Into the Void Science - Issue 5 - September 2018

SEPTEMBER 2018

INTO THE VOID

SCIENCE

Complexities of Carnivore Jaws

Poor Bandwith?

Colour Might be Key

Daleks & Robots Invade the ACT

Cover Image

Even if the air looks clear, it is nearly certain that you will inhale millions of solid particles and liquid droplets. These ubiquitous specks of matter are known as aerosols, and they can be found in the air over oceans, deserts, mountains, forests, ice and every ecosystem in between

Into the void

Science

June 2018 / Issue #2

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Founder / Editor Cameron Costigan Editorial Contributors Elizabeth Suk-Hang Lam Professional Proofreader Susan Dunn Business Sponsors BC Marketing This is 42

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RS PUP RS Pup is a Cepheid type variable star, a class of stars whose brightness is used to estimate distances to nearby galaxies as one of the first steps in establishing the cosmic distance scale.

As RS Pup pulsates over a period of about 40 days, its regular changes in brightness are also seen along the nebula delayed in time, effectively a light echo. Using measurements of the time delay and angular size of the nebula, the known speed of light allows astronomers to geometrically determine the distance to RS Pup to be 6,500 light-years, with a remarkably small error of plus or minus 90 light-years. An impressive achievement for stellar astronomy, the echo-measured distance also more accurately establishes the true brightness of RS Pup, and by extension other Cepheid stars, improving the knowledge of distances to galaxies beyond the Milky Way.

Image credit: NASA, ESA, Hubble Heritage

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Carnivore Jaws

By Ellen Goldbaum-Buffalo

Biologists don’t know a lot about how chewing behavior leaves telltale signs on the underlying bones. Work to solve that mystery produced the unexpected results..

“Even though it is clear that the carnivoran jaw joint is important for feeding, no one knew if jaw joint bone structure across species was related to the mechanical demands of feeding,” explains M. Aleksander Wysocki, first author and a doctoral student in the computational cell biology, anatomy, and pathology graduate program in the department pathology and anatomical sciences in the University at Buffalo Jacobs School.

Wysocki and coauthour, Assistant Professor, Jack Tseng from the Department of Pathology and Anatomical Sciences, examined 40 different carnivoran species from bobcats to wolves, looking at the jaw joint bone called the mandibular condyle.

“The mandibular condyle is the pivot point of the jaw. It functions similarly to the way the bolt of a door hinge does,” Wysocki says. “Studies have shown that this joint is loaded with force during chewing.”

He notes that the team was especially interested in the intricate, spongey bone structures inside the jaw joint, also known as trabecular bone. “We thought that this part of the skull would be the best candidate for determining relationships between food type and anatomy.”

For example, because hyenas crush bone while consuming their prey, one could assume that their jaw joints would need to be capable of exerting significant force. “On the other hand, an animal that eats plants wouldn’t be expected to require that kind of jaw joint structure,” he says. “But we found that diet has a weaker relationship with skull anatomy than we thought. Mostly it’s the animals’ size that determines jaw joint structure and mechanical properties.”

The species that demonstrated the greatest maximum compressive strength during chewing force simulations, was the wolverine (Gulo gulo), followed by the cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus), the malagasy civet (Fossa fossana), the honey badger (Mellivora capensis), and the kinkajou (Potos flavus).

The researchers took computed tomography (CT) scan data of skulls from 40 species at the American

Museum of Natural History, then built 3D models of them, from which they extracted the internal bone structure. Using a 3D printer, the scientists then printed 3D cores, based on virtual “core samples” from the mandibular condyle of each jaw joint, which they then scaled and tested for strength.

“Using a compression gauge, we measured how rigid these jaw joint structures were and how much force they could withstand,” Wysocki says.

The testing revealed no significant correlations between the shape or mechanical performance of the jaw joint bone and the diets of particular carnivorans.

“The mandibular condyle absorbs compressive force during chewing so we hypothesized that this was a part of the skull that was likely to be influenced by what the animal eats,” Wysocki says. “It turns out that body size is the key factor determining the complexity of jaw joint bone structure and strength.”

