Scientists on brink of HIV cure

Danish scientists are expecting results that will show that “finding a mass-distributable and affordable cure to HIV is possible”.

They are conducting clinical trials to test a “novel strategy” in which the HIV virus is stripped from human DNA and destroyed permanently by the immune system.

The move would represent a dramatic step forward in the attempt to find a cure for the virus, which causes Aids.

The scientists are currently conducting human trials on their treatment, in the hope of proving that it is effective. It has already been found to work in laboratory tests.

The technique involves releasing the HIV virus from “reservoirs” it forms in DNA cells, bringing it to the surface of the cells. Once it comes to the surface, the body’s natural immune system can kill the virus through being boosted by a “vaccine”.

In vitro studies — those that use human cells in a laboratory — of the new technique proved so successful that in January, the Danish Research Council awarded the team 12 million Danish kroner (£1.5 million) to pursue their findings in clinical trials with human subjects.

These are now under way, and according to Dr Søgaard, the early signs are “promising”.

Dr Ole Søgaard, a senior researcher at the Aarhus University Hospital in Denmark who is leading the study said: “I am almost certain that we will be successful in releasing the reservoirs of HIV.

“The challenge will be getting the patients’ immune system to recognise the virus and destroy it. This depends on the strength and sensitivity of individual immune systems.”

Fifteen patients are currently taking part in the trials, and if they are found to have successfully been cured of HIV, the “cure” will be tested on a wider scale.

Dr Søgaard stressed that a cure is not the same as a preventative vaccine, and that raising awareness of unsafe behaviour, including unprotected sex and sharing needles, remains of paramount importance in combating HIV.

With modern HIV treatment, a patient can live an almost normal life, even into old age, with limited side effects.

However, if medication is stopped, HIV reservoirs become active and start to produce more of the virus, meaning that symptoms can reappear within two weeks.

Finding a cure would free a patient from the need to take continuous HIV medication, and save health services billions of pounds.

The technique is being researched in Britain, but studies have not yet moved on to the clinical trial stage. Five universities — Oxford, Cambridge, Imperial College, London, University College, London and King’s College, London — have jointly formed the Collaborative HIV Eradication of Reservoirs UK Biomedical Research Centre group (CHERUB), which is dedicated to finding an HIV cure.

They have applied to the Medical Research Council for funding to conduct clinical trials, which will seek to combine techniques to release the reservoirs of HIV with immunotherapy to destroy the virus.

In addition, they are focusing on patients that have only recently been infected, as they believe this will improve chances of a cure. The group hopes to receive a funding decision in May.

“When the first patient is cured in this way it will be a spectacular moment,” says Dr John Frater, a clinical research fellow at the Nuffield School of Medicine, Oxford University, and a member of the CHERUB group.

“It will prove that we are heading in the right direction and demonstrate that a cure is possible. But I think it will be five years before we see a cure that can be offered on a large scale.”

The Danish team’s research is among the most advanced and fast moving in the world, as that they have streamlined the process of putting the latest basic science discoveries into clinical testing.

This means that researchers can progress more quickly to clinical trials, accelerating the process and reaching reliable results sooner than many others.

The technique uses drugs called HDAC Inhibitors, which are more commonly used in treating cancer, to drive out the HIV from a patient’s DNA. The Danish researchers are using a particularly powerful type of HDAC inhibitor called Panobinostat.

Five years ago, the general consensus was that HIV could not be cured. But then Timothy Ray Brown, an HIV sufferer — who has become known in the field as the Berlin Patient — developed leukaemia.

He had a bone marrow transplant from a donor with a rare genetic mutation that made his cells resistant to HIV. As a result, in 2007 Mr Brown became the first man to ever be fully cured of the disease.

Replicating this procedure on a mass scale is impossible. Nevertheless, the Brown case caused a sea change in research, with scientists focusing on finding a cure as well as suppressing the symptoms.

Read more at The Telegraph

New Clues Behind Antimatter Mystery Found by LHC

How the modern universe is primarily composed of matter and not antimatter has foxed astrophysicists for decades, but a result from a Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiment has uncovered a new clue behind the matter-antimatter asymmetry mystery.

