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Exactly why James Markam is alive and well is a bit of a mystery. The octogenarian has lost four siblings to cancer, heart disease and emphysema, all before they reached the age of 62. Yet the retired airline executive recalls only one bout of sickness, culminating with a chest cold, 50 years ago.

Scientists are taking a deep look at Markam’s genetics to see if there’s something protecting him from illnesses that affect others his age, such as Alzheimer’s, cancer, diabetes and heart disease.

Markam, 83, of San Diego is one of more than 1,300 individuals identified as having what Eric Topol, director of the Scripps Translational Science Institute, called “Teflon-coated” genes.

“We think it’s in the genome in these individuals,” said Topol, who is leading research of healthy older people called the Wellderly Study at the institute. “You don’t see any environmental thing that would be explaining this.”

The study expects to have the first set of participants’ genes sequenced by the end of the year, said Cliff Reid, chief executive officer of Mountain View’s Complete Genomics Inc., which is doing the work for free.

Scientists and pharmaceutical companies are closely watching Scripps’ research project and others like it, eager for clues that may help them develop new treatments to ward off diseases that have long afflicted the elderly.

For drug companies such as Merck & Co. and Eli Lilly & Co., the hope is that the research will lead to the creation of billion-dollar blockbuster therapies.

The human genome is a transcript of an individual’s DNA code containing the instructions for making cells in the body. Scientists say the genome may provide keys to understanding health and disease.

The projects reflect researchers’ evolving views of how genetic mutations cause disease. While scientists once thought common genetic variants were responsible for many common diseases, recent research has changed that view.

Instead, combinations of the millions of rare variants are the more likely culprits behind widespread ailments, making them difficult to identify.

Creating a clean map of a healthy genome that can be quickly compared with the DNA that makes a person vulnerable to illness, the thinking goes, will allow researchers to more readily search for the roots of disease.

“What it does is accelerate discoveries of the basics of human disease,” Reid said. “The Wellderly data set promises to offer a superior set of harmless variations; that will enable researchers to more effectively separate the harmless variations from the disease-causing variations.”

Scientists have unraveled the entire genetic code of the tomato, the world’s second-most valuable vegetable after the potato.

From pasta sauce to curry, this South American transplant has found itself at home in cuisines around the world. It is the latest important food crop to yield its genetic secrets, published in Nature.

This breakthrough provides a glimpse at how the genetic revolution is helping keep our favorite foods on the table.

As befits this international vegetable, more than 300 scientists from 14 countries worked on the eight-year project.

Having a genetic map will provide a valuable starting point for breeders looking to make a better, hardier, more nutritious or simply tastier tomato.  

“This will be facilitated now by the fact that we now know not only what genes are there, but their order,” says Giovanni Giuliano with the Tomato Genome Consortium and a researcher at the Italian national energy agency, which also does crop breeding.

Though it is the first tomato to have its DNA sequence decoded, Giuliano says there’s nothing particularly special about the variety chosen for the project, known simply as Heinz 1706.

“It so happens that the day the person that made the first DNA library to be sequenced, they had Heinz 1706 seeds, and they started from that one. It is as simple as that.”

More than 7,000 years ago, prehistoric people in the African Sahara were making dairy products, such as butter, yogurt and cheese.

The discovery, based on the identification of dairy fats on ancient pottery shards found in Libya, is the first to provide a definitive date for early dairy farming in Africa. Adding to findings from Europe and the Middle East, the study points to milk products as a main reason why people in many places may have chosen to give up the hunter-gatherer lifestyle in favor of a more settled existence.

A gigantic tyrannosaurus skeleton tucked away in a New York warehouse was seized by US authorities, who hope to return the prehistoric remains to their native Mongolia, officials said.

The skeleton, about eight feet (2.43 meters) tall and a whopping 24 feet (7.31m) wide, was locked up at Cadogan Tate Fine Art storage facility after being sold last month at Heritage Auctions for $1.05 million.

A spokesperson for the auction house on Friday confirmed the seizure to AFP.

The tyrannosaurus a tarbosaurus bataar walked Central Asia’s Gobi Desert on two feet at the end of the Cretaceous period, some 70 million years ago.

In May 2010, the skeleton was shipped to Florida from Britain. It was sold at a New York auction on May 20 for $1.05 million by Heritage Auctions.

But according to documents filed Monday in US District Court in New York, it is alleged to have been illegally imported from Britain through false claims about what it was and its value.

A Manhattan prosecutor filed to seize the reconstituted skeleton Monday and return it to Mongolian authorities, who had tried in vain to prevent the sale, and the request was approved by judge Kevin Casten.

