UCR’s Researchers Discover New Way to Store Information Via DNA

UCR’s Researchers Discover New Way to Store Information Via DNA

Technique may make it less expensive for industry to identify counterfeit merchandise

(February 19, 200

RIVERSIDE, Calif. (www.ucr.edu) – Researchers at UC Riverside have found a way to get into your body and your bloodstream. No, they’re not spiritual gurus or B-movie mad scientists. Nathaniel G. Portney, Yonghui Wu, Stefano Lonardi, and Mihri Ozkan from UCR’s departments of Bioengineering, Computer Science and Engineering, Biochemistry, and Electrical Engineering, and the Center for Nanoscale Science and Engineering, are just talented when it comes to manipulating DNA.

In their paper, “Length-based Encoding of Binary Data in DNA,” which was published by the American Chemical Society last month, the researchers discovered a system to encode digital information within DNA. This method relies on the length of the fragments obtained by the partial restriction digest rather than the actual content of the nucleotide sequence. As a result, the technology eliminates the need to use expensive sequencing machinery.

Why is this discovery important? The human genome consists of the equivalent of approximately 750 megabytes of data – a significant amount of storage space. However, only about three percent of DNA goes into composing the more than 22,000 genes that make us what we are. The remaining 97 percent leaves plenty of room to encode information in a genome, allowing the information to be preserved and replicated in perpetuity.

Given the size of the DNA fragments (one base pair of DNA is 0.33 nanometers), one could store a large amount of information in a very small space. By storing messages within DNA, organizations can “tag” objects to verify authenticity, as well as to inconspicuously send data to a specific destination. “Already there are several companies using DNA to tag objects that they certify to be original and which then can be very difficult to counterfeit,” says Stefano Lonardi, Associate Professor of Computer Science & Engineering at UCR’s Bourns College of Engineering.

For example, the British company, Redweb Security, has developed something called i-powder that tags DNA and another company called PSA DNA Authentication services tags sports memorabilia.

“What we developed at UCR is a method to encode a message in DNA in a way that does not require an expensive sequencing machine,” notes Lonardi. “The decoding still requires a wet lab procedure, but the experimental procedure is significantly easier.”The University of California, Riverside is a doctoral research university, a living laboratory for groundbreaking exploration of issues critical to Inland Southern California, the state and communities around the world. Reflecting California’s diverse culture, UCR’s enrollment of about 17,000 is projected to grow to 21,000 students by 2010. The campus is planning a medical school and already has reached the heart of the Coachella Valley by way of the UCR Palm Desert Graduate Center. With an annual statewide economic impact of nearly $1 billion, UCR is actively shaping the region’s future. To learn more, visit www.ucr.edu or call (951) UCR-NEWS.

Wonderful Tesla’s Electricity

to legend, Tesla was born precisely at midnight during an electrical storm, to a Serbian family in the village of Smiljan near Gospi?, in the Lika region of the Croatian Krajina in Military Frontier (part of the Austrian Empire), in the present-day Croatia.

Tesla then studied electrical engineering at the Austrian Polytechnic in Graz (1875). While there, he studied the uses of alternating current. Some sources say he received Baccalaureate degrees from the university at Graz.However, the university says that he did not receive a degree and did not continue beyond the first semester of his third year, during which he stopped attending lectures.Others have stated that he was discharged without a degree for nonpayment of his tuition for the first semester of his junior year.According to a college roommate, he did not graduate.

Tesla engaged in reading many works, memorizing complete books. He had a photographic memory.Tesla related in his autobiography that he experienced detailed moments of inspiration. During his early life, Tesla was stricken with illness time and time again. He suffered a peculiar affliction in which blinding flashes of light would appear before his eyes, often accompanied by hallucinations. Much of the time the visions were linked to a word or idea he might have come across; just by hearing the name of an item, he would involuntarily envision it in realistic detail. Modern-day synesthetes report similar symptoms. Tesla would visualise an invention in his brain in precise form before moving to the construction stage; a technique sometimes known as picture thinking. Tesla also often had flashbacks to events that had happened previously in his life; this began to happen during childhood.

Snake Eating Kangaroo

Pictures of snake while eating and swallowing kangaroo.

Most Haunted Places In World

1. Edinburgh Castle - Edinburgh, Scotland

Edinburgh Castle is reputed to be one of the most haunted spots in Scotland. And Edinburgh itself has been called the most haunted city in all of Europe. On various occasions, visitors to the castle have reported a phantom piper, a headless drummer, the spirits of French prisoners from the Seven Years War and colonial prisoners from the American Revolutionary War - even the ghost of a dog wandering in the grounds’ dog cemetery.

