Posts tagged environment
Space flight to test antibiotic’s effectiveness
Jan 3rd
education project on ants to space station
NASA Television will provide live coverage of the launch of Orbital Sciences Corp.’s commercial Cygnus spacecraft on Tuesday, Jan. 7 from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia, which will be carrying two University of Colorado Boulder payloads to the International Space Station.
The two CU-Boulder payloads — a biomedical antibiotic experiment and an educational K-12 experiment involving ant behavior in microgravity — are slated to be launched aboard Orbital Sciences Corp.’s Antares rocket at 11:55 a.m. MST. Both experiments were designed by BioServe Space Technologies, a NASA-funded center in CU-Boulder’s aerospace engineering sciences department.
The CU-Boulder biomedical experiment was designed to test the effectiveness of antibiotics in space. Past experiments by CU-Boulder and other institutions have shown bacterial susceptibility to antibiotics is significantly reduced during spaceflight, although the reason is not yet known, said CU-Boulder Associate Professor David Klaus, principal investigator on the project.
Klaus said the investigation will examine changes in the gene expression of the bacteria E. coli during exposure to different concentrations of antibiotics while in the microgravity environment of space. The hope is to locate particular genes that are key to resisting antibiotics, which could lead to improved testing on Earth as well as new drug targets or new approaches to understanding antibiotic resistance in certain diseases or infections, said Klaus.
“Previous studies carried out in microgravity have shown that bacteria are able to grow in what normally would be an inhibitory concentration of the antibiotic,” said Klaus. “This investigation is aimed at characterizing the genetic basis for this response in the weightless environment of space with the intent of applying any insight gained toward combating the increasing emergence of drug-resistant pathogens here on Earth.”
Co-investigators on the project include BioServe Director Louis Stodieck, a research professor in aerospace engineering, and Shawn Levy, a researcher at the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology in Huntsville, Ala. The research effort also involves CU-Boulder doctoral candidate Luis Zea.
Bacterial resistance to antibiotics kills 100,000 Americans every year and represents a roughly $20 billion expense to the U.S. government in excess health care costs, said Klaus. The experiments will be undertaken using spaceflight test tubes contained in the Commercial Generic Bioprocessing Apparatus, or CGBA, an automated, suitcase-sized incubator, all designed and built by BioServe.
The second experiment launching to ISS is known as Ants in Space, which examines foraging patterns based on the density of the common Pavement Ant, said BioServe Business Development Manager and Education Program Director Stefanie Countryman. “Past experiments by Professor Deborah Gordon, principal investigator on this project, have shown that some ant species have the ability to search areas collectively without individual communication. When ant densities are high, each ant thoroughly searches one small area in a circular, “random” walk, she said. When ant densities are low, each ant searches by walking in a relatively straight line, allowing it to cover more ground.
“Ants assess their own density at the rate at which they meet,” said Countryman, who said the eight individual ant habitats on ISS will be loaded with roughly 100 ants each. “The experiment examines whether in microgravity ants will use the rate at which they meet to assess density, and so use straighter paths in the larger habitat areas. The results will be compared to ground controls, which in this case will include ant habitats in hundreds of K-12 classrooms around the world.”
Countryman has previously directed BioServe K-12 education experiments involving the behavior of butterflies, ladybugs and spiders in space, reaching hundreds of thousands of students around the world in the past two decades. For the ant experiments, BioServe is partnering with the Baylor College of Medicine’s Center for Education Outreach, a longstanding BioServe partner that has developed the education curriculum guide for the experiment.
BioServe research partners on the ant project include Gordon of Stanford University and Associate Professor Michael Greene of the University of Colorado Denver. The experiment is sponsored by NASA’s National Lab Education Office as well as the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space, a nonprofit group headquartered in Cape Canaveral, Fla.
Teachers interested in participating in the ant experiments may contact Countryman at countrym@colorado.edu. More information on the project for teachers and students will be online beginning in mid-January at http://www.bioedonline.org.
The flight will be the first Cygnus resupply cargo mission launched to ISS by Orbital Sciences Corp. and follows the earlier, successful launch of a Cygnus demo flight to ISS that arrived at the orbiting station Oct. 22.
