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28 September 2016
Our home spiral arm in the Milky Way is less wimpy than thought | New Scientist
By Rebecca Boyle

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Our home in the universe
NASA/JPL


It’s tricky to map an entire galaxy when you live in one of its arms. But astronomers have made the clearest map yet of the Milky Way – and it turns out that the arm that hosts our solar system is even bigger than previously thought.

The idea that the Milky Way is a spiral was first proposed more than 150 years ago, but we only started identifying its limbs in the 1950s. Details about the galaxy’s exact structure are still hotly debated, such as the number of arms, their length and the size of the bar of hot gas and dust that stretches across its middle.

The star-filled arms are densely packed with gas and dust, where new stars are born. That dust can obscure stars we use to measure distances, complicating the mapping process.

Two of the arms, called Perseus and Scutum-Centaurus, are larger and filled with more stars, while the Sagittarius and Outer arms have fewer stars but just as much gas. The solar system has been thought to lie in a structure called the Orion Spur, or Local Arm, which is smaller than the nearby Perseus Arm.

Just as grand
Now, Ye Xu and colleagues from the Purple Mountain Observatory in Nanjing, China, say the Local Arm is just as grand as the others.

The team used the Very Long Baseline Array in New Mexico to make extremely accurate measurements of high-mass gas clouds in the arms, and used a star-measuring trigonometry trick called parallax to measure their distances.

“Radio telescopes can ‘see’ through the galactic plane to massive star forming regions that trace spiral structure, while optical wavelengths will be hidden by dust,” Xe says. “Achieving a highly accurate parallax is not easy.”

The new measurements suggest the Milky Way is not a grand design spiral with well-defined arms, but a spiral with many branches and subtle spurs.

However, Xu and colleagues say the Orion Spur is not a spur at all, but more in line with the galaxy’s other spectacular arms. The team also discovered a spur connecting the Local and Sagittarius arms.

“This lane has received little attention in the past because it does not correspond with any of the major spiral arm features of the inner galaxy,” the authors of the study write.

Future measurements with other radio telescopes will shed more light on the galaxy’s shape. The European Space Agency’s Gaia spacecraft is in the midst of a mission to make a three-dimensional map of our galaxy, too. More measurements of the high-mass gas regions will help astronomers determine what our galaxy looks like, from the inside out.


Journal reference:
The local spiral structure of the Milky Way, Ye Xu, Mark Reid, Thomas Dame, Karl Menten, Nobuyuki Sakai, Jingjing Li, Andreas Brunthaler, Luca Moscadelli, Bo Zhang and Xingwu Zheng, Science Advances 28 Sep 2016, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.1600878

Abstract

The nature of the spiral structure of the Milky Way has long been debated. Only in the last decade have astronomers been able to accurately measure distances to a substantial number of high-mass star-forming regions, the classic tracers of spiral structure in galaxies. We report distance measurements at radio wavelengths using the Very Long Baseline Array for eight regions of massive star formation near the Local spiral arm of the Milky Way. Combined with previous measurements, these observations reveal that the Local Arm is larger than previously thought, and both its pitch angle and star formation rate are comparable to those of the Galaxy’s major spiral arms, such as Sagittarius and Perseus. Toward the constellation Cygnus, sources in the Local Arm extend for a great distance along our line of sight and roughly along the solar orbit. Because of this orientation, these sources cluster both on the sky and in velocity to form the complex and long enigmatic Cygnus X region. We also identify a spur that branches between the Local and Sagittarius spiral arms.​
 
More news on the baking soda stuff.

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Study finds soda helps fight cancer
2016-09-27 09:14 | China Daily | Editor: Feng Shuang

Therapy involves injection as part of liver treatment, not drinking liquid

A test of a cancer therapy by Chinese researchers based on baking soda - or sodium bicarbonate - shows promise but is still in the preliminary stages of research, and much more testing is needed, they said.

The researchers made the statement after heated discussion arose online about the research, with some netizens speculating that drinking sodium bicarbonate dissolved in water can cure cancer.

The study, published in the journal eLife in August, was led by Hu Xun, a cancer researcher at the Second Affiliated Hospital of Zhejiang University's School of Medicine, and Chao Ming, a radiology researcher at the hospital. All 40 liver cancer patients on whom the therapy was tried during the trial responded positively.

An infusion of soda before a procedure to restrict a tumor's blood supply appeared to aid the attack on cancerous cells.

