A physicist at Denmark's Niels Bohr Institute has recreated one of the two main particle detectors at the Large Hadron Collider out of Lego - and the replica machine is to scale with the tiny Lego engineers that walk through its tunnels. Sacha Melhase used 9,500 pieces of Lego to build the model - a task which took him 35 hours.The Niels Bohr Institute covered his 2,000 Euro brick bill - hoping that Mehlhase's work would inspire interest in high-energy physics.

Mehlhase has contacted Lego to see if the Danish company is interested in making the model part of its official range. Planning a 3D model took him 48 solid hours of work - before he even began sorting the bricks. 'It illustrates all details, from the muon spectrometer and magnet system to the innermost pixel detector,' says Mehlhase. 'I do not have a straightforward construction manual yet, but I am working on it!'

The real Atlas detector - one of two detectors that sit on the 'ring' at the LHC to monitor particles created in the high-speed collision - is about 70 feet wide and weighs 7,000 tonnes. Mehlhase's model is a metre by half a metre.

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Researchers found that wild chimps that spotted a poisonous snake were more likely to make their "alert call" in the presence of a chimp that had not seen the threat. This indicates that the animals "understand the mindset" of others. The insight into the primates' remarkable intelligence will be published in the journal Current Biology. The University of St Andrews scientists, who carried out the work, study primate communication to uncover some of the origins of human language.

To find out how the animals "talked to each other" about potential threats, they placed plastic snakes - models of rhino and gaboon vipers - into the paths of wild chimpanzees and monitored the primates' reactions. "These [snake species] are well camouflaged and they have a deadly bite," explained Dr Catherine Crockford from University of St Andrews, who led the research.

"They also tend to sit in one place for weeks. So if a chimp discovers a snake, it makes sense for that animal to let everyone else know where [it] is."The scientists put the snake on a path that the chimps were using regularly, secreting the plastic models in the leaves.

"When [the chimps] saw the model, they would be quite close to it and would leap away, but they wouldn't call," she told BBC Nature. "It wasn't a knee-jerk reaction."After leaping away, each chimp immediately, very carefully, approached the snake again. And this time, they would make a soft "hoo" sound if they were close to a chimp that was not aware the snake was there.

"We monitored the snake all day, so we knew which animals had seen it and which hadn't," Dr Crockford explained. She added that when the primates called out, They were "very focused on their audience".

"That's not entirely new," she said. "Lots of animals give alarm calls and are more likely to give an alarm call [when another animal is present]."But what is new here, she continued, is that "they seem tuned, not into who the audience is, but to what the audience knows".

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14 different mutations in the gene CSF1R that lead to development of hereditary diffuse leukoencephalopathy with spheroids have been identified by neuroscientists. This is a devastating disorder of the brain’s white matter that leads to death between ages 40 and 60. People who inherit the abnormal gene always develop HDLS.

Until now, a definite diagnosis of HDLS required examination of brain tissue at biopsy or autopsy.The finding is important because the researchers suspect that HDLS is more common than once thought and a genetic diagnosis will now be possible without need for a brain biopsy or autopsy. According to the study’s senior investigator, neurologist Zbigniew K. Wszolek, M.D., a significant number of people who tested positive for the abnormal gene in this study had been diagnosed with a wide range of other conditions.

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In their study, scientists from Cambridge University created liquid streams ranging from pure water to pure glycerol, a naturally-occurring compound used to sweeten food and manufacture glue. The researchers then used a high-speed camera to record the various substances as they fell to the ground. From this data, the scientists could determine specifically what variations in viscosity and surface tension led to streams forming droplets or pinching off. The experiment provided a verification of previous models, but the data also navigated uncharted territory with the wide selection of previously untested liquids.

With this new data, scientists hope to improve upon several applications that depend heavily on differences in viscosity and surface tension. In ink-jet printing, for example, the printer shoots a stream of ink at high speeds onto the paper, requiring just the right type of liquid to avoid blotting.

Also, patients receiving certain respiratory medicines rely on liquid droplets as opposed to streams. Only small enough droplets can be absorbed in the lungs, so this type of research can help doctors better administer these types of drugs. This research on fluid dynamics will be published in a forthcoming article in the journal Physical Review Letters.