During high-energy proton collisions in 2011, the worlds most powerful particle accelerator, located at the France-Swiss border near Geneva, created BOs mesons — hadronic subatomic particles comprised of one quark and one antiquark — inside the LHCb experiment.

By observing the rapid decay of the BOs, physicists were able to identify the neutral particle’s decay products — i.e. the particles that it decayed into. After a huge number of proton collisions and BOs decay events, physicists have announced that more matter particles are generated than antimatter during neutral BOs decays.

“The discovery of the asymmetric behavior in the BOs particle comes with a significance of more than 5 sigma — a result that was only possible thanks to the large amount of data provided by the LHC and to the LHCb detector’s particle identification capabilities,” Pierluigi Campana, spokesperson for the LHCb collaboration, said in a CERN announcementon Wednesday (April 24). “Experiments elsewhere have not been in a position to accumulate a large enough number of BOs decays.” 5-sigma is the statistical “gold standard” of a discovery in particle physics.

This preference of matter over antimatter in decay products of particles is known as a “CP violation.” Generally, the laws of physics will only allow equal quantities of matter and antimatter to be produced in decay events (called “CP symmetry”). However, there are some exceptions known within the Standard Model of physics.

Violation of CP symmetry was first documented in the 1960s in the decay of neutral kaon particles. Since then, Japanese and US labs have detected CP violation in BO mesons. Recently, the LHCb experiment has detected CP violation in B+ mesons. And now, the decay of BOs is showing similar behavior.

At the time of the Big Bang, it is thought that equal quantities of matter and antimatter were created, but how did matter overwhelm antimatter to form the universe we know and love today? Although the effect of a slight asymmetry in BOs decay products is suggestive, the effect is very small, but it is another clue as to why the nature of our universe prefers matter over antimatter.

Read more at Discovery News

Computer Scientists Suggest New Spin On Origins of Evolvability: Competition to Survive Not Necessary?

Scientists have long observed that species seem to have become increasingly capable of evolving in response to changes in the environment. But computer science researchers now say that the popular explanation of competition to survive in nature may not actually be necessary for evolvability to increase.

In a paper published this week in PLOS ONE, the researchers report that evolvability can increase over generations regardless of whether species are competing for food, habitat or other factors.

Using a simulated model they designed to mimic how organisms evolve, the researchers saw increasing evolvability even without competitive pressure.

"The explanation is that evolvable organisms separate themselves naturally from less evolvable organisms over time simply by becoming increasingly diverse," said Kenneth O. Stanley, an associate professor at the College of Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Central Florida. He co-wrote the paper about the study along with lead author Joel Lehman, a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Texas at Austin.

The finding could have implications for the origins of evolvability in many species.

"When new species appear in the future, they are most likely descendants of those that were evolvable in the past," Lehman said. "The result is that evolvable species accumulate over time even without selective pressure."

During the simulations, the team's simulated organisms became more evolvable without any pressure from other organisms out-competing them. The simulations were based on a conceptual algorithm.

"The algorithms used for the simulations are abstractly based on how organisms are evolved, but not on any particular real-life organism," explained Lehman.

The team's hypothesis is unique and is in contrast to most popular theories for why evolvability increases.

"An important implication of this result is that traditional selective and adaptive explanations for phenomena such as increasing evolvability deserve more scrutiny and may turn out unnecessary in some cases," Stanley said.

Read more at Science Daily

Developmental Neurobiology: How the Brain Folds to Fit

During fetal development of the mammalian brain, the cerebral cortex undergoes a marked expansion in surface area in some species, which is accommodated by folding of the tissue in species with most expanded neuron numbers and surface area. Researchers have now identified a key regulator of this crucial process.

