08

Nov. 14, 2009 Anti-Anemia Drugs Risky

Cancer patients who took drugs to cut the risk of anemia were twice
as likely to develop blood clots in the lungs or legs as other patients, a
decade-long study of more than 55,000 cancer patients has found.

Science

News in Brief Dinosaurs May Have Been Deafness Gene

Smart SMS Applications to Expand
In a world of smartphones, text messaging might seem
humdrum. But SMS could be used to bring Internet-
based services to users with basic handsets.
Umesh Chandra of Nokia Research Center in Palo
Alto, California, is building a network protocol that
will enable cellphones to connect via SMS with Internet
servers.
He thinks it will be particularly useful in countries like
India, where lots of people have cellphones but few can
afford advanced models, NewScientist reported.
One Facebook-like app lets people text to find friends
who are in the area. The system would use location in-
formation based on the nearest cellphone base stations to
send a response.
It would also be able to send details of any nearby ac-
tive vendors on sites such as Craigslist. This is an im-
provement on previous location-based SMS systems,
which could only provide static information such as the
position of the nearest library.
The character limit for text messages restricts how
much information can be exchanged.
The new system gets round this by developing a
concise syntax to encapsulate the information the user
Warm-Blooded
Many dinosaurs may have been warm-blooded just like mammals or birds, poten-
tially explaining their extraordinary success before their extinction.
For decades, scientists assumed that because dinosaurs resembled lizards, they
were cold-blooded as well, their internal temperature rising and falling with the
outside world. However, birds are warm-blooded, and the fact that birds seem
to have descended from dinosaurs raises the question of whether their ancestors
were as well, LiveScience reported.
If dinosaurs were warm-blooded, they would have possessed the potential for
athletic abilities rivaling those of mammals and birds. They could have survived
in colder habitats that would kill cold-blooded creatures, enabling them to cover
the entire landscape. Such advantages do carry a price--warm-blooded animals
need much more food than their cold-blooded counterparts because their rapid
metabolisms fatally malfunction if they cool down too much from lack of fuel.
To investigate whether dinosaurs were warm-blooded, researchers sought to infer
how much energy they used. For instance, if walking and running burned more energy
than a cold-blooded metabolism can supply, dinosaurs were probably warm-blooded.
After investigating anatomical models of 13 extinct dinosaur species, both the
methods the scientists employed suggest at least five of them, and perhaps all
of them, were probably warm-blooded athletic animals, because their energy re-
quirements during walking and running were too high for cold-blooded animals to
generate.
Discovered
A gene that causes deafness in the elderly has been identified by scientists.
The findings will help doctors better understand the nature of age-related decline in hear-
ing and may lead to new therapies to prevent or treat the condition, Telegraph reported.
The gene is a protein called Bak that makes hair cells in the inner ear self-destruct, as peo-
ple grow older.
Researchers at the University of Wisconsin found that removing the gene in mice prevent-
ed the death of these cells and stopped deafness developing in animals.
Tests on five- and 15-month mice found those who had the protein knocked out had much
better hearing than mice whose genes were left alone.
Most mice display at least some degree of age-related-hearing loss (AHL) and the age of
onset varies from three months to 20 months.
Dr Tomas Prolla and colleagues said, “Bak is required for the development of age-related-
hearing loss.”
The condition is a universal feature of aging in humans and other mammals, and is the
most common sensory disorder in the elderly population.
It affects more than four-in-10 people over the age of 65 and because of its high prevalence
it is a “major social and health problem”, said Dr Prolla.
He said AHL is characterized by an age-dependent decline of auditory function associated
with loss of sensory hair cells and spiral ganglian (SG) neurons in the inner ear.
Dr Prolla said hair cells and SG neurons do not regenerate in mammals and loss of these
long-lived cells leads to permanent hearing impairment.

Iranians Produce
wants.
The system can locate a person using it to within 300
meters in cities with a high density of cellphone base
stations such as Bangalore, India.

