Using the Spitzer Space Telescope, astronomers detect signs of water on a "hot Jupiter."

A scorching-hot gas planet beyond our solar system is steaming up with water vapor, according to new observations from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope.
The planet, called HD 189733b, swelters as it zips closely around its star every two days or so. Astronomers had predicted that planets of this class, termed “hot Jupiters,“ would contain water vapor in their atmospheres. Yet finding solid evidence for this has been slippery. These latest data are the most convincing yet that hot Jupiters are “wet.“
“We’re thrilled to have identified clear signs of water on a planet that is trillions of miles away,“ says Giovanna Tinetti, a European Space Agency fellow at the Institute d’Astrophysique de Paris in France. Tinetti is lead author of a paper on HD 189733b appearing today in Nature, Astronomy.com said.
Although water is an essential ingredient to life as we know it, wet hot Jupiters are not likely to harbor any creatures. Previous measurements from Spitzer indicate that HD 189733b is a fiery 1,000 Kelvin (1,340 degrees Fahrenheit) on average. Ultimately, astronomers hope to use instruments like those on Spitzer to find water on rocky, habitable planets like Earth.
“Finding water on this planet implies that other planets in the universe, possibly even rocky ones, could also have water,“ says co-author Sean Carey of NASA’s Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. “I’m excited to tell my nephews and niece about the discovery.“
The new findings are part of a brand new field of science investigating the climate on exoplanets, or planets outside our solar system. Such faraway planets cannot be seen directly; however, in the past few years, astronomers have begun to glean information about their atmospheres by observing a subset of hot Jupiters that transit, or pass in front of, their stars as seen from Earth.
Earlier this year, Spitzer became the first telescope to analyze, or break apart, the light from two transiting hot Jupiters, HD 189733b and HD 209458b. One of its instruments, called a spectrometer, observed the planets as they dipped behind their stars in what is called the secondary eclipse. This led to the first-ever “fingerprint,“ or spectrum, of an exoplanet’s light. Yet, the results came up “dry,“ probably because the structure of these planets’ atmospheres makes finding water with this method difficult.
Later, a team of astronomers found hints of water in HD 209458b by analyzing visible-light data taken by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. The Hubble data were captured as the planet crossed in front of the star, an event called the primary eclipse.
Now, Tinetti and her team have captured the best evidence yet for wet, hot Jupiters by watching HD 189733b’s primary eclipse in infrared light with Spitzer. In this method, changes in infrared light from the star are measured as the planet slips by, filtering starlight through its outer atmosphere. The astronomers observed the eclipse with Spitzer’s infrared array camera at three different infrared wavelengths and noticed that for each wavelength a different amount of light was absorbed by the planet. The pattern by which this absorption varies with wavelength matches that created by water.

Has it come to this? Robots standing in for doctors at the hospital patients’ bedside?
Not exactly, but some doctors have found a way to use a videoconferencing robot to check on patients while they’re miles from the hospital.
One is at Baltimore’s Sinai Hospital. Outfitted with cameras, a screen and microphone, the joystick-controlled robot is guided into the rooms of Dr. Alex Gandsas’ patients where he speaks to them as if he were right there, AP reported.
“The system allows you to be anywhere in the hospital from anywhere in the world,“ said the surgeon, who specializes in weight-loss surgery.
Besides his normal morning and afternoon in-person rounds, Gandsas uses the $150,000 robot to visit patients at night or when problems arise. The robot can circle the bed and adjust the position of its two cameras, giving “the perception from the patient’s standpoint that the doctor is there,“ the surgeon said.
“They love it. They’d rather see me through the robot,“ he said of his patients’ reaction to the machine.
Gandsas presented the idea to hospital administrators as a method to more closely monitor patients following weight-loss surgery. Gandsas, an unpaid member of an advisory board for the robot’s manufacturer who has stock options in the company, added that since its introduction, the length of stay has been shorter for the patients visited by the robot.
A chart-review study of 376 of the doctor’s patients found that the 92 patients who had additional robotic visits had shorter hospital stays. Gandsas’ study appears in the July issue of the Journal of the American College of Surgeons.
Nicknamed Bari for the bariatric surgery Gandsas practices, the RP-7 Remote Presence Robotic System by InTouch Technologies is one of a number of robotic devices finding their way into the medical world. Across town at Johns Hopkins, for example, a similar robot is used to teleconference with a translator for doctors who don’t speak their patient’s language. Robotic devices have also been used to guide stroke patients through therapy and help them play video games.
Michael Chan, executive vice president with InTouch Technologies, said his company’s device allows physicians to “be in more than one place at once.“
Speaking with Gandsas through one of the robots at company headquarters in Santa Barbara, Calif., Chan said the company envisions applications for the devices in remote locations and for dealing with shortages of health care professionals. About 120 of the robots are in use in hospitals worldwide.
Sinai patient David Williams said he appreciated the fact that Gandsas knew the details of his care.