Different regions of the mammalian brain are devoted to the performance of specific tasks. This in turn imposes particular demands on their development and structural organization. In the vertebrate forebrain, for instance, the cerebral cortex -- which is responsible for cognitive functions -- is remarkably expanded and extensively folded exclusively in mammalian species. The greater the degree of folding and the more furrows present, the larger is the surface area available for reception and processing of neural information. In humans, the exterior of the developing brain remains smooth until about the sixth month of gestation. Only then do superficial folds begin to appear and ultimately dominate the entire brain in humans. Conversely mice, for example, have a much smaller and smooth cerebral cortex.

"The mechanisms that control the expansion and folding of the brain during fetal development have so far been mysterious," says Professor Magdalena Götz, a professor at the Institute of Physiology at LMU and Director of the Institute for Stem Cell Research at the Helmholtz Center Munich. Götz and her team have now pinpointed a major player involved in the molecular process that drives cortical expansion in the mouse. They were able to show that a novel nuclear protein called Trnp1 triggers the enormous increase in the numbers of nerve cells which forces the cortex to undergo a complex series of folds. Indeed, although the normal mouse brain has a smooth appearance, dynamic regulation of Trnp1 results in activating all necessary processes for the formation of a much enlarged and folded cerebral cortex.

Levels of Trnp1 control expansion and folding

"Trnp1 is critical for the expansion and folding of the cerebral cortex, and its expression level is dynamically controlled during development," says Götz. In the early embryo, Trnp1 is locally expressed in high concentrations. This promotes the proliferation of self-renewing multipotent neural stem cells and supports tangential expansion of the cerebral cortex. The subsequent fall in levels of Trnp1 is associated with an increase in the numbers of various intermediate progenitors and basal radial glial cells. This results in the ordered formation and migration of a much enlarged number of neurons forming folds in the growing cortex.

Read more at Science Daily

Physicists, Biologists Unite to Expose How Cancer Spreads

Cancer cells that can break out of a tumor and invade other organs are more aggressive and nimble than nonmalignant cells, according to a new multi-institutional nationwide study. These cells exert greater force on their environment and can more easily maneuver small spaces.

The researchers report in the journal Scientific Reports that a systematic comparison of metastatic breast-cancer cells to healthy breast cells revealed dramatic differences between the two cell lines in their mechanics, migration, oxygen response, protein production and ability to stick to surfaces. The researchers discovered new insights into how cells make the transition from nonmalignant to metastatic, a process that is not well understood.

The resulting catalogue of differences could someday help researchers detect cancerous cells earlier and someday prevent or treat metastatic cancer, which is responsible for 90 percent of all cancer deaths, according to the study. It was conducted by a network of 12 federally funded Physical Sciences-Oncology Centers (PS-OC) sponsored by the National Cancer Institute. PS-OC is a collaboration of researchers in the physical and biological sciences seeking a better understanding of the physical and chemical forces that shape the emergence and behavior of cancer.

A multi-institutional study including researchers from Princeton University's Physical Sciences-Oncology Center found that metastatic cancer cells are more aggressive and nimble than nonmalignant cells. The Princeton group used silicon-etched microchannels (above) to study the behavior and physical properties of cancer cells. In this device, metastatic cancer cells enter the narrow channels at one end and accelerate as they rapidly move down the channel. Such high motility is a hallmark of metastasis and also indicative of high glucose metabolism, another hallmark of cancer. (Image by Guillaume Lambert)

"By bringing together different types of experimental expertise to systematically compare metastatic and nonmetastatic cells, we have advanced our knowledge of how metastasis occurs," said Robert Austin, professor of physics and leader of the Princeton PS-OC, along with senior co-investigator Thea Tlsty of the University of California-San Francisco.

Researchers with the Princeton PS-OC, for instance, determined that metastatic cells, in spite of moving more slowly than nonmalignant cells, move farther and in a straighter line, Austin said. The investigators studied the cells' behavior in tiny cell-sized chambers and channels etched out of silicon and designed to mimic the natural environment of the body's interior.

"The mobility of these metastatic cells is an essential feature of their ability to break through the tough membrane [the extracellular matrix] that the body uses to wall off the tumor from the rest of the body," Austin said. "These cells are essentially jail-breakers."