Plavix Works in Men, Women

The popular blood-thinner Plavix prevents heart attacks
and strokes in both women and men, but the benefits dif-
fer slightly by gender, US researchers said.
They analyzed data from five major studies of more
than 80,000 people, 30 percent of them women, and
found that Plavix or clopidogrel cut the risk of having
a heart attack or stroke by 16 percent in men and by 7
percent in women, Reuters reported.
The study by Dr. Jeffrey Berger of the New York Uni-
versity’s School of Medicine offers the first look at gen-
der differences with Plavix.
Plavix is used widely in treating heart
attack patients. It works in a similar way
to aspirin by stopping platelets--tiny
blood cells vital for the normal clotting
process--from clumping together and
forming life-threatening clots.
In women, the benefit from Plavix
mostly comes from a reduction in the risk of heart at-
tacks, but does not significantly reduce the risk of stroke
or death.
In men, Plavix significantly cut the risk of all three--
heart attacks, stroke and death.
The study also found differences in the risk of bleed-
Nano-Organic Fertilizer
I
ranian researchers have produced
the first nano-organic iron-chelat-
ed fertilizer in the world, which is
also the first such fertilizer for Iran.
Nano fertilizers have unique features
like ultra high absorption, increase of
20 percent to 200 percent in production,
rise in photosynthesis by 3.5 times and
a 70-percent expansion in the leaves’
surface area, Iranian Nanotechnology
Initiative Council reported.
“While foreign samples cause an in-
crease of up to 30 percent in photosyn-
thesis, the Iranian nano fertilizers are
able to cause a 350-percent increase.
Moreover, these nano fertilizers are
environmentally sustainable due to
their organic base which makes them
more suitable than foreign fertilizers
that are hormone based,” Mrs. Toweh
Saleh, the sales manager of Sodour
Ahrar-e-Shargh Company, told INIC.
“Based on agreements between our
company and Tehran’s Municipality,
the Parks and Green Space Organiza-
tion are obliged to replace current ferti-
lizers with nano fertilizers. This will in-
crease green spaces and oxygen volume
to a significant extent,” she added.
Saleh expressed hope that as infor-
mation about nanotechnology-based
domestic products spreads, more Ira-
nian farmers would use nano fertiliz-
Nano fertilizers are environmentally sustainable due to their organic base. ers.

Tehran to Host Int’l Paint Confab

ing, with women who take Plavix in addition to aspirin
having roughly twice the bleeding risk as men.