He notes that some previous research has revealed that despite the wide variety of diets consumed by different carnivorans, the overall skull shape is considerably influenced by non-feeding variables.

“Still, given how critical the temporomandibular joint is in capturing prey and eating it, these results are very striking,” he says. “For over a century, it has been assumed that skull shape is closely related to what an animal eats. And now we have found that jaw joint bone structure is related to carnivoran body size, not what the animal is eating.”

Wysocki says that the reasons for this apparent disconnect may be that larger carnivorans don’t need such powerful jaws because they are proportionately larger than their prey, or possibly because they share the work involved by hunting in groups. He also says that other factors such as developmental constraints of bone structure could play a role in producing the trends observed in the study.

“Our research shows that factors other than diet need to be considered when attempting to understand jaw joint function,” Wysocki concludes. “It turns out that the functional anatomy of the jaw joint is much more complex than we thought.”

Source: University at Buffalo

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Daleks & Robots

By Elizabeth Suk-Hang Lam

While WALL-E and EVE may only appear in movies, we all have the chance to play with robots ourselves!

Perhaps not everyone has the luck to experience playing with robots but the Robots Outreach team provides an opportunity for everyone to have fun with them. In fact, one of the ighlights in the National Science Week is their robots | exhibits at “Science in ACTion”.

The robots sing, dance and can even have a conversation among themselves and make presentations to the audience.

What’s more, the robots are simply controlled by an app on a tablet. Children and visitors can, therefore, have hands-on experience with robots and make them perform different tasks.

The Birth of Robots Outreach Team This exciting robots outreach team is founded by a volunteer in Questacon, Andrew Corson. He and Luis Bonilla were volunteers in the Technology & Learning Centre, creating stuff from their own ideas to engage visitors. When the centre was closed to the public, they moved to transitioned to volunteers in Inquiry Learning team in Questacon. Driven by his interest in technology and the desire to engage visitors, Andrew came up with the idea of using robots to explain exhibits and entertain visitors. He then built the first robot, Miko the Meccanoid®, followed by Luis, who built Mackenna, the second Meccanoid® robot.

The Meccanoid® personal robots are driven by ten servo motors for movement and pre-programmed functions. With their effort in programming, their Meccanoid® robots know over 3000 pre-programmed phrases, as well as capable to tell stories, play games and dance.

Together with another passionate Questacon volunteer, Imogen Brown, they started the first robots outreach visit to a church group. Later, Andrew and Luis were given the opportunity to demonstrate robots in the foyer of Questacon. The amazing performance of their robots has brought them more outreach opportunities. Joined by another young enthusiastic volunteer, Eleanor Cocks, the team has provided many exhibits and demonstrations in schools, Science in ACTion, and the National Science Week. They also provide programming workshops in Science Time in Questacon.

“I am happy to do this, not for Questacon, but for the children. I can see how happy they are, and how excited they are,” said Luis.

Besides Robots, there comes… the Daleks!

Perhaps robots alone are enough to give visitors awe and fascination. But when the Daleks come onto the stage, they

win the spotlight. Andrew has built seven Daleks between 1987 and 2012. They are based on the BBC television series Doctor Who in 1963. The Daleks have appeared in 13 stories and two feature films of the long-running series. In contrast to robots, they are travel machines for mutated creatures known as Kaleds from the planet Skaro in the story. Since 1987, Andrew and the Daleks participated in nearly 100 events around Australia, including festivals and conventions.

Together, they have delighted thousands of children and adults. The Daleks have also helped the team to draw children to come over and learn robotics!

Together, they form the “Canberra Daleks and Robots”!

The team now has about seven enthusiastic volunteers, who are always ready to engage with children and all visitors to the centre. With eleven robots, they have provided more outreach activities that engage with both children and adults.

“Robots are fine and you can interact with them and they can be useful for us… And I want to be a role model for girls in STEM,” said Imogen.

