Thursday, August 11, 2011

Solar flares, coronal mass ejections (CMEs)

Solar flares are like large explosions found on sun that send light, energy and high speed particles into space. These flares are found associated with large solar magnetic storms that are known as (CMEs) coronal mass ejections. The number of such flares usually increases in every 11 years, and currently sun is moving towards another, that is likely to be in 2013. This means that more of the flares will be coming in the times to come, some may be small and some may be big enough to send their harmful  radiation to the Earth.

If these will be directed at Earth, such CMEs and the associated flares will result in very long lasting radiating storms that will harm communication system, power grids, satellite systems, and various land-based technologies. For example,: X-class flares occured on 5th Dec, 2006 and 6th Dec, 2006, triggered the CME that had badly interfered with the GPS signals which used to be forworded to land-based signal receivers.

Thursday, March 31, 2011

Farewell to Assays? Researchers Create Web-based Tool for Determining Pluripotency in Human Stem Cells


In an effort to create a cheaper, faster, and animal-free method for determining pluripotency in stem cells, an international research team has developed a web-based test that helps investigators determine whether their cell lines are pluripotent based on their gene expression profiles.

"Many scientists are unhappy" with the teratoma assay, Jeanne Loring, a Scripps Research molecular biologist and one of the authors of the study, said in a statement. The method can take six to eight weeks to get results, she noted, and is also "technically challenging and difficult to standardize." PluriTest uses two related classifiers: The "pluripotency score," which indicates whether a query sample contains a pluripotent signature; and the "novelty score," which measures how far the stem cells in a query sample deviate from the normal pluripotent stem cell lines.

Simply put, "you upload raw data to the website and it tells you if your cell line is pluripotent or not and it's also got some information about ... interesting patterns in the gene expression profile," Franz-Josef Mueller, a researcher at the Center for Integrative Psychiatry in Kiel, Germany, and a co-author on the paper, told BioInform.

Source: A bioinformatic assay for pluripotency in human cells (NATURE METHODS)