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Study reveals potential treatments for Ebola and other deadly viruses

Illnesses caused by many of the world’s most deadly viruses cannot be effectively treated with existing drugs or vaccines. A study published by Cell Press in the March 21 issue of the journal Chemistry & Biology has revealed several compounds that can inhibit multiple viruses, such as highly lethal Ebola virus, as well as pathogens responsible for rabies, mumps, and measles, opening up new therapeutic avenues for combating highly pathogenic viruses.

“The medical field currently does not have ideal antiviral therapies, often no therapeutics at all, and the development of broad-spectrum antivirals is a great way to provide treatment in the future,” says study author Claire Marie Filone of Boston University School of Medicine. “Toward that end, we have identified a drug that targets multiple viruses- and may be developed into an antiviral treatment for known and emerging viruses.”

Many viruses that cause human diseases are nonsegmented, negative-strand (NNS) RNA viruses, which include the highly lethal Ebola virus and other pathogens mentioned above. In contrast to the many antibiotics that work against a wide range of bacteria, there are currently no highly effective or safe broad-spectrum drug treatments for viral diseases.

To address this need, John Connor and John Snyder of Boston University and their team screened thousands of diverse compounds for small molecules that showed strong antiviral activity against multiple NNS viruses. They identified several molecules that inhibited infection in cells exposed to either Ebola or another NNS virus called vesicular stomatitis virus. These molecules, which are related to a class of plant-derived compounds called indoline alkaloids, share a common chemical structure that can be modified to enhance antiviral activity.

The most potent of these compounds turned off NNS viral genes by blocking transcription. “Because our antiviral targets such a critical step in virus replication, we may be able to develop it into a therapeutic that could be used against many different types of viral infections,” Filone says.

Source

9 Year Old Discovers New Dinosaur And Has It Named After Her

One little girl’s odd hobby has led to an extraordinary find for British paleontologists.

At the age of 9, Daisy Morris has discovered a new dinosaur species, which scientists have since named after her. The new creature has been dubbed Vectidraco daisymorrisae, the “Dragon from the Isle of Wight.”

Daisy was just 4 when she stumbled upon the fossilized remains of an unknown animal during a family walk on the beach in 2009. The family lives near the coast of England’s Isle of Wight — also known as the “dinosaur capital of Great Britain.”

“She has a very good eye for tiny little fossils,” her mother Sian Morris told BBC. Daisy apparently first began fossil hunting at age 3. “She found these tiny little black bones sticking out of the mud and decided to dig a bit further and scoop them all out,” her mother said.

Realizing that Daisy had possibly uncovered an ancient specimen, her family took the findings to Southampton University’s fossil expert Martin Simpson.

Over the past several years, the bones Daisy discovered have been thoroughly analyzed by paleontologists. The findings were finally published this Monday. The fossilized remains belong to a previously unknown genus and species of a small flying reptile called the pterosaur.

The remains date back to the Lower Cretaceous period and may be up to 115 million years old.

The family has donated the fossils to the Natural History Museum while Daisy’s personal collection continues to grow. Sian Morris told the Daily Mail, “She’s fascinated and we’re very proud of her.”

Source: The Huffington Post

Happy Birthday Mr. Rogers! 

Fred Rogers (March 20, 1928 – February 27, 2003) would’ve turned 85 years old today. Most famous for his children’s television show Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, which ran for over three decades, Fred Rogers was nothing short of a hero. Although not a scientist, we feature his birthday here because there are few examples of individuals quite like him - ones who were able to inspire children and adults alike to be curious, kind and tolerant of those around them. His message was as beautiful as his program, and his persona on-and-off camera were the same wonderfully compassionate human being. 

Here’s a video that Mental Floss and John Green did on Mr. Roger’s life. 

A quote:

“As human beings, our job in life is to help people realize how rare and valuable each one of us really is, that each of us has something that no one else has—or ever will have—something inside that is unique to all time. It’s our job to encourage each other to discover that uniqueness and to provide ways of developing its expression.”

How Did We Not See the Russian Asteroid Coming? 

Over a hundred people are injured after a meteor or meteors reportedly exploded over Chelyabinsk, Russia this morning. Although there are no confirmed deaths, the full extent of the situation is still being assessed.

Chelyabinsk is a city of about a million people, located just to the east of the Ural Mountains. This morning, several people captured video of a bright trail streaking across the sky, followed by a saturatingly bright light. Although some people say that the lights were caused by a meteor shower, others believe that it was a single meteor that cut across the sky and exploded in the atmosphere.

