Current News - The Adstock Science Club

 

Recent pictures have been released by NASA taken by the Hubble Space Telescope of what appears to be Jets of liquid, possibly water, spraying out of fissures in the frozen surface of Europa, one of Jupiter’s many moons.

This discovery has given scientists alternative for probing for life by arranging that a probe fly through the jets, collecting and then analysing what is being sprayed out, a much easier way of getting the job done. The race is now on between NASA and ESA, the European Space Agency, to see who will be the first to get results and possibly be the first to find extra-terrestrial life.

Ugly little critters! But they are one of the hardiest animals around. They are found in some pretty inhospitable places and can survive conditions that any normal animal or plant could not. To see just how amazing these animals are scientists in 2007 actually launched them aloft in a satellite where they were exposed to the hostile environment of outer space. Later they were returned to Earth where it was found that neither the vacuum, the cold nor the intense radiation of space had any lasting effect on these hardy creatures.

A unique protein has been found in the water bear which can be used to protect human DNA from X-ray damage, stunned researchers reported a short time ago. Human cells cultivated with the newly-discovered protein, dubbed "Dsup" for "damage suppressor", experienced half as much decay as normal cells when blasted with radiation. "We were really surprised," said lead author Takuma Hashimoto, a biologist at the University of Tokyo who designed the experiments.

Most research has concluded that water bears have a heightened capacity to repair damaged DNA, especially as they emerge from a state of extreme desiccation, which can last for decades. However, in their experiments with human cells, Hashimoto and colleagues found the tardigrade's Dsup protein could also "work as a kind of physical shield to protect DNA"—especially from X-ray harm. The findings were published in the scientific journal Nature Communications.

The results may resolve a controversy that erupted after another team of researchers published the first complete genome of a tardigrade—from the species Ramazzottius hypsibius—last December in the US Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences.

That study had found that nearly a fifth of the species' DNA had been obtained from other plants and animals, a new record in the animal kingdom for so-called horizontal gene transfer between species.

This, they hypothesised, accounted for the remarkable resistance of water bears.

This discovery may prove useful for adapting humans to life in space especially if we intend to visit Mars and other planets.

Take a look at this New Scientist web site for the full story -