“Besides being a role model as a female in STEM, I want to get younger kids into many aspects of science,” said Eleanor.

The future of Robots Outreach?

“To build more robots!” said Andrew. He would like to build a robot from scratch, develop and have his own programs in the robots. This could further teach and engage children more about robotics and programming. As for the future directions of the team, it would be led and inspired by people they work with.

“I hope to encourage children and adults to engage with science and technology by understanding the robots’ capabilities, how they work and how they can be programmed to do things, but above all, to have fun with it,” said Andrew.

Robots and Daleks are of course amazing. But what makes it remarkable, is the enthusiasm and passion of the whole team of volunteers. It is the interests, the awe, the fascination that appears on the faces of children that drive them to build these interactive robots and engage the future leaders of our society to learn science and technology!

If you want to visit these fascinating robots or invite them for demonstrations, contact the Robots Outreach Team canberradaleks.atwebpages.com and get prepared for fun and surprises with robots!

Sept 2018

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Earth’s Magnetic Field Reversals

Happen more often than thought A study on past reversals of Earth’s magnetic field has found that a rapid shift occurred within two centuries – such an event in future would increase our exposure to the Sun’s radiation that may cause trillions of dollars in power and communications systems damage.

The international research team found that magnetic field reversals – whereby the magnetic south pole became the magnetic north pole and vice versa – could happen much more rapidly than the thousands of years previously thought to be needed.

Professor Andrew Roberts from The Australian National University (ANU) said the magnetic field’s strength decreased by about 90 per cent when a field reversal occurred, making the Earth much more vulnerable to the Sun’s radiation.

“Earth’s magnetic field, which has existed for at least 3.45 billion years, provides a shield from the direct impact of solar radiation,” said Professor Roberts from the ANU Research School of Earth Sciences who was part of the study led by Distinguished Professor Chuan-Chou Shen at the National Taiwan University and lead author Dr Yu-Min Chou of the Southern University of Science and Technology in China.

“Even with Earth’s strong magnetic field today, we’re still susceptible to solar storms that can damage our electricity-based society.”

A field reversal would have much more of an effect than the solar storm that hit Earth in 1859. A similar magnitude solar storm today would cause major damage to power grids and communications systems worth trillions of dollars.

“Hopefully such an event is a long way in the future and we can develop future technologies to avoid huge damage, where possible, from such events,” Professor Roberts said.

He and his ANU colleague Dr Xiang Zhao from the Research School of Earth Sciences contributed to the study of the paleomagnetic record from 107,000 to 91,000 years ago that is based on precise magnetic analysis and radiometric dating of a stalagmite from a cave in southwestern China.

The stalagmite, which is one metre in length and eight centimetres in diameter, has a candle-like shape and ranges in colour from yellow to dark brown.

“The record provides important insights into ancient magnetic field behaviour, which has turned out to vary much more rapidly than previously thought,” Professor Roberts said.

The study is published in the prestigious journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America (PNAS).

How much does life weigh?

Researchers have developed a scale for measuring cells. It allows the weight of individual living cells, and any changes in this weight, to be determined quickly and accurately for the first time. The invention has also aroused significant interest both in and outside the field of biology.

Image Credit: Martin Oeggerli/micronaut.ch/ETH Zurich/University of Basel

Mantle Shifting

By Talia Ogliore-Wustl

A shift in the Earth’s mantle to start incorporating and retaining volatile compounds from the atmosphere before spewing them out again through volcanic eruptions could not have begun much before 2.5 billion years ago, according to new research.

“Life on Earth cares about changes in the volatile budget of the surface,” says first author of the study Rita Parai, Assistant Professor of Geochemistry in Earth and Planetary Sciences at the University of Washington in St. Louis. “And there’s an interplay between what the deep Earth was doing and how the surface environment changed over billion-year timescales.”

Volatiles—such as water, carbon dioxide, and the noble gases—come out of the mantle through volcanism and may be injected into the Earth’s interior from the atmosphere, a pair of processes called mantle degassing and regassing. The exchange controls the habitability of the planet, as it determines the surface availability of compounds that are critical to life—such as carbon, nitrogen, and water.