The research aroused public attention over the past few days, with many netizens excited because they believed doctors had found an effective and cheap way - merely a drink of soda water - to cure liver cancer, one of the most common types of cancer among Chinese people.

"The research is valid, but it is preliminary," Chao said in a statement posted on the hospital's website on Monday. "Repeated tests are needed."

The therapy involves injecting sodium bicarbonate into the blood vessels that supply tumors. Patients are not asked to drink it, he said, adding that it is not clear that slightly alkaline water, such as soda water, is beneficial to the treatment of cancer.

In addition, the therapy only proved effective in patients with liver cancer in the research. Further research is needed to see whether it is effective against other cancers, he said.

Zhang Yuewei, a radiologist at Beijing Tsinghua Changgung Hospital who had discussed the research earlier with Chao, said the new therapy is at an early research stage, and the therapy is intended to improve the effectiveness of the usual treatment for liver cancer, not to replace it.
 
Documentary traces apple's origin to China
Updated: 2016-09-27 08:02
By Xinhua in Urumqi(China Daily)

A documentary broadcast on Monday traces the origins of the apple to the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region, quashing the popularly held Chinese belief that they were introduced to the country from the West.

The documentary, "Saving the Gene Pool", draws on a multitude of scientific evidence to show that all cultivated apple varieties are offshoots of Malus sieversii, a wild apple native to the Tianshan mountain range in Central Asia.

Many Chinese attribute the introduction of the apple to China by John Livingston Nevius (1829-93), a US Christian missionary. Livingstone and his wife were said to have brought apple seedlings with them to Yantai, Shandong province, now a major apple growing region.

The documentary team also tested a wild apple tree in the Ili Kazak autonomous prefecture in Xinjiang. The 12.9-meter tree is believed to be over 600 years old, predating the supposed introduction of apples to China by a few hundred years.

The sequencing of the apple genome by Italian Riccardo Velasco further supports the relationship between wild apples and domesticated apples, said Zhang Daoyuan, a researcher with the Xinjiang Institute of Ecology and Geography of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

The Tianshan mountain range has one of the world's largest wild fruit ecological systems. Many wild fruit species flourished in the valleys and basins about 65 million years ago. According to the latest research, the region has 84 varieties of wild apple, making it a rare and rich apple gene pool.

Guan Kaiyun, deputy head of the institute, said researchers are exploring the potential to domesticate wild varieties that are not only drought- and cold-resistant, but also taste good.

The documentary, broadcast by China Central Television, was jointly produced by the institute, CCTV and the CAS Bureau of Science Communication.

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A farmer picks apples at an orchard in the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region. Wang Tiesuo / China News Service File Photo
 
Chinese, U.S. scientists invent power-generating fabric
2016-09-30 15:17:18 Xinhua Web Editor: Fei Fei

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The special cloth can utitlize sunshine and body movements to charge small electronics
like watches and mobile phones. [Photo: Chinanews.com/Chongqing University]

Playing a baseball game on a sunny afternoon may soon be a way to charge your iPhone, thanks to a new fabric developed by Chinese and American scientists.

The fabric harvests energy from both motion and sunlight. Solar cells and nano-generators embedded in lightweight fibers are woven with wool to create the fabric, according to Fan Xing, a chemical engineering professor at Chongqing University.

Only 0.32 millimeters thick, the fabric could be used with wearable devices, or as window shades and tents in the future, Fan told Xinhua on Friday.

With sufficient sunlight and constant motion, a 5-cm long and 4-cm wide fabric can generate and maintain electricity with a voltage of 5V, enough to charge a cellphone.

"Our research considers the safety of the fabric and we conduct our tests at low voltage," Fan said. "The fabric is safe the for human body."

Durability tests have not yet been run, but the fabric can be bent 500 times without losing performance.

The findings, in cooperation from the Georgia Institute of Technology, were published in Nature Energy, an international academic journal earlier this month.
 
Maojun Yang’s Group Published the Structure of Respirasome in Nature

On September 21st 2016, a research team led by Professor Maojun Yang from the School of Life Sciences, Tsinghua University published an article entitled “The Architecture of the Mammalian Respirasome” in Nature which has reported the highest resolution cryo-EM structure of mitochondria respirasome (1). This work is the second breakthrough by Prof. Yang in the area after reporting the structure of type-II mitochondria complex I in Nature in 2012 (2). The structure of respirasome, which is the largest and most complicated membrane protein complex identified to date, provides insight into the organization of mammalian respiratory chain as well as the mechanism of proton pumping and electron transfer, ultimately provides critical information into the treatment of cellular-respiration related diseases.