As with all castles, Edinburgh’s fortress has been a centre of military activity. As an ancient fortress Edinburgh Castle is one of the few that still has a military garrison, albeit for largely ceremonial and administrative purposes. The New Barrack Block is now home to the official headquarters of the Royal Regiment of Scotland and 52 Infantry Brigade, as well as home to the regimental museum of the Royal Scots and Royal Scots Dragoon Guards. The Governor of Edinburgh Castle is Major General David McDowall, GOC of the British Army’s 2nd Division. The Governor of the Castle has always been the head of the Army in Scotland. Direct administration of the castle by the War Office only came to an end in 1923 when the army formally moved to the city’s new Redford Barracks. Nevertheless, the Castle continues to have a strong connection with the Army. Sentries still stand watch at the castle gatehouse after opening hours, with responsibility for guarding the Honours of Scotland.

2. The Whaley House - San Diego, California,US

Located in San Diego, California, the Whaley House has earned the title of “the most haunted house in the U.S.” Built in 1857 by Thomas Whaley on land that was partially once a cemetery, the house has since been the locus of dozens of ghost sightings.

Author deTraci Regula relates her experiences with the house: “Over the years, while dining across the street at the Old Town Mexican Cafe, I became accustomed to noticing that the shutters of the second-story windows [of the Whaley House] would sometimes open while we ate dinner, long after the house was closed for the day. On a recent visit, I could feel the energy in several spots in the house, particularly in the courtroom, where I also smelled the faint scent of a cigar, supposedly Whaley’s calling-card. In the hallway, I smelled perfume, initially attributing that to the young woman acting as docent, but some later surreptitious sniffing in her direction as I talked to her about the house revealed her to be scent-free.”

3. The Borley Rectory - Borley, England

Borley Rectory was constructed near Borley Church by the Reverend Henry Dawson Ellis Bull in 1862, and he moved in a year after being named rector of the parish. The large brick building was built in a style influenced by Pugin, that replaced the rather earlier Georgian house built for a Reverend Herringham, which Henry Bull demolished. The rectory would eventually be enlarged to house a family of 14 children.
The church dates from the 12th century and serves a rather scattered rural community making up the parish. There are several substantial farmhouses, and the fragmentary remains of Borley Hall, once the seat of the Waldegrave family. Ghost-hunters like to quote the legend of a Benedictine monastery supposedly built in this area about 1362, according to which a monk from the monastery carried on a relationship with a nun from a nearby convent. After their affair was discovered, the monk was executed and the nun bricked up alive in the convent walls. It was confirmed in 1938[citation needed] that this legend had no historical basis and seems to have been invented by the rector’s children to romanticise their red-brick rectory. The story of the walling up of the nun was probably taken from a novel by Rider Haggard.

4. The Bell Farm - Adams, Tennessee, US

The Bell Farm has been made notorious through books, TV specials and movies. Most recently the events at this small Tennessee farm were dramatized in the 2005 movie An American Haunting. The story behind the Bell Farm haunting is so notable and recognized because it is said to be the only documented account in paranormal history when a ghost caused the death of a living person. Between the years of 1817 and 1821, the Bell Family was terrorized by some sort of entity, mostly said to be a woman, who became known as the Bell Witch or, more personally, “Kate.” She is said to have perturbed and tortured John Bell (the father of the family and victim of a nervous system disorder) so much that it lead to his inevitable death.

He was unable to sleep or recuperate and the ghost’s antics worsened his condition. It is also said that a vile with a strange black liquid was found at John Bell’s deathbed and that Kate herself claimed she gave it to him. Supposedly, in order to test the liquids validity, a drop was placed on the family cat’s tongue and it immediately killed the animal. Though the haunting of the Bell Farm has been sensationalized many times over, it is still inarguable that something happened there during those three years. A family and a community were terrorized by an entity of some kind, and residents still believe Kate is up to no good. For an extensive history of everything that went on at the Bell Farm, click here.

5. Raynham Hall - Norfolk, England

Raynham Hall in Norfolk, England, is most famous for the ghost of “the Brown Lady,” which was captured on film in 1936 in what is considered one of the most authentic ghost pictures ever taken.

The Unexplained Site describes one of the first encounters with the spirit: “The first known sighting happened during the 1835 Christmas season. Colonel Loftus, who happened to be visiting for the holidays, was walking to his room late one night when he saw a strange figure ahead of him. As he tried to gain a better look, the figure promptly disappeared. The next week, the Colonel was again came upon the woman. He described her as a noble woman who wore a brown satin dress. Her face seemed to glow, which highlighted her empty eye sockets.”

6. The Queen Mary - Long Beach, California, US

This grand old ship is quite haunted, according to the many people who have worked on and visited the craft. Once a celebrated luxury ocean liner, when it ended its sailing days the Queen Mary was purchased by the city of Long Beach, California in 1967 and transformed into a hotel.The most haunted area of the ship is the engine room where a 17-year-old sailor was crushed to death trying to escape a fire. Knocking and banging on the pipes around the door has been heard and recorded by numerous people. In what is now the front desk area of the hotel, visitors have seen the ghost of a “lady in white.”

