Slashdot Mirror

An extensive survey of bacteria and fungi on surfaces inside the International Space Station has revealed an astonishing number of microorganisms living among the astronauts -- the health impacts of which aren't entirely clear. Gizmodo reports: Since it was first established in 1998, the International Space Station has been visited by hundreds of astronauts (227 to be exact). These trips have invariably introduced an array of microbes to the orbital outpost, as have shipments of cargo. But while astronauts return to Earth, their germs stay behind. New research published today in Microbiome offers the most comprehensive catalogue to date of the bacteria and fungi living on the ISS, detailing the station's distinctive and ever-changing microbiological profile. This research will now be used by NASA and other space agencies to develop safety measures for the ISS and other long-term space missions.

NASA astronauts took swabs using sterile wipes at eight predefined locations on the ISS, on three different occasions during a 14 month period. The locations included both high and low traffic areas, including the viewing window, toilet, exercise platform, stowage rack, dining table, and sleeping quarters. NASA astronaut Terry Virts performed the first two sampling sessions on March 4, 2015 and then three months later on May 15, 2015. NASA astronaut Jeffrey Williams took the third sample a year later on May 6, 2016. The samples were returned to Earth for analysis. The ISS may seem like a cold, sterile place in space, but the analysis showed it's a veritable cornucopia for microbes. The most prolific bacteria, according to culture results, were Staphylococcus (26 percent of total samples), Pantoea (23 percent), Bacillus (11 percent), Staphylococcus aureus (10 percent) and Pantoea conspicua and Pantoea gaviniae (both at 9 percent). The fungal population was primarily comprised of Rhodotorula mucilaginosa. The authors warn that some strains of bacteria could form damaging biological sheets known as biofilms: "[B]iofilm formation on the ISS could decrease infrastructure stability by causing mechanical blockages, reducing heat transfer efficiency, and inducing microbial influenced corrosion..."

From a new report: As humanity starts packing for a trip to Mars, NASA scientists are studying what not to bring along for the journey. In short, leave the fungus at home. NASA researchers created a closed habitat -- similar to where humans would have to live to survive long space travel or on a new planet -- and looked at fungi and how they grew, publishing their findings in the journal Microbiome. Fungi are "extremophiles" that can survive in the harshest conditions, but in the closed environment of a space station, they can wreak havoc. To see exactly what kind of fungi might colonize astronauts while they colonize Mars, researchers set up an Inflatable Lunar/Mars Analog Habitat, which simulates the closed environment of the International Space Station. They found that certain kinds of fungi increased in number while humans were living inside the habitat, and the weakened immune systems that come with living in a bubble make people more vulnerable to fungi.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Scientific American: In recent years scientists have discovered another possible use for aspirin: stopping the spread of cancer cells in the body after an initial tumor has already formed. The research is still developing, but the findings hint that the drug could one day form the basis for a powerful addition to current cancer therapies. Not everyone responds equally well to the drug, however, and for some people it can be downright dangerous. Investigators are thus trying to develop genetic tests to determine who is most likely to benefit from long-term use of aspirin. The latest research into the drug's cancer-inhibiting activity is generating findings that could possibly guide those efforts. More recently, investigators have started to elucidate a third way that aspirin works -- one that interferes with the ability of cancer cells to spread, or metastasize, through the body. Intriguingly, in this case, the drug's anti-inflammatory properties do not appear to play the starring role. Researchers often inject tumor cells into the bloodstream of mice to approximate what happens during metastasis when cancer cells must navigate the bloodstream to find a new home in the body. When Elisabeth Battinelli, a hematologist at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, and her team fed aspirin to certain strains of mice and then injected them with malignant cells, the investigators discovered that the platelets did not shield breakaway cancer cells from the immune system or produce the necessary growth factors that allow cancer cells to grow and divide in a new location. Thus, aspirin appears to fight cancer in two ways: its anti-inflammatory action prevents some tumors from forming, and its antiplatelet properties interfere with some cancer cells' ability to spread.

An anonymous reader writes from a report via WinBeta: A new report from scientists Mark Ziemann, Yotam Eren, and Assam El-Osta says that 20% of scientific papers on genes contain gene name conversion errors caused by Excel. In the scientific article, titled "Gene name errors are widespread in the scientific literature," article's abstract section, the scientists explain: "The spreadsheet software Microsoft Excel, when used with default settings, is known to convert gene names to dates and floating-point numbers. A programmatic scan of leading genomics journals reveals that approximately one-fifth of papers with supplementary Excel gene lists contain erroneous gene name conversions."

It's easy to see why Excel might have problems with certain gene names when you see the "gene symbols" that the scientists use as examples: "For example, gene symbols such as SEPT2 (Septin 2) and MARCH1 [Membrane-Associated Ring Finger (C3HC4) 1, E3 Ubiquitin Protein Ligase] are converted by default to '2-Sep' and '1-Mar', respectively. Furthermore, RIKEN identifiers were described to be automatically converted to floating point numbers (i.e. from accession '2310009E13' to '2.31E+13'). Since that report, we have uncovered further instances where gene symbols were converted to dates in supplementary data of recently published papers (e.g. 'SEPT2' converted to '2006/09/02'). This suggests that gene name errors continue to be a problem in supplementary files accompanying articles. Inadvertent gene symbol conversion is problematic because these supplementary files are an important resource in the genomics community that are frequently reused. Our aim here is to raise awareness of the problem." You can view the scientific paper in its entirety here.