The tiny silicon chambers were built using Princeton's expertise in microfabrication technology -- typically used to create small technologies such as integrated circuits and solar cells -- and are an example of the type of expertise that physicists and engineers can bring to cancer research, Austin said. For the current study, the Princeton team included physics graduate students David Liao and Guillaume Lambert, and postdoctoral researchers Liyu Liu and Saurabh Vyawahare. They worked closely with a research group led by James Sturm, Princeton's William and Edna Macaleer Professor of Engineering and Applied Science and director of the Princeton Institute for the Science and Technology of Materials (PRISM) where the microfabrication was done.

The Princeton PS-OC also includes collaborators at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and the University of California-Santa Cruz.

The nationwide PS-OC program aims to crack the difficulty of understanding and treating cancer by bringing in researchers from physics, engineering, computer science and chemistry, said Nastaran Zahir Kuhn, program manager for the PS-OC at the National Cancer Institute.

Other notable findings from the paper include that metastatic cells recover more rapidly from the stress of a low-oxygen environment than nonmetastatic cells, which is consistent with previous studies. Although the low-oxygen environment did kill many of the metastatic cells, the survivors rebounded vigorously, underscoring the likely role of individual cells in the spread of cancer. The study also looked at total protein production and detected proteins in the metastatic cells that are consistent with the physical properties such as mobility that malignant cells need to invade the extracellular matrix.

"The PS-OC program aims to bring physical sciences tools and perspectives into cancer research," Kuhn said. "The results of this study demonstrate the utility of such an approach, particularly when studies are conducted in a standardized manner from the beginning."

For the nationwide project, nearly 100 investigators from 20 institutions and laboratories conducted their experiments using the same two cell lines, reagents and protocols to assure that results could be compared. The experimental methods ranged from physical measurements of how the cells push on surrounding cells to measurements of gene and protein expression.

"Roughly 20 techniques were used to study the cell lines, enabling identification of a number of unique relationships between observations," Kuhn said.

Read more at Science Daily

New Excavations in Sweden Indicate Use of Fertilizers 5,000 Years Ago

Researchers from the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, have spent many years studying the remains of a Stone Age community in Karleby outside the town of Falköping, Sweden. The researchers have for example tried to identify parts of the inhabitants' diet. Right now they are looking for evidence that fertilisers were used already during the Scandinavian Stone Age, and the results of their first analyses may be exactly what they are looking for.

Using remains of grains and other plants and some highly advanced analysis techniques, the two researchers and archaeologists Tony Axelsson and Karl-Göran Sjögren have been able to identify parts of the diet of their Stone Age ancestors.

'Our first task was to find so-called macrofossils, such as old weed seeds or pieces of grain. By analysing macrofossils, we can learn a lot about Stone Age farming and how important farming was in relation to livestock ranching,' says Axelsson.

Another aim has been to collect animal bone material -- or simply 5,000 year old food remains. The researchers know that pieces of bones from cattle, pigs and sheep can be found at the site.

'By studying the levels of isotopes in the bones, we can for example find out where the animals were raised, which in turn can give important information about their role in trade,' says Sjögren.

The results of the first grain analyses have now been presented, and besides revealing that both barley and wheat were farmed at the site, they point to elevated levels of the isotope N15 (nitrogen 15). The elevated levels may indicate that fertilisers were used in the area of Karleby already 5,000 years ago.

'We will continue our analyses both in the field and in the lab, and are hoping to find more macrofossils. Hopefully we'll find some weed seeds, as they may help confirm that fertilisers were indeed used since the type of weeds found in a field can signal whether fertilisers or some other method was used,' says Axelsson.

From Science Daily

Vaterite: Crystal Within a Crystal Helps Resolve an Old Puzzle

With the help of a solitary sea squirt, scientists have resolved the longstanding puzzle of the crystal structure of vaterite, an enigmatic geologic mineral and biomineral.

A form of calcium carbonate, vaterite can be found in Portland cement. Its quick transformation into other more stable forms of calcium carbonate when exposed to water helps make the cement hard and water resistant. As a biomineral, vaterite is found in such things as gallstones, fish otoliths, freshwater pearls, and the healed scars of some mollusk shells.

