EBOLA GOES FROM KILLER TO HEALER
A redesigned Ebola virus shell can transform the organism from a killer into a gene therapy healer, Purdue University researchers say. Sticking helpful genetic material into infection-causing genes is not new but the Purdue team took it farther. The researchers looked at proteins of all Ebola strains and found a string of amino acids kept cropping up on the shells. The discovery seemed important until researchers found the amino acids appeared in different sequences from strain to strain. Lead researcher David Sanders said, "It's a protective paint job, not a piston. Our viruses don't need to hide from the immune system because they don't replicate themselves inside the cells they invade -- they switch good genes for bad and disappear. So we reasoned it was unnecessary to include that section in our viruses -- we could get our Ebola through the assembly line faster if the paint job were skipped." The group removed the 181 amino acids from the string and built a shell from the remainder. "We managed to cut more than 25 percent of the string and found the retrovirus would transfer genes even more effectively than one with a 'natural' Ebola coat," Sanders said. "We now have a vehicle that can potentially bring genes directly to the lungs, which was not feasible before."
BUILDING THE SENSITIVE ROBOT
Vanderbilt researchers Nilanjan Sarkar and Craig Smith are working on a robot that can sense human emotion. "Psychological research shows that a lot of our communications, human to human, are implicit," Sarkar says. "The better we know the other person the better we get at understanding the psychological state of that person." The key to the project is determining whether a robot can sense the psychological state of a human. The researchers used scientific measures of human heart rate with measures of skin conductance -- affected by hand sweating -- and facial muscle activity, such brow furrowing and jaw clenching. They combined the information to produce a series of rules that allow a robot to respond to information about a person's emotional state. The robot initially was given a task of exploring a room. As it moves randomly, the physiological data of a person experiencing high anxiety levels is sent to a processor that detects the anxiety level and instructs the robot to move to a specific location and say, "I sense that you are anxious. Is there anything I can do to help?"
ANTARCTIC LAKE YIELDS MICROBIAL LIFE
Researchers drilling into the Antarctic's Lake Vida say it really isn't an ice block at all but could be an ecosystem -- an "ice-sealed," lake that contains the thickest non-glacial lake ice cover on Earth and water seven times saltier than seawater. The National Science Foundation-supported research suggests the lake could be a template for the search for evidence of ancient microbial life on Mars and other icy worlds. Using ground-penetrating radar, ice core analyses and long-term temperature data, the researchers now say Vida has a thick light-blocking ice cover, a vast amount of ancient organic material and sediment, and a cold, super-salty, liquid zone underlying the ice. Researchers also revived viable microbes containing DNA at least 2,800 years old and say the life forms could have some type of antifreeze and ice nucleation inhibitors that allow them to survive the freeze-thaw cycles and come back to life when exposed to liquid water.
EVIDENCE THAT LIFE CAME FROM OUTER SPACE
Viable microorganisms have been discovered floating in Earth's upper atmosphere, evidence supporting the controversial theory life began by bacteria and other microbes arriving here from outer space. "We were able to conclude there were viable microorganisms present at different heights in the air," Chandra Wickramasinghe, of Cardiff University's Center for Astrobiology, told United Press International. Wickramasinghe's team reported last year they had discovered microorganisms high above Earth but were unable to grow them in the lab. Microbiologist Milton Wainwright of the University of Sheffield, England, was able to isolate and grow a fungus and two species of bacteria collected 25 miles above the planet surface. Wickramasinghe says the microbes are not new species and "they're extremely closely related to known Earth bacteria, but that's what the theory of panspermia predicts," because it holds that bacteria on Earth originated from space.
---
(EDITORS: For more information about EBOLA, contact David Sanders at (765) 494-6453 or e-mail [email protected]. For ROBOT, call David F. Salisbury at (615) 343-6803, for LAKE VIDA, Josh Chamot, 703-292-8070 or [email protected], and for PANSPERMIA, Chandra Wickramasinghe, 029-208-74201 or e-mail [email protected]).