An anonymous reader writes from a report via WinBeta: A new report from scientists Mark Ziemann, Yotam Eren, and Assam El-Osta says that 20% of scientific papers on genes contain gene name conversion errors caused by Excel. In the scientific article, titled "Gene name errors are widespread in the scientific literature," article's abstract section, the scientists explain: "The spreadsheet software Microsoft Excel, when used with default settings, is known to convert gene names to dates and floating-point numbers. A programmatic scan of leading genomics journals reveals that approximately one-fifth of papers with supplementary Excel gene lists contain erroneous gene name conversions."

It's easy to see why Excel might have problems with certain gene names when you see the "gene symbols" that the scientists use as examples: "For example, gene symbols such as SEPT2 (Septin 2) and MARCH1 [Membrane-Associated Ring Finger (C3HC4) 1, E3 Ubiquitin Protein Ligase] are converted by default to '2-Sep' and '1-Mar', respectively. Furthermore, RIKEN identifiers were described to be automatically converted to floating point numbers (i.e. from accession '2310009E13' to '2.31E+13'). Since that report, we have uncovered further instances where gene symbols were converted to dates in supplementary data of recently published papers (e.g. 'SEPT2' converted to '2006/09/02'). This suggests that gene name errors continue to be a problem in supplementary files accompanying articles. Inadvertent gene symbol conversion is problematic because these supplementary files are an important resource in the genomics community that are frequently reused. Our aim here is to raise awareness of the problem." You can view the scientific paper in its entirety here.

Are you tired of boring old milk in your cereal? Is the half and half in your coffee leaving you flat? If so, the recent discovery of the gene responsible for pigeon crop "lactation" might be the good news you've been waiting for. While mammals are the only animals that produce true milk, a number of birds produce a nutritious, liquid "crop milk" for their chicks. From the article: "The idea of drinking pigeon milk may bring a shudder to every sane and rational person in the world, but it's actually quite nutritious. Although it's high in fat, to help the young squabs develop fast, it's also packed full of antioxidants and immune-system-boosting proteins."

GisG writes "General aptitude tests and specific mental ability tests are important tools for vocational guidance. Researchers are now asking whether performance on such tests is based on differences in brain structure, and if so, can brain scans be helpful in choosing a career? In a first step, researchers writing in the open access journal BMC Research Notes have investigated how well eight tests used in vocational guidance correlate to gray matter in areas throughout the brain." The researcher's (provisional) paper is available as a PDF.

ScentCone writes "Transgenic pigs (and other critters) are valuable research tools because of their utility in studying human diseases. Tracking changes in some developing tissues is going to be easier, say a Taiwanese team that has introduced fluorescent, green proteins into the breeding. Said one of the researchers: 'There are partially fluorescent green pigs elsewhere, but ours are the only ones in the world that are green from inside out. Even their hearts and internal organs are green.' Do you like green eggs and ham?"

Roland Piquepaille writes "In this article, The Scientist reveals a curious and probably unique story. Two years ago, a researcher at Brown University submitted a paper to a scientific medicine journal. Then he received a note from the editor saying that his paper would not interest the journal readers. Thinking that his article was unfairly rejected before peer review, he decided to publish a two-page ad with the contents of his paper in the same journal. He even asked readers if they thought the contents interesting and received 33 positive replies. Read this summary before telling me what you think and if you've heard about a similar story."

RichiH writes "Most of you have probably heard that science journals are getting more and more expensive. In hard numbers, 215% increase in price over the last fifteen years. What proves a major problem for libraries and interested individuals is great for the publishers. Reed Elsevier, with about 1700 scientific magazines the leading publisher, had a profit margin of 33.8% in 2003. With most research which is published, the taxpayers get the bill while the publishers get the money. So now for the good news: People are starting to fight this. Creative Commons is a good way, for example. Additionally, there are several magazines available which are based on a author-pays basis. If this sounds like a strange idea, think again. If Cell prints an article by you, you are charged $1000 for the first and $250 for each additional graphic you include. And this is for a reader-pays magazine! With PLoS Biology, the author pays $1500 for the whole article and the reader gets the magazine for free on the internet. Biomed Central lists 100 free magazines while the Directory of Open Access Journals lists an amazing 1425. I for one considered getting the $160 a year print subscription of PLoS just Because."

pq writes "Reasearchers at VCU, Pennsylvania State have created "superatoms" of aluminium and iodine that behave like the alkaline earth metals. From the article: "Our production of such a species is a stirring development that may lead to new compounds with a completely new class of chemistry and applications". Another article on Biomedcentral"

The Importance of writes "Yesterday, Creative Commons announced the launch of 'the Science Commons exploratory phase.' This may eventually become a sister organization of Creative Commons that 'will delve into both legal areas (patents, data) and subject matter (biomedicine) outside the scope of [the] current organization.' In related news, the open access science publisher, BioMed Central, has adopted CC's 'attribution license' for their over 100 peer-reviewed journals."

nilepoc writes "The Human Genome project is finally done. Done being a relative term, due to the variability of DNA. 'You can think of this as the end of the high-throughput phase of human sequencing. The fact that it's yielded up 99% of the gene-containing DNA at this level of accuracy means that almost everybody who is looking for answers from the genome will find it in the most final form that they ever could have dreamed of,' Collins said in a BioMedCentral Article. Let the patenting begin."

Mark Baard points to a story running at biomedcentral.com titled "Gain for science is history buffs' loss", summarizing "Privacy laws enacted by Iceland's Parliament in light of DeCode's research now apply to genealogies, restricting who can access information that was once public."

mcockerill writes "Oracle just posted a development version of their latest RDBMS (Oracle 9i release 2) for Mac OS X (300+megs of it). It requires Jaguar to run. No fancy installation wizards or GUI config apps as yet; the whole thing is command line only for now. But still, this is a major development as far as serious use of Mac OS X in a server environment is concerned. It's long been rumored to be on the way -- after all, Ellison is on Apple's Board -- but frankly I never thought I'd see the day."