In the past 25 years, BioServe has designed, built and flown microgravity life science research experiments on more than 40 space missions. BioServe has a full suite of space flight hardware, both on ISS and on the ground, which supports its own research as well as research conducted by its customers and partners. Past BioServe partners include large and small pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies, universities and NASA-funded researchers.
For more information on BioServe visit http://www.colorado.edu/engineering/BioServe/index.html.
-CU-
22 Boom – Best of Jann Scott Live – Episode 67
Sep 13th
In this episode we bring to you a collection of some of our favorite TV acceptable Jann Scott Live shows, Jann Scott Live has been from Radio, to TV, to the web and Back for decades of great entertainment. Whether you like it or not, Jann talks news, politics, environmental issues, cars, money, media, conspiracy, with Jann’s occasional sarcastic and sometimes questionable exploration into our societies known issues. That’s just the tip of the iceberg here, but either way we hope you like this collection of Jann Scott Live shows.
Videos in this Episode
22 Boom Intro
Jann Scott Live – All About the World Channel 1 Networks
Jann Scott Live Spring 2008
Jann Scott Live – War and Crime
Jann Scott Live – Freedom
Jann Scott Live – Financial Tips
Jann Scott Live – Boxing with Rick
Jann Scott Live – Media Awards
Jann Scott Live April 2008
Jann Scott Live – 28 Miles Per Gallon Standards
Jann Scott Live – Fuels
Good Guys Car Show – Larimer County 2009
Jann Scott Live – North Pole
Jann Scott Live – Gas Prices
Jann Scott Live – Cats and Oil
Traveling Vietnam War Memorial Wall
Jann Scott Live – Pain Drugs
Jann Scott Live – Immigration
Colorado Racing at Colorado National Speedway and the Grand Prix of Denver
Outro
CU study: Soot suspect in mid-1800s Alps glacier retreat
Sep 2nd
The research, published Sept. 2 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, may help resolve a longstanding scientific debate about why the Alps glaciers retreated beginning in the 1860s, decades before global temperatures started rising again.
Thomas Painter, a snow and ice scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., is lead author of the study, and co-authors include Waleed Abdalati, Director of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) at the University of Colorado Boulder.
Glacier records in the central European Alps dating back to the 1500s show that between 1860 and 1930, loosely defined as the end of the Little Ice Age in Europe, large valley glaciers in the Alps abruptly retreated by an average of nearly 0.6 mile (1 kilometer). Yet weather in Europe cooled by nearly 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit (1 degree Celsius) during that time. Glaciologists and climatologists have struggled to understand the mismatch between the climate and glacier records.
“Something was missing from the equation,” Painter said.
To investigate, he and his colleagues turned to history. In the decades following the 1850s, Europe was undergoing a powerful economic and atmospheric transformation spurred by industrialization. Residents, transportation, and perhaps most importantly, industry in Western Europe began burning coal in earnest, spewing huge quantities of black carbon and other dark particles into the atmosphere.
When black carbon particles settle on snow, they darken the surface. This melts the snow and exposes the underlying glacier ice to sunlight and relatively warm air earlier in the year, allowing more and faster melt.
To determine how much black carbon was in the atmosphere and the snow when the Alps glaciers began to retreat, the researchers studied ice cores drilled from high up on several European mountain glaciers. By measuring the levels of carbon particles trapped in the ice core layers and taking into consideration modern observations of the distribution of pollutants in the Alps, they could estimate how much black carbon was deposited on glacial surfaces at lower elevations, where levels of black carbon tend to be highest.
The team then ran computer models of glacier behavior, starting with recorded weather conditions and adding the impact of lower-elevation black carbon. By including this impact, the simulated glacier mass loss and timing finally were consistent with the historic record of glacial retreat, despite the cool temperatures of the time.
“This study uncovers some likely human fingerprints on our changing environment,” Abdalati said. “It’s a reminder that the actions we take have far-reaching impacts on the environment in which we live.”
“We must now look closer at other regions on Earth, such as the Himalaya, to study the present-day impacts of black carbon on glaciers,” said Georg Kaser, a study co-author from the University of Innsbruck and lead author of the Working Group I Cryosphere chapter of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s upcoming Fifth Assessment Report.
Other institutions participating in the study include the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and the University of California, Davis.
CIRES is a joint institute of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and CU-Boulder.
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