Ghosts of children are said to haunt the ship’s pool. The spirit of a young girl, who allegedly broke her neck in an accident at the pool, has been heard asking for her mother or her doll. In the hallway of the pool’s changing rooms is an area of unexplained activity. Furniture moves about by itself, people feel the touch of unseen hands and unknown spirits appear. In the front hull of the ship, a specter can sometimes be heard screaming - the pained voice, some believe, of a sailor who was killed when the Queen Mary collided with a smaller ship.

7. The White House - Washington D.C., US

That’s right, 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C. is not only home to the current President of the United States, it also is home of several former presidents who occasionally decide to make their presences known there, despite the fact that they are dead.President Harrison is said to be heard rummaging around in the attic of the White House, looking for who knows what. President Andrew Jackson is thought to haunt his White House bedroom. And the ghost of First Lady Abigail Adams was seen floating through one of the White House hallways, as if carrying something.

The most frequently sighted presidential ghost has been that of Abraham Lincoln. Eleanor Roosevelt once stated she believed she felt the presence of Lincoln watching her as she worked in the Lincoln bedroom. Also during the Roosevelt administration, a young clerk claimed to have actually seen the ghost of Lincoln sitting on a bed pulling off his boots. On another occasion, while spending a night at the White House during the Roosevelt presidency, Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands was awakened by a knock on the bedroom door. Answering it, she was confronted with the ghost of Abe Lincoln staring at her from the hallway. Calvin Coolidge’s wife reported seeing on several occasions the ghost of Lincoln standing with his hands clasped behind his back, at a window in the Oval Office, staring out in deep contemplation toward the bloody battlefields across the Potomac.

8. The Tower of London - London, England

The Tower of London, one of the most famous and well-preserved historical buildings in the world, may also be one of the most haunted. This is due, no doubt, to the scores of executions, murders and tortures that have taken place within its walls over the last 1,000 years. Dozens upon dozens of ghost sightings have been reported in and around the Tower. On one winter day in 1957 at 3 a.m., a guard was disturbed by something striking the top of his guardhouse. When he stepped outside to investigate, he saw a shapeless white figure on top of the tower. It was then realized that on that very same date, February 12, Lady Jane Grey was beheaded in 1554.

Perhaps the most well-known ghostly resident of the Tower is the spirit of Ann Boleyn, one of the wives of Henry VIII, who was also beheaded in the Tower in 1536. Her ghost has been spotted on many occasions, sometimes carrying her head, on Tower Green and in the Tower Chapel Royal.
Other ghosts of the Tower include those of Henry VI, Thomas a Becket and Sir Walter Raleigh. One of the most gruesome ghost stories connected with the Tower of London describes death of the Countess of Salisbury. According to one account, “the Countess was sentenced to death in 1541 following her alleged involvement in criminal activities (although it is now widely believed that she was probably innocent). After being sent struggling to the scaffold, she ran from the block and was pursued until she was hacked to death by the axe man.” Her execution ceremony has been seen re-enacted by spirits on Tower Green.

9. Ballygally Castle - Ballygally Bay, Ireland

Ballygally Castle is a castle in the village of Ballygally, County Antrim, Northern Ireland, located approximately three miles north of Larne. The castle overlooks the sea at the head of Ballygally Bay. The castle is the only 17th century building still used as a residence in Northern Ireland, and is reputed to be one of the most haunted places in the province.The castle was built in 1625 by James Shaw, of Scotland, who had come to the area and rented the land from the Earl of Antrim for £24 a year. It was built in the style of a French chateau with high walls, steep roof, dormer windows and corner turrets. The walls are five feet thick with loopholes for muskets. An open stream ran through the outer hall to provide water in case of siege. The castle did come under attack, from the Irish garrison at Glenarm, several times during the rebellion of 1641 but each assault was unsuccessful. The castle was owned by the Shaw family until it passed into the hands of William Shaw in 1799.

He sold the estate for £15,400. In the 1950s the castle was bought by the carpet tycoon Cyril Lord and was extended and renovated. It is now owned and run by the Hastings Hotels Group.The castle is reputed to host a number of ghosts, the most active of which is the former resident, Lady Isobel Shaw, who amuses herself by knocking at the doors of different rooms and then suddenly disappearing. When she was alive, Isobel was locked in her room and starved by her husband. She leapt to her death from a window. Madame Nixon is another ghost who lived in the hotel in the 19th century. She can be heard walking around the hotel in her silk dress.

10.The Rose Hall Great House - Montego Bay, Jamaica

Rose Hall great house, the most famous in Jamaica. It is a Georgian Mansion with a stone base and a plastered upper storey, high on the hillside, with a fantastic panorama over the coast. Built in the 1770s, Rose Hall was restored in the 1960s to its former splendour, with mahogany floors, interior windows and doorways, panelling and wooden ceilings. It is decorated with silk wallpaper printed with palms and birds, ornamented with chandeliers and furnished with mostly European antiques. There’s a bar downstairs and a restaurant.