The model Parai and collaborator Sujoy Mukhopadhyay of the University of California, Davis, also establishes a range of dates during which the Earth shifted from a net degassing regime—again, think about those oozy volcanoes—to one that tilted the balance to net regassing potentially enabled by subduction, the conveyor-belt action of tectonic plates.

Mechanical properties change as water is added or removed from the mantle, so the onset of regassing had an important effect on the internal churning of the mantle, known as convection, which controls plate motions at the surface, Parai says.

Parai uses noble gases to address questions about how planetary bodies form and evolve over time. In this new research, she modeled the fate and transport of volatile compounds into the Earth’s mantle using xenon

isotopes as tracers.

“Xenon is an excellent volatile tracer, because all minerals that carry water also carry xenon,” Parai says.

“So if xenon regassing was negligible, water regassing must also have been negligible during the Archean (4 billion-2.5 billion years ago).”

Substantial regassing began sometime between a few hundred million to 2.5 billion years ago, the researchers found.

If plate tectonics and subduction began earlier than 2.5 billion years ago, then perhaps by then the Earth’s interior had cooled sufficiently for volatiles to remain in subducting plates, rather than getting released and percolating back to the surface through magmatism, Parai suggests.

“Most people rarely have an occasion to think about volatiles trapped in the Earth’s interior,” Parai says.

“They’re present at low concentrations, but the mantle is huge in terms of mass. So for the Earth’s total volatile budget, the mantle is an important reservoir.”

She plans to focus her future research on pushing the limits of precision in xenon isotopic measurements in a variety of geological samples.

“The more observational constraints we have, the better,” she says.

The research appears in the journal Nature. The NSF funded the project.

Source: Washington University in St. Louis

Low Bandwidth?

Use More Colors

By Kayla Wiles-Purdue

Researchers have simplified the manufacturing process for creating electronic chips that can use multiple colors of light at the same time instead of just one.

The rainbow is not just colors—each color of light has its own frequency. The more frequencies you have, the higher the bandwidth for transmitting information.

Only using one color of light at a time on an electronic chip currently limits technologies based on sensing changes in scattered color, such as detecting viruses in blood samples, or processing airplane images of vegetation when monitoring fields or forests.

Putting multiple colors into service at once would mean deploying multiple channels of information simultaneously, broadening the bandwidth of not only today’s electronics, but also of the even faster upcoming “nanophotonics” that will rely on photons—fast and massless particles of light— rather than slow and heavy electrons to process information with nanoscale optical devices.

IBM and Intel have already developed supercomputer chips that combine the higher bandwidth of light with traditional electronic structures. The new research focuses on simplifying the manufacturing of these chips.

The researchers also addressed another issue in the transition from electronics to nanophotonics: The lasers that produce light will need to be smaller to fit on the chip.

Currently, a different thickness of an optical cavity is required for each color. By embedding a silver metasurface in the nanocavity, the researchers achieved a uniform thickness for producing all desired colors.

“Instead of adjusting the optical cavity thickness for every single color, we adjust the widths of metasurface elements,” Kildishev says.

Optical metasurfaces could also ultimately replace or complement traditional lenses in electronic devices.

“What defines the thickness of any cell phone is actually a complex and rather thick stack of lenses,” Kildishev says. “If we can just use a thin optical metasurface to focus light and produce images, then we wouldn’t need these lenses, or we could use a thinner stack.”

The research appears in Nature Communications.

Additional researchers from Purdue, Stanford University, and the University of Maryland contributed to the work.

A patent has been filed for this technology. The Air Force Office of Scientific Research MURI grant and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s Defense Sciences Office Extreme Optics and Imaging program supported the research.

Source: Purdue University

“A laser typically is a monochromatic device, so it’s a challenge to make a laser tunable or polychromatic,” says Alexander Kildishev, Associate Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Purdue University. “Moreover, it’s a huge challenge to make an array of nanolasers produce several colors simultaneously on a chip.”

