Welcome back!!

Welcome back to the third year of Oak House Science department blog!

What will be different you ask?

More articles written by students about articles they have read and things they are doing that relate to Science and the environment both inside and outside the school.

Our students in ESO (educación secundaria obligatoria: obligational secondary education as a rough translation) take one afternoon a week to take part in an enrichment program. Various activities are arranged including running, debate and of course a Science club. In these clubs, students have the chance to work on topics that interest them and experiment in a more relaxed environment. At the end of each term, these groups will present their findings to their peers and to you via this blog. Keep your eye out for this in November.

The Environment is of concern to many people in the world. We plan to run a number of initiatives both in primary and secondary that will be reported here in this blog.

Also we plan to show you more of what we do as teachers to help our students to achieve success in the areas of Science.

Finally we ask you, whoever you may be, student, teacher, parent or just generally interested Science enthusiast to send your articles to us for possible publication. 

Send them to r.troy@oakhouseschool.com

Thank you for supporting us and let us know what you think via the comments section.

What message would you send?

SETI: the search for extraterrestrial intelligence has been operating for the last sixty years Scientists have been using radio telescopes and searching  space for any form of intelligible radio communication that could be coming from an alien species on a far distant exo-planet. Finding money and telescope time to do this have not been easy. Lately SETI have received a massive investment from a Russian billionaire and are now embarking on a program called “Breakthrough Initiatives”. With this will come more hours to search the heavens and more of the sky to track. Also now that the existence and position of a large number of exo-planets are known, telescopes can now be focused on these points with the hope of a signal.

One new aspect that was being considered, but which will for the moment be rejected, is the sending of our own signal into space which may well be detected by an alien race. But what could we say?

What message could you send that would represent the human race and the fragile planet we live upon? Would you send an accurate picture of the interhuman tensions and total destruction of the planet or a more soft focused view? Should we reveal information about our vulnerabilities to a possibly hostile alien race? Or should we bother as it would take so long to get there and so long for a return signal that humans will no longer exist?

What would you do? Send a message? And if so, what would you say?

To find out more go to here!

Plutó

Plutó era el darrer dels antics planetes que faltava per tenir una visita directa d'una sonda espacial. Finalment la sonda New Horizons el 14 de Juliol ha fet una passada entre Plutó i una de les seves llunes Caront i ara ja fa camí cap al cinturó de Kuiper. Els propers dies les imatges que disposem d'aquest sistema - de moment a més de Plutó i Caront hi ha quatre llunes més - s'afegiran a totes les que ja tenim de les altres missions a la resta de planetes.

Plutó és un dels planetes nans, i era un dels objectes del sistema solar menys conegut. Com han repetit vàries vegades els membres de l'equip de la missió, en un dia es passarà de tenir només una pàgina d'informació sobre Plutó a poder escriure un llibre de text.

No és el primer planeta nan que visitem, la sonda Dawn ha visitat aquest any Ceres, un planeta nan del cinturó d'asteroides. 

La imatge del sistema solar s'ha anat fent cada cop més complexa, i cada planeta té la seva imatge més coneguda, de moment sembla que Plutó, que deu el seu nom al déu de l'inframón, té un gran cor, i és força fotogènic.

La investigació dels sistemes planetaris viu un gran moment: a més de les informacions directes que tenim degut a les missions que estan orbitant planetes, les visites a planetes nans i les sondes que estan sobre cometes o planetes, tenim la informació d'altres sistemes estel·lars en formació o de planetes que fan voltes a altres estrelles. En qualsevol cas, els propers dies descobrirem un nou món.

What is happening in the Science world?

Science students in primary and secondary education may think that science is something that has happened already and everything has been discovered or worked out. But this is so far from the truth...!

Listen to any Science podcast read the news in paper or online and you will see there are many things happening on many fronts.

Who would like to train for a one-way trip to Mars?

How would you deflect an asteroid on a collision course for Earth?

How can we feed 7 billion plus people on the planet and not use up all its resources and cause mass extinction?

These are some of the many issues that today's scientists are tackling and you too could be a part of it!

Watch this space for more news!

Science rocks!

The troubles with transplants

For many years the limit of transplants of blood stem cells is that they can be used as donors only brothers and sisters, the only family members who may have a profile with high rates of immunogenetic compatibility. It is, however, a possibility that only occurs in 25% of cases. In addition, the percentage is expected to drop further, unfortunately, due to the decline of births in our country. To address this problem, over the years, we have created centers of collection and storage of cord blood and Registers of volunteers who collect more than 20 million bone marrow donors. Nevertheless, there is still a 30-40% of people who remain without a compatible donor.

To use the father or mother for transplantation is an important solution to this problem. The technique developed by the Child Jesus can resolve the fact that part of the parents (usually in fact the parents are immunologically compatible with the children only 50%).

In detail, the method requires that donors undergo a drug treatment that stimulates the bone marrow to "liberate" the bloodstream hematopoietic stem cells so they can be collected from the veins of your arms with a simple drawing. This technique avoids collect cells directly from the bone marrow donor to save a much more invasive procedure.