In 1924, Mongolia determined that fossils are national property, and their export is strictly forbidden.

Mongolian President Tsakhia Elbegdorj rejoiced Monday at the legal proceedings, saying the tyrannosaurus represents an important part of the Mongolian people’s cultural heritage.

“We are one step closer to bringing this rare tyrannosaurus bataar skeleton back home to the people of Mongolia,”

Heritage Auctions’ co-chair Jim Halperin, meanwhile, said there should be a “fair and just” solution for Florida-based seller Eric Prokopi.

He “spent a year of his life and considerable expense identifying, restoring, mounting and preparing what had previously been a much less valuable matrix of disassembled, underlying bones and bone fragments.”

Prokopi has denied being an international trafficker of historical artifacts.

Officials at NASA say that a crater on the moon hold vast quantities of water in the form of ice, a discovery that could pave the way for future mission to the Earth satellite.

New research shows there may be frozen water inside a massive crater, called the Shackleton crater, say NASA scientists. Researchers from NASA, MIT, and Brown University say they studied the crater with the help of a laser device, and they note that recorded measurements indicate the presence of ice. The team of astronomers say the laser lit up the area and allowed them to measure the natural reflectivity inside the crater.

Ants in a laboratory nest are individually marked with dabs of paint to help researchers at the University of Arizona track their activities.

This cross-section of an anglerfish’s ovary is reminiscent of another sea creature—the nautilus. Its otherwise-dull spirally composition caught James Hayden’s eye, so he used fluorescent hematoxylin and Eosin stains to illuminate the different details of the image. “I was trying to create an image that sharply defined the boundaries of the different parts of the specimen, so that the image could actually be used to demonstrate the morphology of the ovary and eggs,” he says.

the Cassini spacecraft conducted a flyby of Saturn’s sixth-largest moon, Enceladus, snapping some rather breathtaking photos along the way. The flyby, whose purpose was to gather the highest-resolution photos ever of the moon’s southern polar region and to thermally map the “tiger stripe” terrain there, gathered some stunning images including some of the geyser-like plumes Cassini discovered on the moon’s surface during previous flybys.

The photos themselves provided by Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for Operations (CICLOPS) are raw and unprocessed, but along with the thermal data they should help researchers piece together a detailed map of Enceladus’s geologically active southern pole.

The final nail in the coffin may have been dealt to the idea that neutrino particles can travel faster than light.

The same lab that first reported the shocking results last September, which could have upended much of modern physics, has now reported that the subatomic particles called neutrinos “respect the cosmic speed limit.”
Physicist Sergio Bertolucci, research director at Switzerland’s CERN physics lab, presented the results Friday at the 25th International Conference on Neutrino Physics and Astrophysics in Kyoto, Japan.
“Although this result isn’t as exciting as some would have liked, it is what we all expected deep down,” Bertolucci said in a statement. ast year, OPERA measured that neutrinos were making the 454-mile (730-kilometer) underground trip between the two labs more speedily than light, arriving there 60 nanoseconds earlier than a beam of light would.
At the time, the physicists were stunned because such a result seemed to break Einstein’s prediction that nothing could travel faster than light. This idea is at the heart of his theory of special relativity, on which much of our modern technology and scientific understanding is based.

The OPERA researchers weren’t sure what could explain their anomalous results, having checked and rechecked their work, so they released their findings to the larger community of physicists in hopes that experts around the world could help them figure it out.
“The story captured the public imagination, and has given people the opportunity to see the scientific method in action an unexpected result was put up for scrutiny, thoroughly investigated and resolved in part thanks to collaboration between normally competing experiments,” Bertolucci said. “That’s how science moves forward.”

Could some really great cupcakes be enough to send Americans back to the Moon?
More than a dozen US universities are hosting events on Saturday to urge support for the cash-strapped space agency, which faces major cuts to its planetary programs in fiscal year 2013.
Ranging from shoe shines to car washes and bake sales, the events are not actually designed to raise money to send to NASA, the organizers stressed.
“Our goal is not to raise money but to raise awareness and to have people tell Congress to put the funds back to last year’s funding level,” said Cindy Conrad, an assistant at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado.
NASA’s planetary programs are expected to be cut by more than $300 million dollars in President Barack Obama’s next budget, and the cost-cutting has already axed a major Mars project with Europe.
The US space agency has faced harsh criticism in recent years by slashing a program to return Americans to the Moon and retiring the space shuttle fleet in 2011 without a replacement vehicle to take astronauts to space.

Sierra Nevada Corp.’s (SNC) Dream Chaser Space System (DCSS) has completed its preliminary design review (PDR).  This review was the third major system-level review for the DCSS as part of NASA’s commercial crew development round 2 (CCDev2) program.