When an aphid is attacked by a predator, chemicals in its blood are mixed with an enzyme in its muscles to produce deadly mustard oil which repels the predator.

Cabbage aphids have developed an internal chemical defense system which enables them to disable attacking predators by setting off a mustard oil ’bomb’, says new research.
The study shows for the first time how aphids use a chemical found in the plants they eat to emit a deadly burst of mustard oil when they’re attacked by a predator, for example a ladybird. This mustard oil kills, injures or repels the ladybird, which then saves the colony of aphids from attack, although the individual aphid involved usually dies in the process.
When the aphids feed on cabbages, they consume chemicals called glucosinolates which are found in the nutrient transport vessels of the plant. Once eaten, these chemicals are then stored in the aphids’ blood. Mimicking the plants themselves, the aphids also produce an enzyme called myrosinase, which is stored in the muscles of their head and thorax. In the event of a predator attack this enzyme in the muscles comes into contact with the glucosinolates in the blood, catalyzing a violent chemical reaction which releases mustard oil, Science Daily said.
The research team from the UK and Norway confirmed their findings by controlling the diet of different groups of aphids. They found that those insects eating a diet rich in glucosinolates had a high success rate in fending off predators, whereas those without glucosinolates in their diet did not. Scientists already knew that aphids absorbed these chemicals from their food, but this study published Proceedings of the Royal Society B is the first of its kind to prove that they form the basis of a chemical defense system.
The scientists also found that the extent to which glucosinolates are stored up by the aphids from birth into adulthood depends on whether or not they develop wings. Those aphids that grow wings see a rapid decline in the amount of glucosinolates they store from the time wing buds start to develop.
Dr Glen Powell from Imperial College London’s Division of Biology, one of the paper’s authors, explains: “Our study seems to show that aphids that develop wings cease to store this chemical in their blood as they mature, as they don’t need the ’mustard oil bomb’ to defend themselves from predators when they can just fly away. This is a great example of the way in which a species provides an ingenious method of protecting itself, whatever the circumstances.“

The running bird had two toes facing forwards and two facing backwards.

A roadrunner-like bird lived in China 110 million years ago, say researchers who have analysed fossil tracks found in a quarry. The tracks are 50 million years older than any other evidence of similar birds.
As well as being the size of a roadrunner, which weighs about half a kilogram and measures about half a meter from beak to tail, the bird shared the same unusual foot structure, news@nature.com reported.
Most birds have three toes facing forwards and one--the equivalent of our big toe--facing back. Roadrunners have two facing forwards and two facing backwards. Feet with this shape are called zygodactyl.
“No bird like that has ever been found from that time period,“ says Jerald Harris, a palaeontologist at Dixie State College in St George, Utah, and an author on the study.
Based on the spacing of the tracks and the estimated size of the bird, the researchers think that it was running at about 8 kilometres per hour when it left the footprints. The analysis is reported in Naturwissenschaften1.
Fossil birds from the early Cretaceous period, when this bird lived, include small wading birds, tree-perching birds and possibly a hawk-like raptor or two. But we know of nothing as large, as fast, or with the same foot structure as the one that made these tracks.
The tracks were found in a quarry in Shandong Province; they are named Shandongornipes muxiai. Not expecting to find a zygodactyl bird in rocks that old, researchers originally thought the footprints belonged to a shorebird.
“There are no ground-dwelling zygodactyl birds at all in the fossil record, unless you count a roadrunner from the last million years or so,“ says the study’s leader, Martin Lockley of the University of Colorado, Denver. But further analysis revealed the tracks as belonging to a zygodactyl bird.
The prehistoric bird was not a direct ancestor to the roadrunner--zygodactyly evolved independently in both birds.
Most running birds have three toes, not four. There’s no obvious advantage to being zygodactyl, and no obvious reason for two running birds to evolve this sort of foot, says ornithologist Gerald Mayr of the Senckenberg Research Institute in Frankfurt am Main in Germany. “It’s a big enigma,“ he says.
The modern roadrunner is the only ground-dwelling, running member of the cuckoo family, all of which are zygodactyl. Rather than developing zygodactyly to aid running, Harris suggests that both the roadrunner and its predecessor began as tree dwellers and moved to the ground later.
“Nobody’s really worked out how modern roadrunners got these feet,“ says Harris. “But they probably didn’t evolve for running.“