Subsequently the blood is filtered through a machine that exploits the magnetic properties of the white blood cells from the blood to remove a particular type of white blood cells known as T lymphocytes alpha-beta positive. These are responsible for a complication, known as "graft versus host disease," in which the transplanted cells attack the recipient's tissues. In the compound you get - and this is the main difference compared to normal bone marrow transplants - in addition to hematopoietic stem cells, are also natural killer cells and "gamma-delta T cells positive". "In this way - explained during the presentation of Professor Franco Locatelli - at the time of the transplant, the patient, in addition to receiving treatment for the disease that affects, is also protected from infections that can occur within four months operation, thanks to the white blood cells in the blood of the donor. We can therefore say that we managed to transplant with a donor to 50% with the same results as those completed with subjects totally compatible. "

As for the fields of application, the technique developed by the Child Jesus can be a solution for blood cancers and other diseases, including: severe combined immunodeficiency (SCID), the Fanconi anemia, the Thalassemia major and severe aplastic anemia. The results obtained in the testing phase, in fact, show that the ability to care for children with these diseases are the 90%.

"Another source of pride for their achievements - said Professor Giuseppe Profiti, president of the Child Jesus (see interview below) - it is that this method also has the advantage of being easily replicable. This means being able to significantly expand the pool of people who will have access to treatment options that this new technology offers. "

Future Expedictions to Mars Could Damage Astronaut’s Brains

Particles zipping through space could be the wrong stuff for Mars astronauts.

A study using mice found these high-energy particles slice through the brain. They pruned back connections linking brain cells. This left the animals with memory and learning problems. The study’s authors now worry that astronauts could suffer similar effects on long missions outside Earth’s protective atmosphere. One example: traveling to Mars.

The explosion of massive stars creates cosmic rays. This energetic radiation consists of electrically charged particles. Traveling through space at nearly the speed of light, theis radiation would bombard a spacecraft and its astronauts. For how long? Well, a human mission to Mars could last between one and three years, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration estimates.

Six weeks later, the mice showed memory problems. They had a harder time recognizing new toys than did unzapped mice. They also did a poorer job of remembering where a toy had been. Details appeared May 1 in Science Advances.

Visible brain damage also showed up. The radiation shortened the complex branches on nerve cells that receive messages. It also left these brain cells with fewer branches, the team found. “We weren’t expecting such dramatic effects from these charged particles,” says Limoli.

By Alex Tortosa

Ancient DNA pushes back timing of the origin of dogs

Some friendships go way back. New genetic evidence suggests that the relationship between humans and dogs may have been forged as long as 40,000 years ago.

DNA analysis of an ancient wolf calibrates the split between dogs and wolves to 27,000 to 40,000 years ago. Researchers had previously calculated that the divergence happened about 11,000 to 16,000 years ago. The new dates, reported online May 21 in Current Biology, may mean that dogs were domesticated during the last Ice Age.

Paleogeneticist Love Dalén of the Swedish Museum of Natural History in Stockholm brought the ancient wolf’s bones back from a 2010 expedition to Russia’s Taimyr Peninsula in northern Siberia. The wolf roamed the Ice Age tundra about 35,000 years ago. Dalén and colleagues extracted DNA from a rib bone and deciphered the animal’s entire genetic makeup, its genome.

By Pablo Arps

SCIENTISTS “SEE” THUNDER FOR THE FIRST TIME

We have always been able to see lightning and hear thunder, but not hear and see thunder.

Scientists shot a long wire made of copper into a cloud using a small rocket. This generated a bolt of lighting, and the current followed the wire to the ground. This allowed the scientists and researchers to record the sound waves of the resulting thunder. The intense heating of the copper wire caused the green flashes.

By Maria Ferrajoli

Antarctic glaciers are now melting rapidly!

Glaciers along the Southern Antarctic Peninsula remained roughly stable between 2003 and 2009.

New satellite observations reveal that the region suddenly destabilized in 2009 and is now shedding around 56 billion metric tons of ice each year, enough water to raise sea levels by roughly 0.16 millimeters.

The researchers believe warm ocean water melted the underside of the ice, undermining the region’s stability and triggering the abrupt decline. Even if this warm water went away, the now destabilized region would continue to shrink until reaching a new equilibrium!

By Jorge Salvador

Europe from Space

The European Agency Space does a video of the landscape that they can see from the above.

From the Canary Islands to Italy in less than 30 seconds. It looks like impossible for us but it doesn’t look impossible for technology. We can see a video from the astronauts in the International Space Station. Samantha Cristoforetti has traced a photographic video between this two different point in planet earth. The video has been done with time-lapse, which consists in using photos with movement which offers spectacular results.

Link to the video and information below:

http://www.abc.es/ciencia/20150519/abci-impresionante-viaje-espacial-201505181805.html

By Célia Estragués