>You have new Picture Mail!

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You have new Picture Mail!, originally uploaded by xeno735.

>Photo essay

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You have new Picture Mail!, originally uploaded by xeno735.

>A Facelift Pill That Makes 80-Year-Olds Look 20?

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It may be a long time before humans can extend their lifespans to hundreds of years, but the technology to make humans look sixty years younger than their actual age is right around the corner. A group of scientists at the University of Michigan have done an exhaustive study of what gives people the appearance of age — wrinkled, saggy, or broken skin — and figured out a quick fix that may keep skin looking taut and young even though the person inside it has grown very old. The key lies with collagen, a spongy layer of tissue beneath the skin that is gradually dissolved as people grow older.

Scientists say that aging bodies release an enzyme called collagenase that literally eats away at collagen, which in turn makes the skin weak and thin. It sags and becomes easier to bruise or tear. If collagenase could be removed from the body, or the collagen itself rejuvenated, people’s skin would stay firm and healthy. There are several possible substances already available that could promote collagen regrowth (you can see one, Restylane, plumping up collagen in the image above).

According to Eurekalert:

The U-M researchers base their conclusions on past studies in which they have explored why certain anti-aging treatments are effective. A 2007 study looked at Restylane, marketed as a dermal filler, and found that injections of the product caused fibroblasts to stretch, promoting new collagen, and also limited the breakdown of collagen.In another 2007 study, the U-M team tested lotions containing retinol, a form of Vitamin A found in many skin-care products, and found it significantly reduced wrinkles and skin roughness in elderly skin by promoting new collagen. Other U-M studies have shown why some laser treatments work and some less powerful ones do not. Carbon dioxide laser resurfacing is effective because it removes the aging dermis; in the three-week regrowth process, new, young collagen is produced.

Voorhees and his colleagues say they provide needed, independent research on the effectiveness of available and future treatments to counteract skin aging. They have no ties to the manufacturers of products they study.

It sounds like the early twenty-first century may be the first time in human history when you might have no idea how old the person is that you’re talking to. With collagen replacement, you might think that you’re dating a 25-year-old until she suddenly drops dead of old age.

Why Some Treatments Rescue Aging Skin [Eurekalert] – io9

Actual rejuvenation of cells would be great, but I’m skeptical about this. Read some reviews from people who have tried Restylane.

>Extreme life found at record seafloor depth

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Scientists have found life about twice as far below the seafloor as has ever been documented before. A coring sample off the coast of Newfoundland turned up single-celled microbes living in searing temperatures about a mile (1,626 meters) below the seafloor.

“These are probably not only the deepest, but the hottest organisms found in deep marine sediments,” said R. John Parkes, a geobiologist at Cardiff University in Wales. “I was hoping we would find them this deep, so we were very excited that we actually did confirm they were present. It’s fascinating to know what proportion of our planet actually has living organisms in it.”

While life has been known to exist at even greater depths beneath land — such as bacteria found nearly two miles underground in a gold mine in South Africa — life under the sea had previously only been detected to depths of about half a mile (842 meters) below the seafloor. Parkes and his colleagues analyzed core samples returned from the Ocean Drilling Program. They found evidence for prokaryotic cells, which lack a central nucleus, that appear to be from the archaea family, a sister domain to bacteria.

The newly-discovered life likely gets its energy from methane. It thrives in 111 million–year-old rocks, enduring temperatures between 140 to 212 degrees Fahrenheit (60 to 100 degrees Celsius). In this extreme environment, life is relatively sparse.

“There’s no light around, there’s no oxygen around,” Parkes told LiveScience. “It’s basically just rocks, but there is still some space for water, which the organisms need.”

This discovery of some of Earth’s most extreme living creatures may shed light on the search for extraterrestrial life. “Until we know what’s there on Earth, were not going to have a clue what’s possible on other planets ,” Parkes said. “I think people have taken the message from this type of work that it’s no longer sufficient to take a scoop of Martian soil from the surface and say there’s no life. If life on Earth can go as deep as several kilometers, there’s no reason why that wouldn’t be true under similar conditions on another planet.” – msnbc

The photo is a Dumbo Octopus from the Sable Gully MPA, no an extreme prokaryotic cell… but the archaea family just doesn’t look as cool as the Dumbo Octopus.

>Vietnam reports "UFO" explosion

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HANOI (Reuters) – An unidentified flying object exploded in mid-air over a southern Vietnamese island, state media said Wednesday, a day after Cambodia’s air force retracted a report of a mysterious plane crash.

The Vietnam News Agency said residents of Phu Quoc island, 10 km (6 miles) off the coast of the Cambodian province of Kampot, found shards of grey metal, including one 1.5 meters (1.5 yards) long.