Accounts of injuries vary, but it appears that anywhere between one hundred and four hundred people were injured, most of them by glass from shattering windows. (Reuters is saying 400.) The explosion shook the buildings, and it seems as though the 6000-square-foot roof of a Zinc Plant collapsed. Some people say that fragments of the meteor rained down on the town. Given that it was one of the biggest meteors to hit Earth in possibly a century, why didn’t we see it coming?

For answers, we turned to NASA’s Amy Mainzer, a scientist who works with the space agency’s Near Earth Objects (NEO) program, and one of the main researchers on the NEOWISE satellite project to map NEOs in the sky.

We are quickly learning a lot about the Russian fireball. It was pretty small - only about 15 m and about 7000 tonnes - and that’s why it wasn’t detected. This object wasn’t seen earlier because it was really faint, and it might not have been visible to observers in the night sky. Most of the survey efforts have been very successful in finding the largest asteroids (about 90% of the near-Earth objects larger than 1 km in diameter have been found), but there is still a lot of work to be done with finding and tracking the smaller objects.

Though it seemed enormous, the meteorite that struck Russia was relatively small. It’s likely that objects like this could hit again without warning, simply because right now our satellite systems are combing the skies for truly deadly objects that could wipe out a country or even a continent.

Still, added, Mainzer:

NASA is studying ways to improve the survey capabilities; an example of a prototype new system is the NEOWISE project that I worked on, which used an infrared telescope to discover and characterize NEOs. But the program has been expanded in budget by about a factor of 3 in the last couple of years, so that’s good.

One way that NEOWISE was helpful was that it could measure objects that appear dark to other telescopes. Often we judge the size of asteroids and meteors by measuring how bright and reflective they are. The problem is that some large objects are actually quite dark and very little light bounces off them. Using an infrared telescope like the one on NEOWISE helps us identify even these cloaked objects that might be invisible to other devices.

Images via AP

Source: io9

Happy Birthday Charles Darwin

Born 204 years ago today, Charles Darwin was a British scientist who laid the foundations of the theory of evolution and transformed the way we think about the natural world.

Charles Robert Darwin was born on 12 February 1809 in Shrewsbury, Shropshire into a wealthy and well-connected family. Darwin himself initially planned to follow a medical career, and studied at Edinburgh University but later switched to divinity at Cambridge. In 1831, he joined a five year scientific expedition on the survey ship HMS Beagle.

At this time, most Europeans believed that the world was created by God in seven days as described in the bible. On the voyage, Darwin read Lyell’s ‘Principles of Geology’ which suggested that the fossils found in rocks were actually evidence of animals that had lived many thousands or millions of years ago. Lyell’s argument was reinforced in Darwin’s own mind by the rich variety of animal life and the geological features he saw during his voyage. The breakthrough in his ideas came in the Galapagos Islands, 500 miles west of South America. Darwin noticed that each island supported its own form of finch which were closely related but differed in important ways.

On his return to England in 1836, Darwin tried to solve the riddles of these observations and the puzzle of how species evolve. Influenced by the ideas of Malthus, he proposed a theory of evolution occurring by the process of natural selection. The animals (or plants) best suited to their environment are more likely to survive and reproduce, passing on the characteristics which helped them survive to their offspring. Gradually, the species changes over time.

Darwin worked on his theory for 20 years. After learning that another naturalist, Alfred Russel Wallace, had developed similar ideas, the two made a joint announcement of their discovery in 1858. In 1859 Darwin published ‘On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection’.

The book was extremely controversial, because the logical extension of Darwin’s theory was that homo sapiens was simply another form of animal. It made it seem possible that even people might just have evolved - quite possibly from apes - and destroyed the prevailing orthodoxy on how the world was created. Darwin was vehemently attacked, particularly by the Church. However, his ideas quickly gained currency and have become the new orthodoxy.

Darwin died on 19 April 1882 and was buried in Westminster Abbey.

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science. 

Sources: BBC

Image Sources: History, Smithsonian 

The Brontosaurus Never Existed

Think of dinosaurs, and a few specific creatures inevitably come to mind -a T. Rex, maybe a Velociraptor, and probably a Brontosaurus as well. The Brontosauruses, due to their daunting size and impressive likeness, have been portrayed on TV and in films for decades. However, scientifically speaking - they don’t exist. While these long-necked dinosaurs exist in our culture, science abandoned them long ago, as the name is considered a junior (albeit redundant) synonym of the Apatosaurus. 