Biology textbooks are blunt--neutrophils are mindless killers. These white blood cells patrol the body and guard against infection by bacteria and fungi, identifying and destroying any invaders that cross their path. But new evidence, which may lead to better drugs to fight deadly pathogens, indicates that neutrophils might actually distinguish among their targets.
A scientist in the lab of Whitehead Member Gerald Fink has discovered that neutrophils recognize and respond to a specific form of sugar called beta-1, 6-glucan on the surface of fungi. This sugar comprises just a small fraction of the fungal cell wall, much less than another sugar with a slightly different chemical conformation called beta-1,3-glucan. Because the scarce form of the sugar elicits a much stronger reaction from immune cells than the abundant one, it appears that neutrophils can distinguish between two nearly identical chemicals, Science Daily reported.
“These results show that engulfment and killing by neutrophils varies, depending on cell wall properties of the microbe,“ explains Whitehead postdoctoral researcher Ifat Rubin-Bejerano, first author on the paper, which appears July 11 in the journal Cell Host & Microbe. “We showed that neutrophils respond in a completely different way to slight changes in sugar composition. If we are able to use this unique sugar to excite the immune system, it may help the human body fight infection.“
“Previously, everyone thought that these key cells of the immune system weren’t picky and would eat anything that looked foreign,“ adds Fink, who is also an MIT professor of biology. “Ifat’s work has shown that the cells aren’t little Pac-Men, but can discriminate one pathogen from another.“
Rubin-Bejerano had evidence that neutrophils respond to beta-glucan. After coating tiny beads with a variety of substances (including beta-1, 3-glucan and beta-1,6-glucan), she exposed them to the neutrophils and was surprised to see a striking difference in their response to the two sugars. The neutrophils quickly engulfed many of the beads coated with beta-1,6-glucan, but only a few of those covered in beta-1,3-glucan. Previous studies indicated that blood serum (basically blood minus cells) helps neutrophils recognize their enemies, so Rubin-Bejerano decided to look for clues to their response in this mixture. She identified several proteins in serum that bind to beta-1,6-glucan, but not beta-1,3-glucan, and then pinpointed a molecule on the surface of the neutrophil that recognizes these proteins.
To link her experiments back to real fungi, Rubin-Bejerano worked with the pathogen Candida albicans, which is the most common fungus in blood stream infections. She used an enzyme to digest beta-1,6-glucan from the fungal cell wall, leaving the beta-1,3-glucan intact. She then unleashed the neutrophils on these altered cells and observed a 50 percent reduction in the immune response.
Our bodies maintain a fine balance between the immune system and microbes. Antibiotics and antifungals tilt the balance in favor of the immune system by targeting the microbes directly. A substance like beta-1, 6-glucan could help tilt this balance further by stimulating immune cells.

Scientists in Cuba say two compounds from lobster shells--chitin and chitosan--have healing and bio-stimulant properties.
The University of Havana researchers said the compounds can be used to produce surgical materials with great healing and antiseptic properties, as well as to enhance growth speed and germination in seeds, the university said.
The research has led to the development of a procedure that involves using chitosan to cover surgical threads and lint, into which antibiotics are injected, UPI reported.
The anti-microbial and healing properties remained unmodified after sterilization, the report said.
The research is being conducted in collaboration with the Spanish Center for Scientific Research, the Complutense University in Madrid and the Mexican Research Center for Food and Development.

Women are more likely than men to have lingering depression after suffering heart attacks, Canadian researchers said.
A study by the University of Alberta and McGill University found that 14.3 percent of women had worsening depression one year after their initial myocardial infarctions. Eleven percent of men studied had a similar experience, UPI said.
“The findings are of concern because depression impedes recovery and ultimately, the quality of life in patients following a heart event,“ said lead author Colleen Norris, an associate professor in the Faculty of Nursing at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, said Friday in a release.
Norris said women are less likely to be referred to or to attend cardiac rehabilitation, and therefore don’t have access to the support and assistance to make necessary lifestyle changes.