“The explosion happened at about 8 km (5 miles) above the ground, and perhaps it was a plane, but authorities could not identify whether it was a civil or military aircraft,” VNA said in a report headlined “UFO explodes over Phu Quoc Island.”

Soldiers were sent out to look for wreckage and survivors, and local authorities contacted airlines in Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand, but received no reports of missing aircraft, the official state news agency added.

Villagers in Kampot said Tuesday that they had heard a loud explosion. Wednesday they told Reuters they had found small chunks of metal near the coastline.

Kung Mony, deputy commander of Cambodia’s Air Force, said Tuesday he had been told of a foreign plane crashing in Kampot province, but later backed off his claims of an aircraft accident.

(Writing by Grant McCool and Ed Cropley in Bangkok; Editing by Bill Tarrant)

>Rare Elizabeth I portrait found

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A rare portrait of Queen Elizabeth I as a young princess has been discovered in a private collection at a stately home in Northamptonshire.

The portrait, dating from 1650 to 1680, was found in the Duke of Buccleuch’s collection at Boughton House. It shows Elizabeth with siblings Edward VI and Mary I, father Henry VIII and his jester, Will Somers.

It is a copy of an original panel painting, which is thought to date back to the early 1550s.  The portrait was examined by historians Alison Weir and Tracy Borman after they were told of its existence by the director of Boughton House.

It will now be put on display at the stately home, and historians hope to trace the original through publicising the discovery. Portraits of Queen Elizabeth I before her accession to the throne are extremely rare, with only two other proven portraits known – one at Hampton Court and the other at Windsor Castle.

Mystery

Tracy Borman said that when she was first sent a picture of the portrait she realised it had never been seen before. “The more we found out, the more obvious it was that nobody had come across this,” she said. “It’s clearly a copy of a lost original and it’s that mystery that we started to try to solve.

“It’s also a very different look to Elizabeth and comparing it to other portraits it helps us to solve the identity of other portraits – for example one always known as the Unknown Lady in the National Portrait Gallery.” Charles Lister, house manager at Boughton House, said the picture was to go on public display when the house opens in August.

He said: “The portrait is normally in a private area of the house with a number of other Tudor portraits. When we had a meeting with Tracy it came under discussion and it sort of all went from there.  We knew it was important because it’s a picture of Henry VIII and his family but we did not realise it in the context of Elizabeth as princess.”

The finding is reported in the latest edition of the BBC History Magazine. – bbc

>Woman Wakes Up After Family Says Goodbye, Tubes Pulled

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A West Virginia woman is at the Cleveland Clinic after walking the line between life and death.

Doctors are calling Val Thomas a medical miracle. They said they can’t explain how she is alive. They said Thomas suffered two heart attacks and had no brain waves for more than 17 hours. At about 1:30 a.m. Saturday, her heart stopped and she had no pulse. A respiratory machine kept her breathing and rigor mortis had set in, doctors said. “Her skin had already started to harden and her fingers curled. Death had set in,” said son Jim Thomas. They rushed her to a West Virginia hospital. Doctors put Thomas on a special machine which induces hypothermia. The treatment involves lowering the body temperature for up to 24 hours before warming a patient up.After that procedure, her heart stopped again. “She had no neurological function,” said Dr. Kevin Eggleston. Her family said goodbye and doctors removed all the tubes. However, Thomas was kept on a ventilator a little while longer as an organ donor issue was discussed. Ten minutes later the woman woke up and started talking.”She (nurse) said, ‘I’m so sorry Mrs. Thomas.’ And mom said, ‘That’s OK honey. That’s OK,” Jim Thomas said. Val Thomas and her family strongly believe that the Lord granted them their miracle and they want everyone to know. “I know God has something in store for me, another purpose. I don’t know what it is but I’m sure he’ll tell me,” she said. She was taken to the Cleveland Clinic for specialist to check her out. Doctors said amazingly she has no blockage and will be fine. – nn5

>Childhood ‘toy’ revealed as ancient Persian relic

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An ancient gold cup mysteriously acquired by an English scrap metal dealer is expected to fetch close to a million dollars at auction after languishing for years in a shoe box under its current owner’s bed.

Owner John Webber says his grandfather gave him the 5.5-inch (14-centimetre) high mug to play with when he was a child, back in 1945.

He assumed the golden cup, which is decorated with the heads of two women facing in opposite directions, their foreheads garlanded with two knotted snakes, was made from brass.

But he decided to get it valued when he was moving house last year and was told it was actually a rare piece of ancient Persian treasure, beaten out of a single sheet of gold hundreds of years before the birth of Jesus Christ.

Experts said the method of manufacture and the composition of the gold was “consistent with Achaemenid gold and gold smithing” dating back to the third or fourth century BC.

The Achaemenid empire, the first of the Persian empires to rule over significant portions of Greater Iran, was wiped out by Alexander the Great in 330 BC.