SNC’s PDR included a review of all major elements of its orbital flight program including the Dream Chaser orbital crew vehicle, the Atlas V launch vehicle, and Dream Chaser mission and ground systems.  The entire design, architecture and performance of the Dream Chaser Space System was reviewed and evaluated by NASA and the DCSS partner companies. It was determined that the SNC preliminary design for DCSS is complete.

The Program’s PDR came during the same week when the Dream Chaser vehicle began its flight test program, illustrating SNC’s approach of concurrent design and development.  On May 29, the Dream Chaser Program completed the successful first flight of Dream Chaser full scale vehicle.  The flight met all the pre-established flight test goals and is a moving towards preparing the vehicle for an autonomous approach and landing test scheduled for later this summer.

 The Dream Chaser is a crewed suborbital and orbital vertical-takeoff, horizontal landing lifting-body space plane that was developed by SpaceDev, a subsidiary of SNC. The Dream Chaser is designed to carry seven people to and from low earth orbit. The vehicle is designed to be launched vertically on an Atlas V rocket and land horizontally on conventional runways.

The Dream Chaser was publicly announced in September of 2004 as a candidate for the NASA vision for space exploration, and then for the commercial orbital transportation services program. The DCSS is being developed as part of NASA’s venture into commercially provided crew transport.

Also  Sierra Nevada will utilize Virgin Galactic to market Dream Chaser commercial services and will also use “Virgin’s WhiteKnightTwo carrier aircraft as a platform for drop trials of the Dream Chaser atmospheric test vehicle” in 2012

At the time, the mother was just 18 weeks into the pregnancy.

The doctors said the findings, reported in Science Translational Medicine, could eventually lead to foetuses being screened for thousands of genetic disorders in a single and safe test.

However, they also caution it would raise “many ethical questions”.

The scientists at the University of Washington used pieces of the foetus’ DNA which naturally float around in the pregnant woman’s blood.

These fragments were then pieced together using the parents’ DNA as a guide to build a complete ‘map’ of the foetus’s genome 

This work opens up the possibility that we will be able to scan the whole genome of the foetus for more than 3,000 single-gene disorders through a single, non-invasive test”

Dr Jay ShendureUniversity of Washington

They then compared the genetic map drawn 18 weeks into pregnancy with the foetus’ actual DNA taken from the umbilical cord after birth. It was 98% accurate.

The Grand Prismatic hot spring is a deep thermal spring, richly colored by growths of exotic heat-loving micro-organisms. Some believe they offer a glimpse of what the first life on earth would have looked like.

A parachute destined for Mars experiences 81,250 pounds of drag force in the world’s largest wind tunnel at NASA Ames Research Center. Scientists went on to deploy the parachute 13 more times this past spring before deeming the 51-foot-diameter mammoth fit to land the next Red Planet rover, the Mars Science Laboratory. Cushioning a 2,000-pound rover from a supersonic descent in the thin Martian atmosphere demands special stamina. The chute gets its strength from stronger synthetic fiber, called Technora, in its suspension lines. Now a parachute identical to the one that was tested is packed and ready for the 2011 launch of the MSL mission, which will explore Mars for signs that it could have once supported life. “The parachute’s got a tough job,” says Douglas S. Adams, the MSL parachute senior engineer. “It passed [the tests] with flying colors.”

Plastic spheres block sunlight and cancer, If you make a mess, just cover it up. That’s the theory behind the Department of Water and Power’s latest project in Los Angeles, which aims to prevent the formation of a carcinogen in two drinking-water sources, the Ivanhoe [pictured] and Elysian reservoirs. The unwanted chemical, bromate, forms when sunlight, chlorine and the naturally occurring mineral bromide intermingle.

The city considered solutions, like a tarp or metal cover, but they were all too costly, labor-intensive or ugly. Then the ball idea, courtesy of LADWP Brian White, floated to the top. The layer of three million black polyethylene balls prevents sunlight from completing the deadly cocktail. If it seems a bit temporary, it is—officials plan to retire the balls in five years, when a replacement underground reservoir near Griffith Park is finished.

It will require 30 million of the 40 cent balls ($12 million) to cover the Ivanhoe and Elysian reservoirs.

One of fifteen incredible extreme weather photographs (this one shows a tornado kicking up some serious dust) taken by Jim Reed.

A close-up view of a mammoth bone found in 2004 by a private fossil collector in Vero Beach clearly shows the sketch of a large elephant or mammoth. The bone and carving are estimated to be 12,000 to 14,000 years old and provide evidence that humans and large mammals coexisted in Florida during the Pleistocene period.