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A new paper by biologists in Turkey and the United States warns that while Turkey’s rich biodiversity is unique and globally important, it remains poorly researched and faces growing threats, especially from development.

In the paper, published in the journal Biological Conservation, the 13 authors say they hope to alert the world to the intensity of the assault on the country’s biodiversity. “It’s worse than at any time in Turkey’s history,” said Cagan Sekercioglu, an assistant professor of biology at the University of Utah and the paper’s lead author.

Of 34 places in the world identified as biodiversity hot spots — places where the diversity of life is unusually rich – Turkey is the only country covered almost in its entirety by three of these regions. A big reason is simply that it has coastlines on four seas, and four major mountain ranges.

Of some 9,000 known species of vascular plants, 3,000 are found only in Turkey. A new plant species is found there once a week on the average scientists say, and its array of reptile and amphibian species is comparable to that of all of Europe. New mammals are even being identified, among them a mountain gazelle discovered in 2009.

That such a large species went unidentified for so long reflects a lack of research and documentation, the scientists write. Yet its uniqueness was not widely appreciated. “The population of this vulnerable species became threatened within only a year of its discovery by the planned construction of a cement plant in its small range,” the paper states.

One reason that Turkey’s natural treasures are poorly studied is cultural, Dr. Sekercioglu said. While scientists in the United States and Europe do research in the field for weeks and months at a time, that is not the custom in Turkey, where professors seldom leave the classroom. What is more, he said, Turkey is not developed enough to pay proper attention to its own biodiversity, or “charismatic” enough to capture the imagination of international organizations that cast a spotlight on threatened ecosystems.

Dr. Sekercioglu is trying to change this through a nonprofit called KuzeyDoga that works to promote biodiversity research and conservation in Turkey.

Even as Turkey begins to grasp and study the wealth of its natural life, Dr. Sekercioglu says, it is receding in the face of inexorable development pressures, from dams to vacation homes. While environmental laws exist, they are often modified when they get in the way of projects, he added.

The paper also cites the case of a professor who was investigating heavy metals from mining found in the breast milk and feces of infants. The professor, Onur Hamzaoglu, was sued by local mayors and faces a two- to four-year jail term for ‘threatening to incite fear and panic among the population,’’ the authors write.

The biologists call on the country to foster a culture of conservation that they say has been sorely lacking. One way of achieving this may be to tie environmental concerns to Turkey’s history, a source of national pride, they suggest.

“Instead of beginning a dialogue on large predator conservation by describing ecological interactions,” the paper says, “one could describe the Roman-era stone traps for Anatolian tigers and leopards still visible in the Toros Mountains.”

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Tags: stroke; behavior; MRI; tissue engineering; cell transplantation; brain repair Postdoctoral Position in Brain Repair after Stroke A postdoctoral position is available immediately in the Modo Laboratory at the McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine & Department of Radiology, University of Pittsburgh. The focus of this position will be on conducting tissue engineering/cell transplantation studies in a rat model of stroke (see Bible, E et al 2009 Biomaterials). The candidate must have a PhD in a life science (preferably neuroscience) and able to perform the middle cerebral artery occlusion (MCAo). Experience in behavioral analyses of animals, immunohistochemistry, magnetic resonance imaging and cell culture is desirable, but not a prerequisite. The position requires working with a diverse research team and collaborators, and therefore strong communication skills in English are required. The appointment is for one year with the possibility of renewal for another 1-2 years.

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Astronomers say they’ve found two more earth-sized planets orbiting a distant star. Planet hunters say this is a step toward finding a planet in the so-called “Goldilocks Zone,” a spot neither too cold, nor too hot, which can support water, and possibly life.

“I think it’s tremendously exciting,” physicist Brian Greene told Here & Now’s Robin Young.  “We’ve asked for ages, since we could even think, whether or not we we’re the only life in the universe. And the first step towards really being able to answer that is to try to find other planets that might support life, or at least life as we understand it,” he said.