According to Matt Lamanna, curator of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, the scientific community has known that the Brontosaurus was a fictitious dinosaur for more than a hundred years. But as with some popular trends, the Brontosaurus remained a cultural fixture until this very day. 

Lamanna said the story of Brontosaurus dates back over a century, to a period known as the Bone Wars. This early period of paleontology in the US saw a wealth of new dinosaur fossils being discovered, with Othniel Charles Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope at the forefront of most discoveries. The feud between them was called the Bone Wars, as they were frequently trying to outdo one another. 

“There are stories of either Cope or Marsh telling their fossil collectors to smash skeletons that were still in the ground, just so the other guy couldn’t get them,” Lamanna said in a detailed interview with Guy Raz of NPR’s All Things Considered. “It was definitely a bitter, bitter rivalry.”

It was this heated race to get dinosaurs published that led to the unwarranted naming of the Brontosaurus. In 1877, Marsh, who had discovered numerous dinosaur fossils, discovered the partial skeleton of a long-necked, long-tailed, herbivorous dinosaur he dubbed Apatosaurus. Since the fossil was missing a skull, in 1883 when he published a reconstruction of his Apatosaurus, he borrowed a skull from another dinosaur — possibly a Camarasaurus — to complete the skeleton.

A few years later his fossil collectors had sent Marsh a second skeleton he believed to belong to a completely new dinosaur, which he named Brontosaurus, according to Lamanna.

However, this new dinosaur was actually a more complete Apatosaurus. And in Marsh’s rush to outdo Cope, he carelessly mistook the dinosaur for something new, Lamanna added.

The dinosaur mistake was eventually spotted by scientists in 1903, but for some reason, the Brontosaurus named lived on in popular culture and children’s imaginations everywhere. It was not until another 67 years, in 1970, when two Carnegie researchers took a second look at the controversy and determined, once and for all, the Brontosaurus was a fictional-only dinosaur.

This conclusion was met due to a dinosaur skull discovered in Utah in 1910 that was correctly attributed to the Apatosaurus rather than Marsh’s defunct Brontosaurus.

“Brontosaurus means ‘thunder lizard,’” he said. “It’s a big, evocative name, whereas Apatosaurus means ‘deceptive lizard.’ It’s quite a bit more boring.”

Sources: RedOrbit, NPR

Image Sources: 1, 2

What is an IP Address?

In one way or another, we’re all vaguely familiar with the term IP address. Hardly any of us, however, are actually familiar with how it works. In essence, an IP address is nothing more than a series of numbers that allows a digital device to communicate with the internet. Each individual IP address allows each of the billions of digital devices across the globe to be located and differentiated from one another. In this sense, an IP address is comparable to a standard mailing address.  “IP” stands for Internet Protocol, which is just a set of rules that govern and legitimize Internet activity and allow for the completion of various tasks on the Internet. While that sounds vague, an IP address is one part of a precise grid that facilitates online communication by locating and connecting devices and locations. 

The address itself consists of four sets of numbers separated by single dots, each of which may contain one to three digits. Each of the series of numbers can range from 0 to 255. For example, an IP address could look like 82.243.1.119. There are two types of IP addresses: 

• Static: A static IP address will never change, they serve as a permanent address. They are based on location, so the numbers represent such information as the city, country, continent etc. that the computer is in - and the Internet Service Provider (ISP) that serves that computer. Generally preferable for online gaming and other communication and location-heavy acts. However, they are generally considered to be less secure because they can be tracked for data-mining purposes. 
• Dynamic: These IP addresses are, unsurprisingly - ‘un-static,’ or changing. These are temporary, and one is assigned each and every time a computer accesses the internet. Essentially, these addresses are borrowed from a set of shared addresses. Only a limited number of static IP addresses can be assigned, so many ISPs share addresses among their customers in this way.

Image Sources: 1, 2 

Check out Quantumaniac on Twitter! 

I apologize for the shameless plug, but please follow me on Twitter if you aren’t already. Obviously there are billions and billions of reasons to follow this account  but besides links to the main posts, here are a few of the totally stellar things you’ll find on Twitter: 

• Jokes - seriously, some of my space jokes are out of this world. 
• Quotes - Much like the Large Hadron Collider, these are always a smashing success. 
• Random Bits of Insight - You’ll totally get to see me in my element. 

If this (somehow) didn’t convince you, please check it out anyway! I promise you (probably) won’t regret it. 

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