Auction house Duke’s, in Dorchester, south-west England, will put the cup under the hammer on June 5, with an estimate of 500,000 pounds (630,000-euro, 988,000-dollars).

Webber, 70, told The Guardian newspaper that his grandfather had a “good eye” for antiques and picked up “all sorts” as he plied his trade in the town of Taunton in south-west England.

“Heaven knows where he got this, he never said,” he added, revealing that as a child, he used the cup for target practice with his air gun. – yahoo

>From s-bend to YouTube: a possum’s tale

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When it comes to toilets, there’s a simple directional rule: everything goes downstream. When things move against the tide, then you have problems.

So as Tim Fraser was doing some laundry in his bathroom last Friday night, he became a wee bit disturbed when his toilet started spontaneously gurgling.

“I could see bubbles coming up and I thought ‘what the the hell is happening?'” he said, recalling that evening. Then he caught sight of a grey, furry head with a pair of pointy ears and saucepan eyes emerging on this side of the s-bend. Moments later there was a half-drowned possum sitting in his Fowler toilet bowl.

“It was like the toilet had given birth,” he said.

It’s not clear who was more startled, man or marsupial. But Fraser was first to react. He darted to the next room and collected his digital camera. As he began filming, he dialled a plumber friend who lived nearby and asked him to come over and lend a hand in the rescue. Fraser, 39, lives just north of the Brisbane CBD in an area near a large colony of the creatures. So he’s used to crossing paths with possums, but never quite like this before.

It quickly dawned on him that the only way the critter could have climbed in was through a 100mm-wide breather pipe for the toilet line.

This runs from the roof of his house, down the back wall before joining the sewage pipe at basement level and turning back up to the toilet – a distance of over 10 metres. The final leg of the possum’s fantastic voyage would have involved wriggling through the s-bend – a set-up that creates a water-filled seal between flushings.

“He was close to death and lucky that no one had used the toilet recently,” Fraser said, adding that he let the possum settle and catch its breath before helping it out of the bowl. Once clear of its porcelain prison, the possum made a dash for freedom. Hissing and snarling at its rescuers, it eventually bolted through an open door and back into its suburban habitat.

Fraser, who likes to tinker with computers and knows his way around the internet, then uploaded four short clips of the possum on to YouTube so he could share it with the world.

It’s more evidence that what used to known as a Kodak moment has now become a YouTube one.  Surprisingly, the videos – Possum Climbs up through Pipe to Toilet – have not taken off, each only collecting a few hundred views. But with the internet being the echo chamber it is, everything is eventually noticed by someone, somewhere.

Arjun Ramachandran writes: According to Nigel Williamson, from Nigel’s Animal Rescue, possums have a habit of getting themselves into trouble.

“Every day of the week I pull a possum out of someone’s chimney – they wander around the roof trying to get inside and fall down the chimney,” said Mr Williamson, who has been rescuing animals for 23 years. “I’ve seen it all and done over 30,000 rescues in that time.”

In February, EnergyAustralia had to “wildlife-proof” up to a dozen sub-stations after a possum knocked out power at a substation in Avalon and left 15,000 homes without power. The possums had been using overhead powerlines as highways to safety from cats and foxes. – smh

>Scientists find strange ring circling dead star

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Using NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope, scientists have found a bizarre ring of material around the magnetic remains of a star that blasted to smithereens, NASA reported Wednesday.

The stellar corpse, called SGR 1900+14, belongs to a class of objects known as magnetars. These are the cores of massive stars that blew up in supernova explosions, but unlike other dead stars, they slowly pulsate with X-rays and have tremendously strong magnetic fields.

“I was flipping through archived Spitzer data of the object, and that’s when I noticed it was surrounded by a ring we’d never seen before,” said Stefanie Wachter of NASA’s Spitzer Science Center, who found the ring serendipitously. Wachter is lead author of a paper about the findings in this week’s Nature.

Wachter and her colleagues think that the ring, which is unlike anything ever seen before, formed in 1998 when the magnetar erupted in a giant flare. They believe the crusty surface of the magnetar cracked, sending out a flare, or blast of energy, that excavated a nearby cloud of dust, leaving an outer, dusty ring.

This ring is oblong, with dimensions of about seven by three light-years. It appears to be flat, or two-dimensional, but the scientists said they can’t rule out the possibility of a three-dimensional shell.

The discovery could help scientists figure out if a star’s mass influences whether it becomes a magnetar when it dies. Though scientists know that stars above a certain mass will “go supernova,” they do not know if mass plays a role in determining whether the star becomes a magnetar or a run-of-the-mill dead star.

According to the science team, the ring demonstrates that SGR 1900+14 belongs to a nearby cluster of young, massive stars. By studying the masses of these nearby stars, the scientists might learn the approximate mass of the original star that exploded and became SGR 1900+14. – io9