Respiration is the most basic activity of all living organisms. Respirasome abnormality in human can lead to various serious diseases, including Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases, multiple sclerosis, Friedreich’s ataxia and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Respirasome, which is a gigantic molecular machine responsible for cellular respiration, locates in the inner mitochondrial membrane (IMM). In 1997, American scientist Hackenbrock proposed the fluid model claiming that four protein complexes, including NADH dehydrogenase (CI), succinate dehydrogenase (CII), cytochrome bc1 complex (CIII) and cytochrome c oxidase (CIV), are separately scattered in the IMM, and each of them catalyzes one step of respiration, while since 2000, more and more evidence shows these complexes are not independent from of each other, but can combine to form a higher order structure, supercomplex (SC). Different combination types can form different supercomplexes, among which SCI1III2IV1 is the most abundant and important.



More -> Maojun Yang’s Group Published the Structure of Respirasome in Nature | Tsinghua University News

Paper:
The architecture of the mammalian respirasome, Nature (2016), DOI: 10.1038/nature19359
 
Scientist from China, UK team up to find out how anti-cancer components are produced in Chinese herb ‘Huangqin’
By Cai Wenjun | September 27, 2016, Tuesday |
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Online Edition

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Scientists from China and UK have started co-efforts on a research to find out how the anti-cancer components are produced inside a traditional Chinese herb.

This can lead to development of new health supplement and drugs to help control and fight with cancer, scientists said during the establishment of a new Sino-UK joint research centre.

Under the cooperation of China Academy of Sciences (CAS) and UK-based John Innes Center (JIC), a joint research center called CAS-JIC Centre of Excellence for Plant and Microbial Science with participation of three leading institutes from China and UK was established with main focus on the improvement of food crops and the production of high-value, beneficial products from plants and microbes, experts announced over the weekend.

Herb Huangqin, or Scutellaria baicalensis Georgi, is been used in traditional Chinese medicine for the treatment of respiratory infection through effects of anti-inflammation and clearing away heat. But scientists have found its anti-cancer effects in its two compounds—baicalein and wogonin, but how the two elements compound and metabolize remained unknown.

Through the team from both Shanghai and UK, scientists explained how the two useful compounds are made in Huangqin. “With the discovery, we can introduce the two compounds in other plants to product plants with anti-cancer effects and develop pure supplements and drugs with anti-cancer effects to benefit the public,” said Dr Zhao Qing from the team.
 
Save Genes for the Future
Sep 30, 2016

It is delicious, it is ancient, it is popular, and it plays an important part in human culture. It is apple, a kind of fruit included in our food list long since the Stone Age.

Modern cultivars of domesticated apple (Malus pumila) were first brought to the world from Europe, and were therefore believed to be originated from Europe. However, scientists found through years of investigation that cultivated apples around the world may trace back to one ancestor—the Malus sieversii.

Malus sieversii is a wild apple native to the mountains of Central Asia in southern Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Xinjiang, China. It was first described (as Pyrus sieversii) in 1833 by Carl Friedrich von Ledebour, a German naturalist who saw them growing in the Altai Mountains.

Located in the far interior of the Eurasia continent, the Tianshan Mountains preserved many of the Mesozoic warmth-requiring wild fruits, when the Quaternary glaciation of the Cenozoic came about two to three million years ago.

Recent survey reveals that the wild fruit forest in the Tianshan Mountains owns 58 wild fruit species, and Malus sieversii is the major species, with as many as 84 varieties. This is a natural gene pool rarely seen in the world and may provide future possibilities for the development of apple species.

However, the species is now considered vulnerable to extinction due to human activities. Wild fruit forest now covers only about half of its areas 50 years ago. Plant diseases and insect pests caused blockbuster damage to the forest. Death rate of the forest reached 80 per cent in Xinjiang’s Xinyuan County, core area of the wild fruit forest. Statistics indicate that the damage is spreading at a speed of 400 hectares per year.

Scientist from the Xinjiang Institute of Ecology and Geography proposed an initiative to preserve the gene pool for wild fruits in the Tianshan Mountains in 2014. The initiative was highlighted by the Chinese government. The project to save and preserve the wild fruit forest was approved this April and will be launched in early October.