Rose Hall is most famous for the story of its mistress Annie Palmer, who came here in 1820, and the fanciful legends of underground tunnels, bloodstains and hauntings. A renowned beauty, Annie Palmer was widely feared as a black magician, and she is also supposed to have dispatched three husbands (by poison, by stabbing and then pouring boiling oil into his ears, and by strangling) and innumerable lovers, including slaves, whom she simply killed when she was bored of them. She was 4ft 11ins high and was murdered in her bed. There is little evidence to support the legend, an amusing version of which was written up by H. G. de Lisser in his “White Witch of Rose Hall”, though maybe you’ll be convinced by the ghostly faces that appear in photographs taken by tourists.

Is this the scariest picture EVER of the Bride of Wildenstein?

If proof were needed that money can’t buy everything, look no further.Rich divorcee Jocelyn Wildenstein spent a rumoured £2million on cosmetic surgery to keep her husband, but succeeded only in ruining the good looks she was born with.

Clearly her strange looks have not completely scared off all male attention, as the scary-looking 62-year-old was out with a male companion enjoying an intimate dinner on last night.

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Scary socialite: Jocelyn Wildenstein looks scarier than ever as she leaves a Hollywood restaurant last night after dining with a male companion

The American socialite has been nicknamed the Bride of Wildenstein and dubbed the world’s scariest celebrity by a plastic surgery website.

Ms Wildenstein famously embarked on a radical amount of cosmetic procedures after fearing her millionaire art dealer husband would leave her.

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Changing faces: Jocelyn today and at various stages of surgery going back to the 70s when she first went under the knife fearing her husband would leave her

Bizarrely she based her remodelled look on exotic wild cats, which he loved, as she decided that he might find her more attractive if she became “more feline”.

The first time Wildenstein saw his newly-sculpted wife, he was said to have screamed in horror, unable to recognise her.

According to the Daily Telegraph, he said: “She seems to think that you fix a face the same way you fix a house.”

After finding her husband in the marital bed with a 19-year-old Russian model, she divorced him and was awarded millions of dollars.

Ex-husband Alec Wildenstein, died on Monday aged 67.

Six minute nap ‘may boost memory’

Even the shortest of catnaps may be enough to improve performance in memory tests, say German scientists. Just six minutes “shut-eye” for volunteers was followed by significantly better recall of words, New Scientist magazine reported.

“Ultra-short” sleep could launch memory processing in the brain, they suggested.

One UK researcher disagreed, saying that longer sleep was needed to have an impact on memory.

This demonstrates for the first time that an ultra-brief sleep episode provides an effective memory enhancement University of Dusseldorf researchers

Dozens of studies have probed the relationship between sleep and memory, with clear evidence that body’s natural sleep-wake cycle plays an important role.

The team from the University of Dusseldorf wanted to see just how short a sleep could have any discernable impact.

They used a group of students who were asked to remember a set of words, then given an hour’s break before testing.

During that hour, some of the students were allowed to sleep for approximately six minutes, while the rest were kept awake.

Remarkably, on waking, the napping students performed better in the memory test.

Some theories suggests that the processing of memories takes place in deep sleep, a phase which does not normally start until at least 20 minutes after falling asleep.

Six minute warning

However, the team, led by Dr Olaf Lahl, said that it was possible that the moment of falling asleep triggered a process in the brain that continued regardless of how long the person actually stayed awake.

“To our knowledge, this demonstrates for the first time that an ultra-brief sleep episode provides an effective memory enhancement,” he wrote.

Professor Jim Horne, from the Sleep Research Centre at Loughborough University, said that while the study was “interesting”, he was yet to be convinced that the effect was purely one of memory enhancement.

“The idea that memory could be enhanced in just six minutes is a quite unique finding and one has to be rather cautious about it.

“There is quite a bit of evidence that memory processing probably takes place more than six minutes into sleep.”

First Direct Observation Of 3-D Molecule Folding In Real Time

All the crucial proteins in our bodies must fold into complex shapes to do their jobs. These snarled molecules grip other molecules to move them around, to speed up important chemical reactions or to grab onto our genes, turning them “on” and “off” to affect which proteins our cells make.

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Recently, scientists have discovered that RNA-the stringy molecule that translates our genetic code into protein-can act a lot like a protein itself. RNA can form loopy bundles that shut genes down or start them up without the help of proteins. Since the discovery of these RNA clumps, called “riboswitches,” in 2002, scientists have been striving to understand how they work and how they form.

Now, researchers at Stanford University are looking closer than ever at how the three-dimensional twists and turns in a riboswitch come together by grabbing it and tugging it straight. By physically pulling on this loopy RNA, they have determined for the first time how a three-dimensional molecular structure folds, step by step.

