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Showing posts with label University of Manchester. Show all posts
Showing posts with label University of Manchester. Show all posts

Monday, January 25, 2016

Rotation speed, bad news for Red Planet pioneers



A team of scientists from Holland, Germany and the United Kingdom (UK’s) University of Manchester have revealed the importance of a circadian body clock that matches the rotational speed of the earth in a new study, reports NaijaAgroNet.

According to the Media Relations Officer, Faculty of Life Sciences, University of Manchester, Mr. Mike Addelman, these group of scientists studied animals in which variation in a single gene dramatically speeds up the natural circadian cycle from 24 to 20 hours.

“It is the first study to demonstrate of the value of having an internal body clock which beats in tune with the speed of the earth’s rotation,” he said.

The researchers, Addelman said, released animals with 24 hour or 20 hour clocks into outdoor pens, with free access to food, and studied how the proportion of animals with fast clocks changed in the population over a period of 14 months.

This, he said, allowed the team to study the impact of clock-speed in context of the “real-world” rather than indoors.

Mice with fast-running clock, experts said, gradually become less common with successive generations, so that by the end of the study, the population was dominated by animals with “normal” 24h clocks.

The research has potentially important implications for human health:  clock-disruption associated with abnormal work and lighting conditions, such as night shift work leads to health problems, such as increased risk of Type 2 diabetes.

The scientists pointed out that these studies now extended to the potential implications of space travel in the future, citing for instance, that the Martian day is 37 minutes longer than that on earth.

Professor Andrew Loudon, from The University of Manchester said the rotation speed of Mars may be within the limits of some people’s internal clock, but people with short running clocks, such as extreme morning types, are likely to face serious intractable long-term problems, and would perhaps be excluded from any plans National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has to send humans to Mars.

“The prospect of settling on Mars is a somewhat distant prospect. But if we ever do get to the Red Planet, I suspect we will be faced with body clock problems; those people with abnormally slow body clocks would be best suited to living there,” Prof. Loudon said.

Correctly, he pointed out that ticking body clock is essential for normal survival in the wild, and this has to be in phase with the rotation speed of the earth.

“Animals with clocks that do not run in synchrony with earth are selected against. Thus, the body clock has evolved as an essential survival component for life on earth,” he explained.

 Isaac Oyimah/GEE

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Friday, July 3, 2015

Astronomers predict fireworks from close encounter of stellar kind



PR@ITRealms:
A team of Astronomers from the University of Manchester’s Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics has predicted fireworks from close encounter of stellar kind, reports NaijaAgroNet.

They also said that the stellar remnant the size of a city and one of the brightest stars in the Milky Way, which is the small object, a pulsar, initially discovered by NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. 
According to the university source, dedicated follow-up radio observations led by a team at The University of Manchester’s Jodrell Bank Centre for Astrophysics, using the 76-m Lovell Radio Telescope, now show that the pulsar travels in an extreme orbit around a companion star. 

A press statement made available to NaijaAgroNet stated that this orbit will, in early 2018, plunge the pulsar through a broad disk of gas and dust round its partner, generating a spectacular series of explosions which will create a range of emissions from radio waves to gamma rays. Scientists are planning a global campaign to watch the event, which could reveal important information about the formation of stars.

The pulsar, known as PSR J2032+4127, is a highly magnetized neutron star weighing nearly twice as much as the Sun. It spins 7 times a second, but is only about 20 kilometres across.  Following its discovery by Fermi in 2009, precision timing of its radio flashes indicates that it is falling rapidly under the gravitational pull of a massive young star known as MT91 213. The orbit derived from these observations has a period of about 25 years and shows that the pulsar will pass very close to the star in less than 3 years time.

MT91 213, a stellar type known as a Be star, is fifteen times the mass of the Sun and shines 10,000 times brighter.  Be stars are characterized by strong outflows, called stellar winds, and large encircling disks of material.  As the pulsar speeds around this inferno, astronomers will be able to use it as a probe to measure the star's gravity, magnetic field, the density of the wind flowing from the star and the structure of its disk.

Professor Andrew Lyne of The University of Manchester is lead author of a paper on the phenomenon, which has been published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. He said: “This is the longest-period binary system known to contain a radio pulsar and provides an excellent opportunity to study these massive stars, important progenitors for supernovae and sources of many of the heavy elements in the Galaxy.”

Dr Paul Ray of the Naval Research Laboratories, Washington, added: “When we discovered this pulsar in 2009, we noticed that it was in the same direction as this massive star in the constellation Cygnus, but our initial measurements did not give any evidence that either star was a member of a binary system. The only way to escape that conclusion was if the binary system had a very long orbital period, much longer than the longest known pulsar-massive star binary at the time, which seemed unlikely.”

It was only the long-term dedicated timing campaign at Jodrell Bank that revealed the true binary nature of the system.  It seems that the system just barely escaped being thrown apart in the violence of the supernova explosion that created the pulsar and placed it in this very long and eccentric orbit.

There are half a dozen other such systems with companion stars that are burning hydrogen, but none are apparently as extreme in mass, orbital period or proximity to the Earth as PSR J2032+4127.  Two of these are also known pulsar/Be-star systems and contain the pulsars B1259-63 and J1638-4725. High-energy observations of B1259-63 during a recent pass by its companion SS 2883 revealed intense flashes of high-energy gamma-ray and X-ray radiation as the pulsar dived through the star's disk.  Similar high-energy radiation is likely during J2032+4127's pass by MT91 213 and this event will offer an exciting opportunity to investigate close-up the properties of such a rare and extreme system.

Professor Ben Stappers of Manchester University said: “This forewarning of the energetic fireworks expected at closest approach in three years' time allows us to prepare to study the system across the entire electromagnetic spectrum with the largest telescopes.”

After the close encounter, the pulsar's speed will then carry it away from the star whose gravity will eventually drag it back for another roasting a quarter of a century later.
 
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Monday, August 5, 2013

Expert says lab grown meat is good

Assorted pieces of meat
A bioethicist, Dr Iain Brassington of the Centre for Social Ethics and Policy, University of Manchester has declared that lab grown meat is a good.

Dr Brassington, told NaijaAgroNet that while the sight of someone eating a very expensive burger is clearly something of a publicity stunt, the underlying idea behind laboratory-grown meat is sound. The research is highly laudable, because what it promises is so desirable.
 
“Meat-eating is morally problematic, and many people are or think they should be vegetarian as a result,” he said, stressing that for one thing, the welfare of the animals we eat is seen by many as a concern. Noting that not only might it be problematic for some that an animal is killed for our benefit at all – but it’s undeniable that the quality of life of many of those animals is abysmal. Carnivores often have blood on their hands in more than the literal sense.

For another, he pointed out that conventional meat-rearing is phenomenally environmentally destructive, because it takes many kilos of grain and many litres of water to produce one kilo of beef.
This, he said, pits hungry humans and cattle in direct competition, meaning that the cost of survival for the poorest is higher than it would be in a vegetarian world. But, in addition, all that livestock has to live somewhere, and this contributes to massive deforestation. And it’s hard to forget the sheer amount of methane that ruminants produce.

“Lab-grown meat offers to solve both these problems. Welfare concerns can be eliminated simply by virtue of there being no real animal to suffer and die. At the same time, the signs are that lab-grown meat would be much less resource-intensive. It would still probably not be as efficient a means of getting protein as vegetarianism, but it would represent a great improvement,” he explained.

Hence there is good reason to welcome the advent of lab-grown meat, and to hope for the day when it’s in the supermarkets.


Correspondent/NaijaAgroNet
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