The remaining wild fruit forest of about 5,000 hectares will get systematic conservation and research under the frame of the project. Scientists hope to find the reasons for the ecosystem degradation of the wild fruit forest and therefore develop key technologies for species rejuvenation of the forest ecosystem.

Modern thremmatoloy develops more and more refined breeding technologies, but leaves less and less farming varieties. About 75 per cent of farming species have gone extinct around the world. This will mean less and less possibilities for variety development, in the perspective of gene basis.

The wild fruit forest, with its abundant germplasm resources, may hold the last key for future development of fruit. But can that happen? Maybe, the answer lies in the wild fruit forest preservation project.


Save Genes for the Future---Chinese Academy of Sciences
 
Besides in Shenzhen airport, now there are 10 robots in Zhuhai and Zhongshan ports.
These robot designs are different to that at Shenzhen or Chongqing.


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Robot customs officers debut in south China ports
2016-10-01 23:50:41 Xinhua Web Editor: Meng Xue

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An intelligent robot works as customs officer at a port in Zhuhai, south China's
Guangdong Province on October 1, 2016. [Photo: ycwb.com]

Ten intelligent robots have started to work as customs officers at three ports in the cities of Zhuhai and Zhongshan, southern China's Guangdong Province on Saturday, according to the local customs office.

They are the first batch of intelligent robots, to be used by Chinese customs at the ports of Gongbei, Hengqin and Zhongshan. The robots, named Xiao Hai, have state-of-the-art perception technology and are able to listen, speak, learn, see and walk.

Based on a specialized customs database, the robots can answer questions in 28 languages and dialects, including Cantonese, Mandarin, English and Japanese.

There are some particular problems they cannot solve, and customs officials said they will link the robots to their customer service hotline in the future.

With face recognition technology, the robots can detect suspicious people and raise an alarm, according to Zhao Min, director of Gongbei customs.

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An intelligent robot works as customs officer at a port in Zhuhai,
south China's Guangdong Province on October 1, 2016. [Photo: ycwb.com]
Discussions for the robots are here -
https://defence.pk/threads/chinas-intelligent-robots.450894/
 
Chinese scientists control major cotton disease with gene technology
Source: Xinhua 2016-10-04 12:58:36

BEIJING, Oct. 4 (Xinhua) -- Chinese scientists have made a breakthrough in controlling a major disease of cotton plants using gene technology, Xinhua has learned.

After eight years of research, scientists with the Institute of Microbiology of Chinese Academy of Sciences found that gene interference technology can prevent the spread of a pathogenic fungus, the cause of verticillium dahliae wilt.

Verticillium dahliae is a vascular fungal pathogen responsible for devastating many crops.

Led by Guo Huishan, the research group has discovered how the fungus infects the cotton.

Based on their findings, scientists have cultivated a new strain of cotton with resistance to verticillium dahliae increased by 22.25 percent.

"Anti-pathogenic fungus cotton will help cotton farmers make more money," said Guo.

The findings have been published in the latest edition of "Nature Plants."
 
Posted: Oct 05, 2016
'Smart clothing' could someday power cell phones with the sun's rays

(Nanowerk News) Batteries in smart phones and other portable electronics often die at inopportune times. Carrying a spare battery is one solution. As an alternative, researchers have tried to create fibers to incorporate in clothing that would power these devices. However, many of these fibers can't withstand clothing manufacturing, especially weaving and cutting.

Now, in the journal ACS Nano ("Tailorable and Wearable Textile Devices for Solar Energy Harvesting and Simultaneous Storage"), scientists report the first fibers suitable for weaving into tailorable textiles that can capture and release solar energy.

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The “threads” (fiber electrodes) featuring tailorability and knittability can be large-scale fabricated and then woven into energy textiles. The fiber supercapacitor with merits of tailorability, ultrafast charging capability, and ultrahigh bending-resistance is used as the energy storage module, while an all-solid dye-sensitized solar cell textile is used as the solar energy harvesting module. (© ACS)

To collect solar power, Wenjie Mai, Xing Fan and colleagues created two different types of fibers. One contained titanium or a manganese-coated polymer along with zinc oxide, a dye and an electrolyte. These fibers were then interlaced with copper-coated polymer wires to create the solar cell section of the textile. To store power, the researchers developed a second type of fiber. This one was made of titanium, titanium nitride, a thin carbon shell to prevent oxidation and an electrolyte. These fibers were woven with cotton yarn.