The researchers used a machine called an “optical trap” to grab and hold the ends of an RNA molecule with laser beams. Based on technology developed by Bell Labs researchers in 1986, the machine was designed by a team led by Steven Block, the Stanford W. Ascherman, M.D., Professor and a professor of applied physics and of biology. The optical trap allows them to hold the ends of the RNA tightly, so they can pull it pin-straight, then let it curl up again.

In the Feb. 1 issue of Science, their paper, of which Block is senior author, describes the development of every loop and fold in one particular RNA riboswitch, and the energy it takes to form or straighten each one-an unprecedented achievement that opens the door for equally thorough studies of other molecules and their behaviors.

The researchers are the first to study the energy and folding behavior of a riboswitch in this detailed, physical way. More important, they are the first to use directly applied force to determine how a molecule makes a three-dimensional bundle, a tertiary structure. No other research has tracked the formation of such a complex structure, fold by fold.

Previous studies typically have used biochemical techniques rather than lasers, which can directly grab and tug the RNA. Biochemical techniques give less clear estimates of how molecules fold in real time. They often give a description of the molecule’s average folding behavior, which must be interpreted by mathematical models. Crystallography-a technique involving freezing the molecule in place-provides a good picture of its shape, but not how it forms or the energy involved.

“What we’re interested in is understanding, in a very fundamental way, how biomolecules take the shapes they do, and how they perform the functions they do,” Block said. “No one has been able to explore in great detail tertiary structure yet.” RNA riboswitches must have this tertiary structure to work.

“Most RNAs just make secondary [two-dimensional] structure. But the ones that really do stuff,” he added, “those all have tertiary structure.”

What RNA can do

RNA has the job of copying the genetic code from DNA (transcription), and using that code to build the proteins organisms need to live (translation). To make RNA, a protein called RNA polymerase moves along the length of a strand of DNA. It reads a pattern in the building blocks of DNA, nucleic acids whose names are abbreviated A, C, G and T, and it makes RNA with a complementary pattern. This long strand of RNA is then the recipe for a specific protein. Another structure called a “ribosome,” which is also made of RNA, then reads this recipe and makes a protein to order.

The RNA copied from DNA generally does not twist up very much, often only forming two-dimensional loops or tight bends called “hairpins.” Occasionally, its loops and hairpins form a three-dimensional structure that does nothing. Sometimes, though, this snarl of loops and hairpins works as a riboswitch. The RNA begins to bundle up while it is being made, so the jumbled portion is attached to a tail still under construction. The riboswitch must have a tertiary structure, because it likes to make a pocket and grab small molecules.

When a riboswitch clutches the right molecule, it folds up even more tightly, tugging on its own incipient long tail and changing its shape in a way that will affect its eventual protein product. That RNA tail usually has a hairpin fold that straightens out when pulled. By tugging out this kink in the RNA, a riboswitch changes how the RNA is translated into protein, effectively turning the gene on or off.

The riboswitch Block’s team studied grabbed onto a molecule called adenine, the nucleic acid dubbed “A.” Whenever the riboswitch gripped a free-floating adenine, a gene that makes a protein crucial to adenine production stopped working correctly. The RNA responsible for translating it to the protein had changed shape. The riboswitch regulated how much adenine was available in the cell; when there was plenty, it shut down the adenine factory. Before scientists discovered riboswitches, they thought only proteins controlled genes this way. “Your average RNA at random is not going to do that,” Block said. “These are highly evolved things.”

The closest look

The researchers who study molecular folding in Block’s lab cannot actually see an RNA molecule under the microscope, but they can see two polystyrene beads; they attach one on either end, and that creates a dumbbell shape the laser beams can manipulate. Their largest beads are 1,000 nanometers across, so 1,000 of them lined up would be a millimeter long. The beads are enormous relative to the RNA, and so are the lasers holding them. To keep the lasers from coming too close together and merging their light into a single beam, the researchers need to attach some extra length to the RNA. To do this, they tack a long strand of DNA on one side.

Under the microscope, the two plastic beads look like tiny pearls against a gray backdrop. The researchers pull the beads apart, taking into account two factors: force and extension. By understanding how much force it takes to cause a certain amount of extension of the RNA, they can describe with unsurpassed accuracy how the folds form and the energy needed to make each fold happen.

“When you pull it apart, different structures will pop open-pop, pop, pop-and you can see the order in which different structural elements get pulled apart,” Block said. “You can map out the order in which the pieces come together, for both folding and unfolding.”

Learning by force

To build a clear picture of how their riboswitch folded in real time, the researchers mapped out the energy of the molecule’s folding based on the forces required to uncurl it and the time the RNA took to re-curl. Block calls the energy graph the “crown jewel of the work,” adding that “all the numbers you’d like to know about this folding sequence are right in front of you in that diagram.”

Block’s team could only attain this detailed “energy landscape” of the RNA’s folding by physically toying with the molecule. The particular RNA they studied folds four times, and each time it adopts a more stable, more comfortable configuration with lower energy. If it grabs an adenine, it hangs on tightly because it is in its most stable state. But because molecules are always jiggling, sometimes a fold pops open briefly. The more stable each fold is, the less likely it is to come undone. The researchers stretched out the RNA to study all four folded states, noting how stable each one was.