But unlike most minerals, vaterite has defied every effort to resolve its crystal structure, stymieing scientists for nearly 100 years. The structure of a mineral crystal is a critically important feature and is determined by how atoms are arranged in the crystal. The arrangement of atoms and the resulting crystal structure, for instance, make the difference between graphite and diamond, both forms of pure carbon.

Now, however, a team of scientists from the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology and the University of Wisconsin-Madison has discovered the crystalline secrets of vaterite with the help of a needlelike spicule from a sea squirt found in the Mediterranean and Red Seas. Writing today (April 25, 2013) in the journal Science, a group led by Boaz Pokroy of Technion and Pupa Gilbert of UW-Madison report that vaterite is composed of two different crystal structures that "coexist within a pseudo-single crystal."

"We never envisaged this scenario," explains Pokroy, a professor of materials science and engineering at Technion. "It was a total surprise, but at the same time it made so much sense knowing the years of conflicting results from different groups publishing on the structure of vaterite."

Ferreting out the structure of the mineral, according to Gilbert, a UW-Madison professor of physics, was challenging because of the difficulty of finding large, pure single crystals of vaterite. Enter Herdmania momus, a solitary sea squirt, and member of a large family of filter-feeding marine invertebrates.

"This organism makes the best crystal," avers Gilbert, an expert on crystalline biominerals formed by marine animals. "Geologic vaterite is extremely rare and unstable. The synthetic version is a powder and yields only small crystal grains with poor structure."

In nature, sea squirts and sponges use spicules as a skeleton to provide structural support. The spicule from the sea squirt Herdmania momus is composed of a large, single crystal that Pokroy and Gilbert used to unmask the atomic structure of its constituent biomineral vaterite using state-of-the-art high-resolution transmission electron microscopy at Technion.

"The Herdmania momus spicules were known to be made of vaterite since 1975 when a paper by the late Heinz Lowenstam of CalTech was published in Science," notes Pokroy. "It was clear that this would be the best source of biogenic vaterite and geologic vaterite we could ever find."

The big discovery, say Gilbert and Pokroy, is that vaterite is really two interspersed crystal structures: "It changes the concept of vaterite," Pokroy says, explaining that knowledge of the atomic properties of a crystalline structure enable prediction and explanation of its physical properties. "Now we know that 'vaterite' is not just one structure, but is composed of two different ones."

Read more at Science Daily

Maya Sun Observatory Hints at Origin of Civilization

The oldest ancient Maya ceremonial compound ever discovered in the Central American lowlands dates back 200 years before similar sites pop up elsewhere in the region, archaeologists announced today (April 25). The recently excavated plaza and pyramid would have likely served as a solar observatory for rituals.

The finding at a site called Ceibal suggests that the origins of the Maya civilization are more complex than first believed. Archaeologists hotly debate whether the Maya -- famous for their complex calendar system that spurred apocalypse rumors last year -- developed independently or whether they were largely inspired by an earlier culture known as the Olmec. The new research suggests the answer is neither.

"This major social change happened through interregional interactions," said study researcher Takeshi Inomata, an anthropologist at the University of Arizona. But it doesn't look like the Olmec inspired the Maya, Inomata told reporters. Rather, the entire region went through a cultural shift around 1000 B.C., with all nearby cultures adopting similar architectural and ceremonial styles.

"It's signaling to us that the Maya were not receiving this sophisticated stuff 500 years later from somebody else, but much of the innovation we're seeing out of the whole region may be coming out of Ceibal or a place like Ceibal," said Walter Witschey, an anthropologist at Longwood University in Virginia, who was not involved in the study.

Oldest ritual compound

The finding comes from seven years of archaeological excavations at Ceibal, a site in central Guatemala that was occupied continuously for 2,000 years. Getting to Ceibal's origins was no small feat: The earliest buildings were buried under 23 to 60 feet (7 to 18 meters) of sediment and later construction, said study co-researcher Daniela Triadan, also a University of Arizona anthropologist.