This requires downsizing the “optical cavity,” which is a major component of lasers. For the first time, researchers embedded so-called silver “metasurfaces”—artificial materials thinner than light waves—in nanocavities, making lasers ultrathin.

“Optical cavities trap light in a laser between two mirrors.

As photons bounce between the mirrors, the amount of light increases to make laser beams possible,” Kildishev says.

“Our nanocavities would make on-a-chip lasers ultrathin and multicolor.”

Image: New ultrathin nanocavities with embedded silver strips have streamlined color production, and therefore broadened possible bandwidth, for both today’s electronics and future photonics. (Purdue University image/Alexander Kildishev)

How Cells Remember Their Jobs During Division Researchers have developed a technique that offers new insight into “cellular memory.” The cells in our body divide constantly throughout life. But how do cells remember whether to develop into a skin, liver, or intestinal cell? It’s a question that has puzzled scientists for many years. With the new research, scientists have come a little closer to understanding the process.

Using the technique, called SCAR-seq, the researchers have been able to address how epigenetic information stored in histone proteins is transmitted when DNA is copied and cells divide.

“We have developed a new tool to look at the transmission of protein-based information in general and how it contributes to epigenetic memory of mammalian cells. For the first time, we can see which proteins are on the two new DNA strands that are formed when DNA is copied during cell division. Thus, we can now investigate how protein-based information is inherited and propagated to daughter cells.”

“This is the first time we have direct evidence that a specific protein is linking the transmission of epigenetic information on histones with the replication of genetic information in DNA. We knew that histone-based information had to be transmitted to both new DNA strands in one way or another, but we did not know how,” says study coauthor Anja Groth, professor at the Biotech Research & Innovation Center at the University of Copenhagen.

Inside the human cell, our DNA wraps around histone proteins. Together they form a structure called chromatin.

When a cell divides, it’s crucial that both the DNA and the entire chromatin structure are copied accurately.

Chromatin stores epigenetic information that affects which genes will be expressed. That is, the epigenetic information in our cells helps to control which genes are “turned on” and “off”.

In the new study, the researchers studied embryonic stem cells from mice. With SCAR-seq, they identified a protein that is responsible for transfer of histone proteins from the old DNA strand to the two new DNA strands during replication. The protein is called MCM2.

The researchers have had MCM2 in their working model for a long time, but it wasn’t possible to determine its exact function before the development of the SCAR-seq technology.

“It has been a recurring question whether the transfer of histones with their chemical modifications was completely random during DNA replication. In our study, we show that it is not a random but a highly controlled process,” says coauthor Robin Andersson, Assistant Professor in the Biology Department.

“Our data show that the histones have a preference for one DNA strand, the so-called leading strand, but that MCM2 counteracts this bias and ensures that there is almost symmetry between the two new DNA strands, that is, an even distribution of histone-based information,” he says.

“When we disrupted that mechanism, all histone-based information was transferred to one DNA strand, namely the leading strand, and not to the other, lagging strand.

This means that this function by MCM2 is essential for the two new DNA strands to receive the same information stored in histones.”

The researchers do not yet know how the disruption of the MCM2 function that ensures proper segregation of the histones affects the ability of embryonic cells to form other cell types, or, in other words, whether these cells still can contribute to the formation of an entire mouse.

Scientists frequently discuss how important histone information actually is for a cell identity and cell fate decisions. This will be the next question the researchers will investigate.

“Understanding this first part of the mechanism for how daughter cells inherit histones and their modifications from the mother cell has a lot of potential. Now, we can start to address what significance this transfer of protein-based information actually has for the cell and for the development of the organism. That is our long-term perspective,” says Groth.

The new study appears in Science. Support for the work came from the Independent Research Fund Denmark, the European Research Council, the Novo Nordisk Foundation, and the Lundbeck Foundation.

Source: University of Copenhagen

Image Credit: Olga Chwa

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