Using force, Block’s team described not only the energy of each fold in the RNA, but the energy it needed to go from one folded state to the next, and how often the folds popped open and closed in real time. The researchers watching little white beads move under the microscope got the closest look yet at how a molecule with a three-dimensional structure behaves in life, thanks to a pair of keen, green lasers and a little judicious tugging. “It’s so cool to be able to take a single molecule and bend it to your will,” Block said.

Other co-authors of the paper, “Direct Observation of Hierarchical Folding in Single Riboswitch Aptamers,” are Stanford graduate students William J. Greenleaf and Kirsten Frieda; Daniel A. N. Foster of the University of Alberta; and Michael T. Woodside of the University of Alberta and the National Institute for Nanotechnology, National Research Council of Canada.

Funding was provided by the National Institute of General Medical Sciences and the National Institute for Nanotechnology at the University of Alberta.

Airline traffic and global warming

As competition among airlines in Asia and other parts of the world intensifies, an ever-growing mass of people finds it convenient to travel by air for business and leisure. But the rapid growth of commercial aviation is having a significant impact on global warming — and Asia, the world’s fastest expanding market for air travel, is starting to feel the heat.In its latest forecast of aviation growth, European aircraft maker Airbus said earlier this month that world’s fleet of large passenger jets (more than 100 seats) would double in the next 20 years to nearly 33,000 aircraft. It predicted that passenger traffic would rise by 4.9 percent per year between 2007 and 2026, almost trebling in two decades as jet planes got bigger and more people flew on them. Meanwhile air-freight will rise by 5.8 percent annually in the same period.

The greatest demand will come from the Asia-Pacific region, where airlines will take delivery of 31 percent of new planes in the next 20 years, compared with 24 percent for Europe and 27 percent for North America.

According to Airbus, the air transport industry contributes just 2 percent of global man-made emissions of carbon dioxide, the main gas blamed for global warming. But it acknowledged that a big rise in the number of planes would mean more greenhouse gas emissions and therefore increased pressure on makers of aircraft and their engines to cut pollution.

Critics assert that the airline industry is underestimating its contribution to global warming. They also say that while advances in engine design and other improved technology will continue to reduce airline pollution, these gains will be offset by the sheer growth of aviation, particularly in Asia, Europe and the U.S.

Reacting to concerns about climate change, Europe has drafted controversial plans to make all airlines flying into an out of the bloc buy pollution permits. The European Commission, executive arm of the European Union, proposed last month that airlines using EU airports would be included in the bloc’s emissions trading scheme from 2012, with a cap on their greenhouse emissions like CO2, nitrogen oxides and water vapor.

Under the scheme, which has yet to be approved by the European Parliament and the 27 member-states of the EU, airlines would gradually have to buy emissions certificates at auction, starting with 20 percent of permits in 2013 and rising to 100 percent in 2020.

EU environmental officials have promoted the airline bill as a centerpiece of Europe’s campaign to lead the world in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. However, the U.S. government and many airlines insist there should be an international agreement first. They warn with without it, European airlines risk retaliation as third countries deny them access or impose punitive taxes while non-European airlines shun Europe as a hub for long-haul flights. Airlines also say that the EU action could cost billions of euros and drive up ticket prices.

But the pressure outside Asia for tighter curbs on global warming emissions from passenger and freight aircraft is growing. In December in the U.S., a coalition of state governments, cities and environmental groups filed petitions with the Environmental Protection Agency urging it to address the effects of vast amounts of global warming pollution from the world’s aircraft fleet. The petitions are the first step in a process that requires the EPA to evaluate the current impacts of aircraft emissions, seek public comment and develop rules to reduce aircraft pollution or explain why it will not act.

The coalition says that aircraft currently account for 12 percent of CO2 emissions from U.S. transportation sources and three percent of the total CO2 emissions from the United States. The U.S. is responsible for nearly half of worldwide CO2 emissions from planes.

However, a recent report by Britain’s Royal Commission on Environmental Protection found that the net effects of ozone, aircraft condensation trails and aviation-induced cloud cover is likely to triple the warming effect of CO2 emitted by aircraft. The report concluded that if these estimates are correct and the anticipated growth in aviation occurs, aviation may be responsible for between six and ten percent of the human impact on climate by the year 2050.

The Asian aviation industry needs to take note of these trends and developments and move from reactive to proactive mode. Staying silent and adding nothing to the growing debate over aircraft pollution and climate change will simply mean that other players act to set the rules governing future air travel.

The writer, a former Asia editor of the International Herald Tribune, works on energy and climate change issues at the Institute of South East Asian Studies in Singapore.