On earth, meanwhile, physicists have been crashing particles against each other in the Hadron Collider underneath Geneva. They say they may have evidence for the existence of the Higgs particle, the last remaining piece of evidence needed to prove the standard theory of how particle physics works.

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Fewer things are as enthralling as learning that a material is few moments away from being "alive." The expanding definition of "life" or "alive" is not only a consequence of joyful abuse of language and metaphors, but also the outcome of an increasingly able gaze upon the things that make -- and with which we make -- the world we supposedly know.

This is how I originally met Zbigniew Oksiuta near one of his gelatin-based spheres, thinking of how water could now again breed life into this structure. Make it sprout -- or decay. Zbigniew Oksiuta is an artist, architect, and scientist, interested in the possibility of designing biological structures, whose work combines architecture, biology, physics, and genetic engineering.

Originally from Poland, he currently teaches in the School of Architecture at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), in Albany, N.Y., and produces and exhibits work in several countries across the globe. Mr. Oksiuta's work includes built architectural structures, scientific experiments and art installations spanning several countries. His work engages the formulation of a new biological habitat investigating biological materials' potential in the formulation of new forms of living on Earth and in space.

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Evolution of the modular structure of the network of dependencies between packages of the Debian GNU/Linux operating system. Packages are represented by nodes. A green arrow from package i to package j indicates that package i depends on package j, and a red arrow indicates that package i has a conflict with package j. Packages within a module (depicted by a big circle) have many dependencies between themselves and only a few with packages from other modules. During the growth of the operating system, the modular structure of the network of dependencies has increased: (I) The new packages added in successive releases depended mainly on previously existing packages within the same module, and hence, the size of the modules created in earlier releases increased over time; (ii) the number of modules also increased, although the new modules consisted only of a few new packages; and (iii) the relative number of dependencies between packages from different modules decreased. Moreover, the relative number of conflicts between packages from different modules decreased, whereas those within modules increased through the different releases of the operating system.

Lead researcher Miguel A. Fortuna, who worked with Juan A. Bonachela and Prof. Simon A. Levin, Director of Princeton’s Center for BioComplexity, describes the main challenges they encountered in designing and implementing the methods used to analyze OS the evolution. “The main difficulty we had was getting, organizing, and storing the data,” says Fortuna. “Notice that the network of interdependent packages of the last release analyzed was composed by more than 100,000 dependencies. “This complexity required that they use structuring query languages (SQL) for managing databases. “We were very careful when identifying software packages through different release – sometimes there could be different versions of the same package within the same release due to the improvements made by developers.”

While Fortuna notes that quantifying the increase of the code’s modular structure time was the main insight of their study, he points out that reuse of code and software’s hierarchical structure were suggested by the pioneering work of Ricard V. Solé and Sergi Valverde in the early 2000s. “The interest that our paper has drawn has helped us to discover work we did not know about software systems. The idea of using the network of dependencies and conflicts of different releases of the Debian operating system as a case study has facilitated the understanding of how code development evolves over time without the need to go deeper into the details of the code itself.”

Another key innovation cited by Fortuna was the team’s use of a very precise method to detect the modular structure of the operating system. “We borrowed an algorithm developed by physicists and widely used in ecology nowadays. In fact, this work has been constantly enriched by an interdisciplinary mixture of ideas from biology and physics.”

The team already has its eye on ways of improving and extending the current experimental design. “The most important follow-up of our study would be the exploration of proprietary software like the Microsoft Windows operating system,” Fortuna comments. “Since Debian is the result of a volunteer effort to create a free operating system, you have the freedom to distribute copies, receive source code, modify the software or use pieces of it in new free programs. The question then becomes, what does the software development pattern looks like when the company developing code doesn't offer this freedom to their users? A comparison of the structure of both development strategies would be more than interesting.”
They are also developing a dynamical model to mimic the growth of Debian over time – an effort which, if successful, might let them predict how many packages, dependencies, and conflicts will arise in the next release of the operating system. An interesting question would be,” he conjectures, “if there are limits to the number of packages that an operating system can offer to the users without jeopardizing its functionality and robustness. Following our analogy with the biological evolution, we could ask if there is a limit to biodiversity, that is, to the number of species that can coexist in our planet.”

