-volatile memory that is similar to flash, a layered structure known as semiconductor-oxide-nitride-oxide-semiconductor (SONOS) technology. The nanowires are positioned using a hands-off self-alignment technique, which could allow the production cost--and therefore the overall cost--of large-scale viable devices to be lower than flash memory cards, which require more complicated fabrication methods.
The researchers grew the nanowires onto a layered oxide-nitride-oxide substrate. Applying a positive voltage across the wires causes electrons in the wires to tunnel down into the substrate, charging it. A negative voltage causes the electrons to tunnel back up into the wires. This process is the key to the device’s memory function: when fully charged, each nanowire device stores a single bit of information, either a “0“ or a “1“ depending on the position of the electrons. When no voltage is present, the stored information can be read.
The device combines the excellent electronic properties of nanowires with established technology, and thus has several characteristics that make it very promising for applications in non-volatile memory. For example, it has simple read, write, and erase capabilities. It boasts a large memory window--the voltage range over which it stores information--which indicates good memory retention and a high resistance to disturbances from outside voltages. The device also has a large on/off current ratio, a property that allows the circuit to clearly distinguish between the “0“ and “1“ states.
Two advantages the NIST design may hold over alternative proposals for nanowire-based memory devices, the researchers say, are better stability at higher temperatures and easier integration into existing chip fabrication technology.

Beware of making bets with a monkey. A study has shown that macaques, just like humans, know how to play the odds. Neurons in one part of the brain appear to have an important role in this process; they integrate what a macaque has seen to help its brain make a decision, researchers report.
When they make decisions, few animals have a firm idea what the consequences will be. Still, there are all kinds of predictors of what might happen after a choice is made--deliberately step on a banana peel, bust your bum. Somehow, the brain integrates these clues, but how it reaches a conclusion is far from clear. Based on recent studies, some scientists had speculated that neurons in the brain region called the lateral intraparietal area can add and subtract information to estimate the chances of various outcomes, Sciencenow.org reports.
Hoping for their own positive outcome, neuroscientists Michael Shadlen and Tianming Yang of the University of Washington, Seattle, spent several months training two macaques to perform a complex task. In each session, they showed the monkeys a sequence of four shapes (out of a possible 10) on a screen. The monkeys then had to choose either a red target or a green target; if they picked the “right“ one, they increased the odds they would receive a small drink reward. It wasn’t entirely a game of skill, however. Whether red or green was the winning color was determined by the shapes that preceded them in a probabilistic manner; for instance, a diamond shape meant a higher chance that green would be rewarded, whereas a semicircle meant that red was a better bet. Both monkeys picked the color most likely to be rewarded, based on the “evidence“ they had seen, 75% of the time, the researchers report online 3 June in Nature.
The team also recorded the activity of 64 neurons in the lateral intraparietal area and found that neurons reacted to the first shape and then adjusted their firing rates after each of the next three shapes were shown; in other words, the animals were combining new clues with existing evidence to estimate the probability of a sugary treat.
The study is the first to convincingly demonstrate that the lateral intraparietal area is involved with calculating evidence, says neuroscientist Anna Ipata of Columbia University. And it is a clear demonstration that monkeys, like humans, can make rational decisions based on accumulation of evidence, she says.

The signal that causes plants to flower, or “florigen,“ has been identified by researchers at UC Davis, the University of Arizona, Tucson, and collaborators in New Zealand and Mexico.
“This is the Holy Grail of plant biology,“ said William J. Lucas, professor of plant biology at UC Davis and senior author on the paper published in the May issue of the journal Plant Cell.
Working with pumpkins and squash, Ming-Kuem Lin, a visiting postdoctoral researcher in Lucas’ lab and colleagues showed that a protein, FT, is transported through the phloem sap from the body of the plant to the growing tips to trigger flowering.
Many plants, including important crops such as rice, maize and wheat, flower in response to lengthening days in the spring or shortening days in fall. Researchers thought that florigen is made in the leaves as the length of the day changes and it is transported to the meristems, or growing tips of the plant, through the phloem network, which actively transports water, sugars and other molecules from the center of the plant to the periphery.
Lucas’ research group works with common pumpkins (Cucurbita maxima), because of the large amount of sap they produce. But pumpkins do not flower in response to day length. So the team searched more than a hundred strains of related plants to find a wild squash, Cucurbita moschata, which flowers only in short days.
The experiments provide absolute, direct evidence that the FT protein moving through the phloem is the florigen, Lucas told PhysOrg.com.
In addition to opening up new ways to understand how plants regulate themselves, the findings could eventually have widespread applications in agriculture, Lucas said.