Going the Distance: Galaxies may hail from early universe

Using a cosmic magnifying glass to peer into the deepest reaches of space, two teams of astronomers have discovered tiny galaxies that may be among the most distant known. Images suggest that one of the galaxies is so remote that the light now reaching Earth left this starlit body when the 13.7-billion-year-old universe was only about 700 million years old.

LONG AGO, FAR AWAY. Gravity of the cluster Abell 1689 acts as a gravitational lens, bending into arcs and magnifying the light from remote background galaxies. One galaxy appears so remote that it doesn’t show up in visible light (top, right) but only in the infrared (middle and bottom, right). L. Bradley & H. Ford/JHU, Bouwens & Illingworth/UCSC, NASA, ESA

The discoveries are important, notes Tim Heckman of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, because they probe a special time in the universe, when the cosmos changed from a place filled with neutral gas to a place ionized by the emergence of the first substantial population of stars and black holes. Studies of distant galaxies help pinpoint when that critical era happened.

All of the galaxies are so small that even the keen eye of the Hubble Space Telescope couldn’t have spotted them without nature providing a gravitational assist. According to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, a massive foreground body acts like a lens, bending and magnifying light from a more remote galaxy that lies along the same line of sight to Earth.

That’s why Garth Illingworth and Rychard Bouwens of the University of California, Santa Cruz and their colleagues went hunting for distant galaxies around a nearby cluster of galaxies called Abell 1689.

The cluster’s gravity distorts images of background galaxies, bending them into arcs and magnifying their brightness. One of these galaxies proved especially intriguing because it appeared bright at several infrared wavelengths recorded by Hubble but disappeared in visible light.

That’s a sign that the galaxy, dubbed A1689-zD1, is both extraordinarily distant and youthful. The data also indicate that the galaxy forms stars at a rate equivalent to five suns a year, typical of the small galaxies thought to be common in the early universe, says Bouwens.

The researchers don’t have a spectrum for the galaxy and therefore can’t be sure of its distance, but they calculate in an upcoming Astrophysical Journal paper that the galaxy most likely lies 13 billion light-years from Earth and has a redshift of 7.6. That redshift signifies that cosmic expansion has stretched the wavelengths emitted by the galaxy by a factor of 8.6.

“The reason we are excited about this [galaxy] is that we can look at it in great detail because of the factor of 10 gravitational amplification by the foreground cluster,” Bouwens says. A1689-zD1 is the brightest known galaxy that’s likely to be extremely distant, his team notes.

The Hubble images show several dense clumps, each containing hundreds of millions of stars. Follow-up images, taken at longer infrared wavelengths with NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, provide additional evidence that the galaxy is remote and also yield a more accurate measurement of the galaxy’s mass.

“It looks pretty convincing” that A1689-zD1 is remote, but proof may require spectra taken by Hubble’s proposed successor, the James Webb Space Telescope, Heckman says.

In searching for distant galaxies, a second team, which includes Richard Ellis and Johan Richard of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, also surveyed several galaxy clusters. The team found evidence of six distant galaxies, which may lie between 12.9 billion and 13.1 billion light-years from Earth, Richard reported this week at an astrophysics meeting at the Aspen Center for Physics in Colorado. Because the galaxies aren’t intrinsically as bright, even though the clusters magnify them by a factor of about 10, astronomers have less information about these faint bodies than they do about A1689-zD1, Richard notes

Their Deepest, Darkest Discovery

Scientists Create a Black That Erases Virtually All Light

Researchers in New York reported this month that they have created a paper-thin material that absorbs 99.955 percent of the light that hits it, making it by far the darkest substance ever made — about 30 times as dark as the government’s current standard for blackest black.

The material, made of hollow fibers, is a Roach Motel for photons — light checks in, but it never checks out. By voraciously sucking up all surrounding illumination, it can give those who gaze on it a dizzying sensation of nothingness.

“It’s very deep, like in a forest on the darkest night,” said Shawn-Yu Lin, a scientist who helped create the material at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y. “Nothing comes back to you. It’s very, very, very dark.”

But scientists are not satisfied. Using other new materials, some are trying to manufacture rudimentary Harry Potter-like cloaks that make objects inside of them literally invisible under the right conditions — the pinnacle of stealthy technology.

Both advances reflect researchers’ growing ability to manipulate light, the fleetest and most evanescent of nature’s offerings. The nascent invisibility cloak now being tested, for example, is made of a material that bends light rays “backward,” a weird phenomenon thought to be impossible just a few years ago.

Known as transformation optics, the phenomenon compels some wavelengths of light to flow around an object like water around a stone. As a result, things behind the object become visible while the object itself disappears from view.

“Cloaking is just the tip of the iceberg,” said Vladimir Shalaev, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Purdue University and an expert in the fledgling field. “With transformation optics you can do many other tricks,” perhaps including making things appear to be located where they are not and focusing massive amounts of energy on microscopic spots.

U.S. military and intelligence agencies have funded the cloaking research “for obvious reasons,” said David Schurig, a physicist and electrical engineer at North Carolina State University who recently designed and helped test a cloaking device. In that experiment, a shielded object a little smaller than a hockey puck was made invisible to a detector that uses microwaves to “see.”