New Dinosaur Species
Found in S. Africa
Scientists say they’ve discovered a new dinosaur species
in South Africa that may help explain how the creatures
evolved into the largest animals on land.
Paleontologist Adam Yates from the
University of the Witwatersrand pre-
sented an incomplete skeleton of the Aar-
donyx celestae at a news conference on
November 4.
The species was a plant-eater dating
back about 200 million years to the early
Jurassic period. The dinosaur walked on
its hind legs but could drop to all fours and stood nearly
6 feet (about 1.7 meters) high at the hip.
Yates believes it represents a missing evolutionary
link between earlier dinosaurs and their descendants.
Floating Expo Center
Fluid, a whale-like pavilion designed for the 2012 World Expo
in South Korea, not only looks dramatic, but
once the Expo is finished, can be moved to
other locations.
Fluid will be anchored to a harbor and can
rise and fall with the tides, Ideaconnection re-
ported.
The interior of the pavilion is open, capable
of hosting various types of events during the
Expo and afterwards.
It can be sailed around to coastal Asian cities, showcasing
various exhibitions or acting as a venue for events, celebra-
tions or concerts.
SleepBox
Perfect for those airport layovers, the Sleep-
Box beats trying to sleep on terminal chairs.
According to Ideaconnection, the bed is
equipped with an automatic change of linen,
ventilation system, sound alerts, LCD TV,
WiFi, laptop sockets and even has room for
your luggage.
The third International Paint and Coatings of Color Science and Technology (ICPC)
Congress and the Second International Con- on November 16-18, 2009, in Tehran.
ference on Automotive Paint and Coatings
will be held simultaneously by the Institute
These gatherings provide opportunities for
all experts, researchers and manufacturers ac-
More Iron, Titanium on Mercury
Mercury is even more of an “iron planet” than scientists
had previously supposed.
Richer concentrations of iron and titanium have been
seen on Mercury’s surface by Nasa’s Messenger probe,
BBC reported.
Previous Earth and spacecraft-based observations had
detected only very low amounts of iron in the silicate
minerals covering the innermost world.
Because of its immense density, scientists have al-
ready assumed much of Mercury’s interior contains iron.
Messenger sees the surface iron bound up in oxides with
titanium.
The mission’s principal investigator, Sean Solomon, said
the new observations would keep theoreticians busy.
Volcanic Region
“The iron is in a form that we don’t normally encoun-
ter in other planetary situations and so it’s going be a vol-
ley back to our geochemists and petrologists to come up
with a scenario that’s consistent with everything we are
measuring now at Mercury,” he told reporters.
Japan Plans Solar Power Station in Space
Japan’s space agency is planning to construct a solar power sta-
tion in space and use it to beam energy down to Earth using
lasers.
The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (Jaxa) hopes that
the ambitious plans will help ease the country’s energy prob-
lems and providing a solution for global warming, Telegraph
reported. A select group of companies and researchers have
been given the task of designing and building the Space Solar
Power System (SSPS).
The plan is to create a miles-wide array of photovoltaic pan-
els like the solar panels used on Earth and place it in a geosta-
tionary orbit.
Solar rays are at least five times as powerful in space as they
are at ground level, allowing the huge panels to gather vast
tive in the paint sector to know the latest sci-
entific and research advances and share their
experiences in the field, Iranian Nanotechnol-
ogy Initiative Council reported.
Theories on how the planet formed would also have to
take the information into account, he added.
Some of these propose that Mercury is predominantly
the remnant core of a body which lost its outer layers in a
mighty collision early in its history.
The new data was returned on Messenger’s third and
final flyby of the planet in September.
The pass, just 228 km from the surface, was intended
as a brake maneuver, using the planet’s gravity to help
slow the spacecraft enough to enable it to enter into orbit
in 2011.
The spacecraft acquired only about half the data it was
expected to because of a power ‘hiccup’ just before clos-
est approach.
Nonetheless, Messenger’s cameras and instruments
collected many high-resolution and color images, un-
veiling another 6 percent of the planet’s surface never
before seen up-close.
Messenger has now viewed about 98 percent of the
surface at various resolutions.
quantities of energy.
A report by researchers at Mitsubishi Heavy Industries said:
“Since solar power is a clean and inexhaustible energy source,
we believe that this system will be able to help solve the prob-
lems of energy shortage and global warming.
“The sun’s rays abound in space.”
Once collected, the solar energy would be beamed down to
a substation on Earth, using laser beams or microwaves.
Jaxa say that the system would be safe, although they admit
that it might be hard to reassure the public over the image of
huge laser beams blasting down from the sky.
The receiver dishes for the substations would probably
be harbored at sea or in the middle of reservoirs to keep them
away from dangerous places.
Nanotechnology is a major part of these
gatherings. An exhibition will also be held
to present the latest products and achieve-
ments in the field of nanotechnology.
New features observed in the pass include a region
with a bright area surrounding an irregular depression,
suspected to be volcanic in origin.
It also spied a very young double-ring impact basin
approximately 290-km across.
“However, to a planetary geologist, ‘young’ is a bil-
lion years or so. But compared to most of the basins on
Mercury, those are three billion years older. So, in a rela-
tive sense, it is very geologically young,” explained Brett
Denevi, a member of the probe’s imaging team from Ari-
zona State University in Tempe.
The low numbers of superposed impact craters and
marked differences in color across the basin suggest that
the smooth area within the innermost ring may be the site
of some of the most recent volcanism on Mercury, she
added.
Messenger also made new measurements of Mercu-
ry’s ‘atmosphere’, the extremely tenuous cloud of atoms
which is lifted off the surface by solar activity and micro-
meteorite impacts.