Regarding potential analogies with evolution and ecology, Fortuna points to macroevolution – that is, speciation and extinction processes – that he sees as being in some ways equivalent to the creation of new packages and the deprecation of those rendered obsolete from one release to the next. “Does the probability of a species becoming extinct depend on how long it’s been on the planet? In other words, are the most ancient species, like crocodiles, the ones with higher risk of extinction? We can formulate the question, which was already explored by Van Valen in the 1970's, by replacing species with software packages. Why do some packages not exist after a subsequent release? Does a new software package created in one of the earliest releases have a high probability to persist over time? What does it depend on? We can calculate these probabilities following the identity of the packages of the Debian operating system through time. The data to do it are available, and we therefore might learn something from software studies that help us answer the biological question – because evolution works as a tinkerer in both cases.”

In relation to the ecological processes, Fortuna illustrates, “When an oceanic island is created colonization and extinction are the main mechanisms that leads to the establishment of a stable community. This community assembly would be equivalent to the package installation process in a local computer. For example, dependencies and conflicts between packages mimic predator-prey interactions and competitive exclusion relationships, respectively. A predator can colonize the island only if the prey it feeds on is already there.”

In Fortuna’s view, the same thing happens with software packages. “A package can be installed in a computer only if the packages it depends on are already installed. Ecologically similar prey species are going to compete with each other in the island for light and nutrients so that the best competitor is going to displace the others, which can then become extinct. Predators feeding on extinct prey are going to disappear as well. Conflicts between software packages have the same consequences: one package cannot be installed in the computer if it has a conflict with an already installed one, so that those packages depending on it cannot be installed either. This parallelism can help us understand the general principles operating on systems of different nature.”

Reminiscent of AI-based evolutionary programming, Fortuna also says that their work might well lead to improved in silico models of evolutionary biology and population ecology. “Charles Ofria and his lab at Michigan State University are studying evolution by using self-replicating computer programs able to mutate and evolve over time.” The genome of these programs consists of a set of instructions that are executed by the central processing unit (CPU). Some of the mutations imply the insertion of random instructions into the genome. If the mutant program is able to reproduce faster than the others, its genome is going to persist through time.

“It could be interesting to explore to what extent new instructions added to the genome interact with the preexisting ones – that is, whether or not there is a reuse of the genome instructions of these digital organisms and its resemblance with a modular structural pattern,” Fortuna observes. “The interplay between ecology and computer science is much more evident if we take a look at the work developed by Luis Zaman, Ofria's graduate student, who is incorporating host-parasite interactions into these computer programs.”

Looking further afield, Fortuna describes how other models or applications might be targeted using the team’s findings. “The closest study would be the comparison with the development pattern of other GNU/Linux distributions – openSuse, Fedora, Gentoo, and so on – as well as proprietary operating systems like Microsoft Windows and Apple OS X. The information needed to accomplish this task would easily be compiled for the first ones – but it will be much more difficult to get it for the last ones. The algorithms for detecting modular structures are publicly available. There are also powerful free SQL relational database management systems like PostgreSQL and MySQL to store, organize, and manage the information. So,’ he concludes, “the bottleneck is once again data availability.”

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The Biology of Spirochetes GRC is devoted to discussions of leading edge fundamental research of all medically important and biologically relevant spirochetes, which comprise a unique group of Eubacteria. Many spirochetes are pathogens and cause a variety of serious human and animal diseases, including syphilis, leptospirosis, Lyme borreliosis, relapsing fever borreliosis, periodontal diseases, digital dermatitis and dysentery.

The highly interactive format and focus on cutting edge, unpublished results that are the requested and established norm for this conference provide a forum for cross-fertilization of ideas by members of the international community working on these bacteria and help delineate common research objectives. This conference provides an optimal setting for early career scientists to introduce themselves and their research to the spirochete community, interact with established investigators and plan the next steps of their careers. A proactive approach has been taken and will be extended to promote active participation by students, fellows, new investigators, women and members of under-represented groups.

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