The earliest structures recently discovered include a plaza with a western building and an eastern platform, a pattern seen at later Maya sites and also at the Olmec center of La Venta on the Gulf Coast of what is now Mexico. The researchers used radiocarbon dating to peg the date of construction to about 1000 B.C. This technique analyzes organic materials for carbon-14, an isotope or variation of carbon that decays predictably. As such, carbon-14 acts as a chemical clock archaeologists can use to figure out how long something has been in the ground.

A construction date of 1000 B.C. makes the Ceibal structures about 200 years older than those at La Venta, meaning the Olmec's construction practices couldn't have inspired the Mayans, the researchers report Thursday (April 25) in the journal Science. Instead, it appears that the entire region underwent a shift around this time, with groups adopting each other's architecture and rituals, modifying them and inventing new additions.

"We are saying there was this connection with various groups, but we are saying it was probably not one directional influence," Inomata said.

There was an earlier Olmec center, San Lorenzo, which declined around 1150 B.C., but residents there did not build these distinctive ceremonial structures. By 850 B.C. or 800 B.C., the Maya at Ceibal had renovated their platform into a pyramid, which they continued refining until it reached a height of about 20 to 26 feet (6 to 8 m) by 700 B.C.

Starting a civilization

This early phase of Maya culture occurs before the group developed written language and before any record of their elaborate calendar system, so little is known about their beliefs, Inomata said. But the pyramid-and-plaza area was almost certainly a space for rituals. Among the artifacts found in the plaza are numerous greenstone axes, which seem to have been put there as offerings.

The architecture layout is what's known as a "group-E assemblage," said Witschey. These assemblages appear all over the Maya world and worked as solar observatories. From the western building, a view could stand and look at the eastern platform or pyramid, which would have posts at each end and at the center. On the summer solstice, the sunrise would occur over the northernmost marker; on the spring and fall equinoxes, it would be right over the center marker; and finally, on the winter solstice, the sun would rise over the southernmost marker, Witschey said.

"The first people who settled at Ceibal had, already, a well-developed idea about what a village would look like," Triadan said. "The transition from a mobile hunter-gatherer and horticultural lifestyle to permanently settled agriculturalists was rapid."

It's not clear what might have prompted the lowland Maya to give up their semi-settled life for permanent villages and cities, Inomata said. One possibility is that maize production became more efficient around 1000 B.C. The coastal Olmec people had long been able to grow maize reasonably well, given fertile soil from rivers feeding into the Gulf of Mexico. But the Maya lowlands were less wet and less fertile, with fewer fish and fowl that the Olmec could have depended on to round out their diets. If maize farming became more productive around 1000 B.C., however, it may have prompted the Maya to start staying put.

"At that point, it probably made sense to cut down many forest trees in the Maya lowlands and then commit more strongly to an agricultural way of life," Inomata said.

Members of the research team are currently working on environmental analysis to try to better understand the climate and weather of the area around the time of settlement. What does seem clear, Inomata said, is that Maya civilization didn't have to arise from an earlier, failing civilization.

"This study is not just a study about this specific civilization," he said. "We also want to think about how human society changed and how human society develops."

Read more at Discovery News

What If We Lost Our Moon?

Today I was asked a question that was motivated by the new movie Oblivion: What would happen to the Earth if the moon was destroyed? “I dunno,” I replied, “What does happen when the moon is destroyed?” When the expected why-the-chicken-crossed-the-road response didn’t come, I decided I’d better try and answer the question.

The first thing that came to mind is that it depends on the manner of the moon’s destruction. If it was, say, zapped to bits by a Death Star and those bits still floated in a cluster in the same orbit, I expect they would exert the same gravitational pull on Earth as does the intact moon, and not much would change on Earth.

We’d no longer watch the phases of the moon at night, but see a glittering cloud of debris which would probably be a lot brighter than the full moon, what with all those zillions of little surfaces to reflect sunlight. I know some astronomers who would really hate this new interference with their dark skies.