The first working cloaks will be limited that way, he said — able to steer just a limited part of the light spectrum around objects — and it could be years before scientists make cloaks that work for all wavelengths, including the visible spectrum used by the human eye.

But even cloaks that work on just a few key wavelengths could offer huge benefits, making objects invisible to laser beams used for weapons targeting, for example, or rendering an enemy’s night goggles useless because objects would be invisible to the infrared rays those devices use.

The Defense Department did not fund development of the new blacker-than-black material, created by Lin and his colleagues. But military officials were among the first to call after a description of the work appeared in this month’s issue of the journal Nano Letters, Lin said in an interview.

Substances that absorb every smidgeon of incoming visible light could complement existing stealth coatings that absorb radar waves, Lin said. He and others emphasized, however, that there are also peaceful and more immediate applications for the blackest stuff on Earth.

Solar panels coated with it would be much more efficient than those coated with conventional black paint, which reflects 5 percent or more of incoming light. Telescopes lined with it would sop up random flecks of incidental light, providing a blacker background to detect faint stars.

And a wide array of heat detectors and energy-measuring devices, including climate-tracking equipment on satellites, would become far more accurate than they are today if they were coated with energy-grabbing superblack.

That helps explain why Lin has been fielding queries from solar-energy companies such as SolFocus of Mountain View, Calif., and the European Space Agency.

“The more black the material the better,” said Gerald Fraser, a physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology, the federal agency that specializes in fine measurements and industrial standards.

That agency offers scientists a chemical mix it calls “standard black,” which for years has been the defining measure of blackness. Photographers and printers use it to calibrate their gray scales. Industrial radiologists use it to calibrate X-ray imaging systems that detect radiation or hidden defects in building materials.

That black reflects about 1.4 percent of incoming visible light, and in recent years it has become somewhat outmoded. In 2003, scientists developed a substance made of nickel and phosphorus that reflected just 0.17 percent of visible light, winning it a Guinness World Records listing and kudos in Time magazine as one of that year’s 300 “coolest inventions.”

The newest black — which when held next to something conventionally black, such as a tuxedo jacket, is noticeably blacker — reflects just 0.045 percent of visible light.

It is made of carbon nanotubes: microscopic, hollow fibers whose walls are just one atom thick. Importantly, the fibers are widely spaced, providing plenty of space to allow light in and almost no surfaces to bounce it back out.

“There are a lot of materials that are very absorbing of light so that once the light gets in, very little is reflected. That is not the big issue,” said John Pendry, a physics professor at Imperial College London. “The big issue is persuading the light to go in there in the first place” — something the New York team accomplished by spacing the nanotubes so widely.

While Lin and his colleagues, including Pulickel Ajayan, now at Rice University, pursue applications for their superblack, Pendry and others are hoping to go further by perfecting complete invisibility. The big difference is that a superblack object, even if invisible to the eye, still casts a shadow behind it, while an object shielded by an invisibility cloak does not.

Pendry pioneered much of modern thinking about how to attain full invisibility using “metamaterials” — substances engineered to manhandle light. Ordinary matter, such as glass or water, slows and bends light as it passes through. Metamaterials contain bits of metal or other substances embedded in precise patterns to make the light bend in an opposite direction from normal paths.

“In a sense you have some negative space,” Pendry said. “The light appears to go backward in space.”

The first generation, metamaterial “cloaks” are not thin and flexible like Harry Potter’s imagined version but are inches thick and solid, resembling canisters, making them able to hide a stationary object but not a moving person. But the science is progressing quickly, physicist Schurig said.

To make a thin, flexible metamaterial cloak, Schurig said, “is technically challenging but not fundamentally impossible.” And although no cloak can yet make objects fully invisible to the human eye, he added, it may not be long before scientists can bend the visible spectrum enough to make an object hard to see.

That object might be found “if you know what you are looking for,” Schurig said. “But if you’re just scanning, then partial invisibility may allow something to go unnoticed.”

There is a flip side to the emerging ability to manipulate light, scientists say. “Think anti-cloaking,” said Shalaev, the engineering professor. “Instead of excluding light from an object, you can concentrate light in a small area.”

Normally, light cannot be squeezed into a space smaller than its own wavelength, he said, but transformation optics create the possibility of accomplishing just that — packing loads of energy into a vanishingly small space. Such beams could pack a destructive punch, or could be tamed to serve as ultrasensitive needlelike probes, able to detect even a single molecule of some substance of interest.

Pendry added a cautionary note about invisible cloaks, making a real-life distinction from the stuff of fiction: People inside them will not be able to see out. By definition, if no light is bouncing off them, none can reach their eyes, either. “You’d have to use signals other than light to communicate,” Pendry said.

Asked for an example of what would work, he paused for a moment.

“You could always talk to them,” he said.