When three genes are better than two

For years, scientists have been wondering why people with Down's Syndrome are less likely to get cancer than the rest of us. Now researchers writing in the journal Nature say they've found the answer.

People with Down's have three copies of chromosome 21 instead of the usual two. This extra chromosome causes the disorder but, the scientists discovered, it also contains a gene that stops the growth of tumours.

The scientists identified the gene in question, known as Dscr1, by studying mice that have extra copies of many of the genes on chromosome 21. Humans normally only have two copies of Dscr1, but it turns out that an extra copy suppresses cancer by stopping tumours from growing blood vessels.

The discovery could lead to potential new treatments, say cancer experts.

Futuresonic Future Everything 3

Got a bug to bare with a friend too far away to fight with? Well don’t worry, Distance LAB have been working on ways to overcome the communication barriers of distance, whether it’s for work, lovers or enemies. Distance LAB displayed a few of these solutions at the Futuresonic conference in Manchester last week.

Distance LAB see the mobile phone as the fast food of communication. It’s a fast efficient tool, however it is also a one size fits all solution, and we all know that talking to our partner can be very different from talking to our boss or someone we are angry with. So Distance LAB have looked at these differences and tried to create various communication tools that can be considered slow food, unique, bespoke, and personal.

The image above shows technology that has been developed to allow people to 'shadow box, no matter how far away they are.

Futuresonic Future Everything 2

Along with current and future uses of digital and social media, Futuresonic displayed numerous artworks at the CUBE gallery, all about this year’s theme of Environment 2.0. The artworks varied wildly, from a public reading of the intergovernmental panel for climate change 2007 report (which I took part in, reading for 20min), to plates patterned with the smog of a city. One of the more interesting artworks was a working design for a living carbon dioxide fuse. A power point was linked to a number of plants, and a fuse, that only allowed you to use as much electricity as the plants were off setting. For a basic table lamp and four average sized plants, this equalled to about a minute of light every half hour. If you wanted to use more power you would have to link up more plants. This was a great illustration of just how much CO2 is produced when using electricity compared to how much can be sequestered by individual plants.

Futuresonic Future Everything 1

Each year in Manchester, the futuresonic conference brings together experts from the fields of digital media and focuses on the cutting edge and future of the technology. This year’s conference looked at social media and the idea of trust as well as the additional theme of the Environment.

Can digital and social media save us from Climate Change? Some believe that it can, as it creates a world where we can communicate around to globe more easily than ever before. Some feel that we will have to resort to geo-engineering. But one thing was agreed upon. More and more the geophysical community is being replaced by the virtual online community. The old feelings of belonging and community that we once felt in our streets and neighbourhoods, can now be found in cyberspace with people we have more in common with than just a postcode. Perhaps this sense of community can be tapped into to help the physical environment, or perhaps we all need to turn our computers off and go outside to appreciate what we may soon lose.

The image above is an art work by the Comob project, who were tracking people using an iphone application on a paper map as they walked around Manchester city locating areas of 'pollution'.

Antioxidant pills block benefits of exercise

If you want to feel the full health benefits of that jog around the park, it's probably best to steer clear of antioxidant vitamin supplements, scientists have found.

Excerise is good for us in all sorts of ways, but one important bonus is that it stops our bodies from becoming resistant to insulin - a condition that can lead to diabetes. However, scientists have discovered that if people regularly pop antioxidant pills, like vitamins A and C, they don't get this benefit.

So what's going on? Antioxidants are famous (especially in skin-care adverts) for mopping up free radicals - nasty molecules that damage cells and add to the ageing process. As a result, they're usually considered to be bad news. But the results of this study show that free radicals have a nice side too, because destroying them makes exercise far less fruitful.

I think I'll be sticking to oranges...

Image: Djenan Kozic

New plastic turns red under pressure

Scientists have created a new type of plastic that turns red when it's stretched or bent. Their work's still at an experimental stage, but it could lead to plastics that change colour when they're about to break.

Integrated into bridges, aeroplane wings, or climbing ropes, it's not difficult to see how plastic with a built-in warning system would save many lives.

What other uses are there for this fantastic plastic?

Image: D. Stevenson, A. Jerez, A. Hamilton and D. Davis

A Disappearing Act

At some undetermined time in the last few months the 18,000 year-old Chacaltaya glacier in the Andes, Bolivia, completely melted away and no longer exists.

It seems to me that this is just the beginning and that we will increasingly hear of ancient glaciers, making their final retreat up the mountain.

This is the sad result of climate change. Environmental features that have played pivotal and meaningful roles in people lives for hundreds if not thousands of years are disappearing because of our careless use of fossil fuels.

A local, who used to play on the glacier as a child, summed it up:

"It's a tragedy," "It's as if someone had died."


Chacaltaya glacier

An object from the past pays a fleeting visit

Last Thursday the ESO's (European Organisation for Astronomical Research) Very Large Telescope identified a faint gamma-ray burst as the signature of a star exploding 13 billion years ago, making it the earliest and most distant object known in the Universe.

Gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are powerful flashes of energetic gamma-rays lasting from less than a second to several minutes. They release huge amounts of energy in this short time making them the most powerful events in the Universe. They are thought to be mostly associated with the explosion of stars that collapse into black holes.

Because light moves at a finite speed, looking farther into the Universe means looking back in time. The explosion occurred just 600 million years after the big bang. It is believed that the very first stars only formed when the Universe was between 200 and 400 million years old.

Studying more GRB's like this one will help scientists learn more about what the early universe was like and how it came about it the first place.