Record Radiation Blast Detected!!

On June 11th last year (2008), the GLAST satellite was launched as a joint venture between NASA, The U.S. Department of Energy, and many European countries in efforts to study gamma-ray astronomy. As we know, Gamma rays are forms of light with the highest energy. GLAST (Gamma Ray Large Area Telescope) has thus since recorded many different sources of gamma rays emminating from many different areas of the universe. This following news story has been it's biggest find and has been in the news last week!

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Astronomers have detected the strongest radiation blast from deep space ever known, exceeding the power of almost 9,000 exploding stars.

The gamma ray burst occurred 12.2 billion light years away in the constellation Carina. Its light has taken most of the age of the universe to reach us.

Gamma ray bursts are the most luminous explosions in the universe. Scientists believe they occur when exotic massive stars run out of fuel and collapse to form a black hole.

Jets of material powered by processes that are not yet fully understood are thought to blast outwards at nearly the speed of light, generating intense gamma rays.

The new explosion, designated GRB 080916C, was spotted last year by the American space agency Nasa's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, which is designed to detect gamma radiation.

Astronomers soon discovered that the gamma ray burst belonged in the record books.

The short-lived blast, described today in the online version of the journal Science, was more powerful than nearly 9,000 ordinary supernovae, or exploding stars.

Scientists calculated that the material emitting the gamma rays must have been moving at 99.9999% the speed of light.

The explosion was enigmatic as well as spectacular due to a curious time delay separating the highest-energy emissions from the lowest. Scientists are still trying to understand the reason for the time delay, which may have a straightforward physical cause or be due to peculiar quantum effects.

Professor Peter Michelson, a member of the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope team, said: "Burst emissions at these energies are still poorly understood. This one burst raises all sorts of questions. In a few years, we'll have a fairly good sample of bursts, and may have some answers."

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Observations like these are always an amazing piece of evidence and concrete material for astronomers and scientists to study and analyze to gain more insight into our universe and open doors into things we might never have known.

Genetic Screenings for Newborns

This was an entirely new thing for me: now-routine genetic screenings for newborns across all 50 states. While light of the science and research, the article names a few of the 29 rare diseases that can be tested for in infants using just a prick on the heel to extract blood for examination. Apparently in the last few years, testing across the United States has jumped from only half of the hospitals implementing the tests to now nearly 96% of all American hospitals.

The article is easy to read, and just fascinating in seeing how far medicine and technology have come.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/19/health/18screening.html?_r=1&ref=health

One Father's Attempt to Hack His Daughter's Genetic Code

This article is about a father whose daughter is sick with a variety of rare and strange genetic disorders that medical experts and doctors could not fully explain. This father, with a medical degree and background in genetic consulting, has set out to map his daughter's genetic code in order to find what exactly is wrong with his child.

http://www.wired.com/medtech/genetics/magazine/17-02/ff_diygenetics

Scientists zero in on Earth's original animal.

I was looking around the web for articles regarding the first organisms that lived on our planet and I came across an amazing article on livescience.com. Sea sponges have been thought by some scientists to be the most primitive living animals, the closest living things to approximate Earth's original animal, down at the base of the tree of life for the animal kingdom. But the squishy things are now being pushed aside by a group of amoeba-shaped creatures called Placozoans, according to a new analysis which shows the fairly simple but still multi-cellular animals are closer to the base of the tree, researchers say.

A weirder result follows from the fact that the analysis finds that corals, jellyfish, sponges, comb jellies and Placozoans (aka the "lower" animals) evolved in parallel to "higher" animals including flatworms, insects, mollusks and chordates (which includes all animals with backbones, ranging from frogs to apes and humans).

Nervous systems are found in both groups (among the lower animals, jellyfish have nervous systems), so the new arrangement means that these systems must have evolved twice in the history of animal evolution, said Rob DeSalle, a biologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York who did the analysis along with Sergios-Orestis Kolokotronis, also at the museum.

DeSalle said the finding is unsurprising to him.

"Things in organisms that look alike a lot of times aren't really derived from a common ancestor," he said. "The nervous system of cnidarians [a lower animal group that includes corals, jellyfish and hydras], and Bilateria [the higher animals group that includes humans] are constructed with the same molecules and often times using the same genes. But it is possible that the cnidarians' nervous system really is not the same nervous system found in Bilaterians."

Many lower animals other than jellyfish lack nervous systems, DeSalle said, but they could have the rudiments of a nervous system and we just haven't seen them. "Placozoans and sponges both have genes for nervous systems in their genomes," he said. "They just don't do it. They don't make it."

The new tree also underscores the fact that evolution does not proceed along a straight line, counter to many cartoons. And it's pretty common to find things evolving more than once, DeSalle said.

"You see that in other systems and kinds of anatomy — dorsal-ventral polarity in animals, which means having a stomach and back, has evolved twice. It's different in invertebrates and vertebrates. Even if you flip the things upside down, in other words, they are not the same," he said.

And the eye is another example, he said. "They are incredibly complex things, but they have evolved many times," he said. The famous biologist Ernst Mayr once wrote a paper stating that the eye had evolved 25 different times in nature, so "it's not that far-fetched to think that the nervous system would have evolved twice," DeSalle said.