But if the moon were dragged off and completely removed, there would be none of its mass left to tug gravitationally on the Earth. One of the effects would be that we could throw out tide tables for good.

The ocean tides would still happen, but the bulge of water would follow the sun, so you could expect high tides around noon everywhere, everyday. I know some fishermen who would appreciate this.

Since the solid Earth flexes tidally, it makes sense that there might be some internal grumbling when Earth loses the moon. Earthquakes. Maybe a few volcanoes getting rowdy. That kind of stuff. But there’s no reason to worry (or hope) that California will fall into the Pacific. Sorry New York. Sorry Las Vegas.

The greater concern would be in the long-term, regarding the Earth’s wobbling spin axis. Right now the spin axis of the Earth very slowly wobbles over 26,000 years, like a slowing wobbling top, because of the tug of the sun. The wobble causes true north to not always point at Polaris, a.k.a., the North Star. Experts agree that the moon acts sort of like a shock absorber to this wobble — keeping it from getting out of hand (see the nitty gritty details in this SETI talk).

It’s possible that Earth without a moon would wobble wildly, sort of like Mars does. The Red Planet’s wobble is so extreme that it may be the cause of some cycles of climate change there. If the same thing happened here, Earth might wobble so much that seasons would become inhospitably extreme and Earth would be a much less stable and habitable planet.

Without the moon the tilt of the Earth’s axis could go from its current wobble of 22 to 25 degrees to a wide ride of zero to 85 degrees — zero would eliminate seasons, and 85 is basically the Earth leaning over on its side. If this happened, the current crisis we call global warming would be a very pleasant tea party by comparison.

Luckily, the wobbling would not affect things right away but over many millions of years.

Read more at Discovery News

Einstein's Theory Passes Extreme Gravity Test

Every human being that has ever lived could fit inside 1 cubic inch of space at the center of a newly found neutron star, called PSR J0348+0432, located about 7,000 light years from Earth.

But extreme density is not its most unusual feature. The star, which packs about twice the mass of the sun into an object less than 13 miles in diameter, spins around 25 times a second, emitting a steady and detectable radio pulse. Plus, it has a companion close by, a dying star known as a white dwarf, which circles around every 144 minutes.

Assembling the pieces of the system took some time, but when astronomers realized what they had found an idea took shape: Would the pulsar’s extreme gravity cause the pair to move closer together at the rate predicted by physicist Albert Einstein’s long-standing general relativity theory? Or, was this a situation better explained by other models, such as those that tiptoe into the realm of quantum mechanics where the rules of gravity break down?

“There are many theories about what happens to matter under such extreme conditions,” John Antoniadis, with the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Bonn, Germany, told Discovery News.

Making the measurements required patience and extreme precision, but in the end the gravitational impact predicted by Einstein’s theory proved correct. In this case, the loss of energy due to gravity waves from the system escaping into space slowed the pair’s orbital period by eight-millionths of a second per year.

“It is essential to know the masses of the pulsar and white dwarf to high accuracy because these are the actual inputs that General Relativity or other theories use to predict the orbital decay,” said astronomer Ryan Lynch, with McGill University in Montreal, Canada.

Astronomers also needed a way to precisely measure the pair’s orbital period. The pulsating neutron star served as their clock.

“These things came together to make J0348 a power tool,” Lynch wrote in an email to Discovery News.

Scientists are continuing to study the system in hopes of learning more about how it formed. They believe it has been in its present state for about 2 billion years.

Astronomers also remain on the hunt for even more extreme conditions to test Einstein’s theory. In particular, scientists would like to find a pulsar orbiting a black hole, which is an object even denser than a neutron star that does not even allow photons of light to escape its gravitational grip.

“This would allow us to test the properties of black holes in great detail and see if they follow Einstein's predictions,” Antoniadis said.

Gravity at the surface of J0348, the heaviest neutron star found so far, is 300 billion times stronger than Earth’s gravity. At its center, 1 billion tons of matter can fit into an area the size of a sugar cube.

Read more at Discovery News