Business people can use mediators to match names with new faces, says Roediger, by connecting the name with an identifying body feature. He uses mediators to learn the names of his students on the first day of school.
Yet studying erosion rates could help researchers better figure out the history of Antarctic ice, says Thomson. He is now working on more detailed studies of erosion over the past 34 million years, when the great East Antarctic ice sheet is thought to have started growing.
“We’re trying to look at where sediments come from and what they tell us,” he says. Then researchers who use computer models can include those data and see whether current ideas about how Antarctica got icy are correct.
Checking the fossil record is important for verifying ideas about past niches, because modeling them rests on assumptions that can go awry, says paleoecologist Rebecca Terry of Stanford University. For example, working backward from a species’ current address assumes that the modern population occupies all of its prime habitat and has not lost ground to people.
Yanovsky and his colleagues suggest that because PRMT5 plays similar, but not identical, roles in daily rhythms in Arabidopsis and fruit flies, the time-keeping mechanism probably evolved separately in plants and animals. That explanation is the most likely, Harmer says, but “there’s that tantalizing possibility that there might be something else going on.”
One idea is that the mechanism is a remnant of an ancient chemical clock that operated in a common ancestor of plants and animals, but evidence in support of that hypothesis is lacking in this case, she says.
The galaxy, dubbed UDFy-38135539, was initially identified as a distant candidate from visible-light and infrared images recorded by the Hubble Space Telescope’s Wide Field Camera 3. But the brightness of the body at different wavelengths, while consistent with it being remote, did not hd7 case constitute proof. To determine the galaxy’s distance, Lehnert’s team divided the faint light into its component colors using a spectrograph on the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope at La Silla Paranal Observatory in Chile.
The team was initially frustrated because “we thought we would need a year to do the spectroscopy,” recalls study coauthor Nicole Nesvadba of the Institut d’Astrophysique Spatiale in Orsay, France. However, Lehnert calculated that the light emitted by hydrogen atoms in the galaxy was bright enough to do a shorter study.
In fact, 16 hours of observations with the spectrograph allowed the scientists to measure the galaxy’s redshift — the extent to which light emitted by a body is shifted to longer, or redder, wavelengths by the expansion of the universe. The more distant a body, the greater its redshift. UDFy-38135539 has a redshift of 8.56, beating the previous distance holder, a powerful cosmic explosion known as a gamma-ray burst, by about 35 million light-years (SN Online: 4/28/09).
Studying the galaxy may better illuminate the ancient era known as reionization, in which the universe’s hydrogen atoms were broken apart into their constituent electrons and protons, presumably by ultraviolet light emitted by the first stars in the cosmos. The time at which reionization — a gradual process — began marks the time that the first stars switched on, clearing the fog of neutral hydrogen atoms that had enveloped the cosmos. For UDFy-38135539 to be seen at all, reionization must have already begun in the galaxy’s immediate vicinity. Otherwise, the neutral hydrogen fog would have scattered the galaxy’s light, preventing it from reaching Earth.
But Lehnert and his colleagues calculate that UDFy-38135539 is not bright enough on its own to break apart most of the hydrogen atoms in the galaxy’s neighborhood. The body must have had several helpers — small companion galaxies at the same distance from Earth, but too faint to be seen — to reionize this neck of the cosmic woods.
Kaplitt and coworkers hope that their findings could guide a human zenmed-acne-scar-treatment.com trial using gene therapy to treat depression. In fact, collaborators are already performing experimental p11 gene therapy on primates to see if it is nontoxic and effective. A Phase II clinical trial using a similar gene therapy technique to treat Parkinson’s disease has just ended, Kaplitt says, so he is hopeful that the same kind of trial for depression in humans might be ready to start in one to two years.
Kaplitt is the founder of and a consultant for the Fort Lee, N.J., gene therapy company Neurologix Inc., which holds intellectual property rights to p11 gene therapy treatments.
Long-lasting marriages may thrive on love, compromise and increasing ignorance about one another. Couples married for an average of 40 years know less about one another’s food, movie and kitchen-design preferences than do partners who have been married or in committed relationships for a year or two, a new study finds.
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