When combined, the new materials formed a flexible textile that the team could cut and tailor into a "smart garment" that was fully charged by sunlight. The researchers say the clothing could potentially power small electronics including tablets and phones.

Source: American Chemical Society

'Smart clothing' could someday power cell phones with the sun's rays


Journal Reference:
Tailorable and Wearable Textile Devices for Solar Energy Harvesting and Simultaneous Storage, ACS Nano (2016), DOI: 10.1021/acsnano.6b05293
 
Editor's summary

The lower olefins—chiefly ethylene, propylene and butylene—are starting materials for many plastics and other industrial products. They are usually obtained by cracking hydrocarbon feedstocks, so as petroleum reserves become depleted the urgency to switch to alternative feedstocks such as biomass increases. The 'Fischer–Tropsch to olefins' (FTO) process produces lower olefines from syngas—a mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide derived from biomass, coal and natural gas—but at the same time produces large amounts of unwanted methane. Here Liangshu Zhong and colleagues describe a new catalyst for the FTO conversion. Formed from cobalt carbide nanoprisms, the catalyst is active in mild reaction conditions, is highly selective for lower olefins and, critically, produces very little methane.


Cobalt carbide nanoprisms for direct production of lower olefins from syngas : Nature : Nature Research
 
Researchers demonstrate a single laser source scheme for studying topological matter in cold-atom systems
October 7, 2016 by Bob Yirka report

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Experimental realization of 2D SO interaction and 1D-2D crossover. Credit: Science (2016). DOI: 10.1126/science.aaf6689

(Phys.org)—A team of researchers with members from several institutions in China has developed a new means for studying topological matter in cold-atom systems that involves using a single laser source. In their paper published in the journal Science, the team describes how the scheme works and outlines possible uses for it. Monika Aidelsburger with UPMC Sorbonne University offers an overview of the work done by the team in a Perspective piece in the same journal issue and offers some insight into some of the possible directions such research is going.


Continue -> http://phys.org/news/2016-10-laser-source-scheme-topological-cold-atom.html

More information: Z. Wu et al. Realization of two-dimensional spin-orbit coupling for Bose-Einstein condensates, Science (2016). DOI: 10.1126/science.aaf6689
 
By Karen McNulty Walsh | October 7, 2016
Still No 'Sterile' Neutrinos, But the Search Goes On
Looking through a window into the "dark" universe

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A liquid-filled detector at the Daya Bay Reactor Neutrino Experiment in China (Credit: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory)

Reports of the non-existence of the so-called “sterile” neutrino are premature, say scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory—even as they release results from two experiments that further limit the places this elusive particle may be hiding. These results, described in three papers published in Physical Review Letters (PRL) by scientists working on the Daya Bay Neutrino Experiment in China and the Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search (MINOS) at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory—like results recently announced by another neutrino experiment known as IceCube—greatly narrow the “phase space” where scientists must hunt.

Whether you look at the new results as “zeroing in” on the elusive particles, or largely ruling out their existence, the scientists say the search for sterile neutrinos will and should go on.

“Finding true evidence that sterile neutrinos exist would profoundly change our understanding of the universe,” said Brookhaven physicist Xin Qian, one of the neutrino hunters. These light, electrically neutral particles could be components of the mysterious “dark world,” including the dark matter that physicists know makes up about a quarter of the universe, but has never been directly detected.

Continue ->

Journal Reference:
  1. Daya Bay-only Phys. Rev. Lett. 117, 151802
  2. MINOS-only Phys. Rev. Lett. 117, 151803
  3. MINOS-Daya Bay-Bugey 3 Phys. Rev. Lett. 117, 151801
 
60 years of China aerospace development
Baku, September 19, AZERTAC

Beijing authorities plan to 2030 to transform the Chinese capital into the global scientific and technical innovation center.

This is stated in the document, ratified by the Premier of the state Council of China Li Keqiang.

According to the plan of the authorities, Beijing will become the world leader in the field of scientific and technical innovation pole for a high level of economic growth, the best place for innovative personnel, by area of innovation in the field of culture and the city, is an example for others in the field of exemplary environmental building.

By 2017, the government plans to form the basis for the construction of the Beijing innovation center. By 2020 it is planned to further strengthen the basic functions of the scientific and technical innovation center and its scientific and technical innovation potential. By 2030, the authorities plan to further strengthen and optimize the basic functions of the city as a centre of excellence of the scientific and technical innovation to provide support for scientific and technological development of the country.
http://azertag.az/en/xeber/993803
 
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