Zebrafish made to grow pre-hands instead of fins

PERHAPS the little fish embryo shown here is dancing a jig because it has just discovered that it has legs instead of fins. Fossils show that limbs evolved from fins, but a new study shows how it may have happened, live in the lab.

Fernando Casares of the Spanish National Research Council and his colleagues injected zebrafish with the hoxd13 gene from a mouse. The protein that the gene codes for controls the development of autopods, a precursor to hands, feet and paws.

Zebrafish naturally carry hoxd13 but produce less of the protein than tetrapods - all four-limbed vertebrates and birds - do. Casares and his colleagues hoped that by injecting extra copies of the gene into the zebrafish embryos, some of their cells would make more of the protein.

One full day later, all of those fish whose cells had taken up the gene began to develop autopods instead of fins. They carried on growing for four days but then died (Cell, DOI: 10.1016/j.devcel.2012.10.015).

"Of course, we haven't been able to grow hands," says Casares. He speculates that hundreds of millions of years ago, the ancestors of tetrapods began expressing more hoxd13 for some reason and that this could have allowed them to evolve autopods.

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Tokyo stocks up 1.62% after LDP win in Japan polls

TOKYO: Tokyo stocks soared 1.62 per cent at the open on Monday after Japan's conservative opposition swept to victory in national polls, with promises from its leader to press for more central bank easing.

The benchmark Nikkei 225 index added 158.12 points to 9,895.68 at the start of trade, as the yen plunged in the wake of the Liberal Democratic Party's landslide win over the ruling Democratic Party of Japan.

- AFP/fa

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SkyTender puts automation in airplane aisles

Don't you hate waiting for the drinks cart to slowly make its way through economy class to your seat? This gadget might speed things up a bit.

SkyTender isn't quite the robot bartender that some are making it out to be, but as an automated drinks dispenser it could make flying slightly less hellish than it nearly always is.

This beverage trolley can whip up more than 30 different drinks, including soft drinks, coffee, wine, and cocktails, at the touch of a button or two.

Regular trolleys can be upgraded to SkyTenders with the installation of modular drinks cartridges that use an RFID system and a CO2 cylinder for the dispenser mechanism.

As seen in the educational vid below, SkyTender has a touch screen that rises out of the trolley. Put a cup in the dispenser, push a button on the screen, and there's your drink. A stocked trolley, which has about 8 gallons of hot and cold water on board, can prepare up to 290 drink servings.

Yes, you still need a flight attendant in the loop. Changing the drinks cartridges, keeping the batteries charged, and other maintenance tasks mean there's room for breakdowns, but perhaps no more than when conventional trolleys run out of your choice of wine.

When I told my flight attendant friend Leanne about SkyTender, she was impressed by the fact that it could save her many trips to the galley to reheat or make new pots of coffee and tea.

It also seems safer during turbulence because there are fewer things that could fly off it, she added, and fewer discarded drinks cans present an environmental benefit.

SkyTender recently took its inaugural flight on a German airline, WDL Aviation, going from Cologne to Palma, Majorca.

"Our first ever test flight was a complete success, the system operated as expected and we have generated even more interest in our innovative product, the passengers were extremely pleased with the beverage options and most importantly the quality and speed of service," SkyMax's Oliver Kloth said in a release.

What do you think? Would you be more willing to fly with a given carrier if it had automation in the aisles?

(Via Live Science)

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Space Pictures This Week: Frosty Mars, Mini Nile, More

Photograph by Mike Theiss, National Geographic

The aurora borealis, also known as the northern lights, illuminates the Arctic sky in a recent picture by National Geographic photographer Mike Theiss.

A storm chaser by trade, Theiss is in the Arctic Circle on an expedition to photograph auroras, which result from collisions between charged particles released from the sun's atmosphere and gaseous particles in Earth's atmosphere.

After one particularly amazing show, he wrote on YouTube, "The lights were dancing, rolling, and twisting, and at times looked like they were close enough to touch!" (Watch his time-lapse video of the northern lights.)

Published December 14, 2012

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Photos: Conn. Community in Sorrow After School Shooting

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Zebrafish made to grow pre-hands instead of fins

PERHAPS the little fish embryo shown here is dancing a jig because it has just discovered that it has legs instead of fins. Fossils show that limbs evolved from fins, but a new study shows how it may have happened, live in the lab.

Fernando Casares of the Spanish National Research Council and his colleagues injected zebrafish with the hoxd13 gene from a mouse. The protein that the gene codes for controls the development of autopods, a precursor to hands, feet and paws.

Zebrafish naturally carry hoxd13 but produce less of the protein than tetrapods - all four-limbed vertebrates and birds - do. Casares and his colleagues hoped that by injecting extra copies of the gene into the zebrafish embryos, some of their cells would make more of the protein.

One full day later, all of those fish whose cells had taken up the gene began to develop autopods instead of fins. They carried on growing for four days but then died (Cell, DOI: 10.1016/j.devcel.2012.10.015).

"Of course, we haven't been able to grow hands," says Casares. He speculates that hundreds of millions of years ago, the ancestors of tetrapods began expressing more hoxd13 for some reason and that this could have allowed them to evolve autopods.

If you would like to reuse any content from New Scientist, either in print or online, please contact the syndication department first for permission. New Scientist does not own rights to photos, but there are a variety of licensing options available for use of articles and graphics we own the copyright to.

All comments should respect the New Scientist House Rules. If you think a particular comment breaks these rules then please use the "Report" link in that comment to report it to us.

If you are having a technical problem posting a comment, please contact technical support.

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Cautious Obama faces gun control pressure after school shooting

WASHINGTON: The latest mass shooting in the United States - this time with 20 children among the dead - is triggering a deluge of calls for President Barack Obama to address gun control, a politically sensitive issue which he avoided during his first term in the White House.

With the nation in shock over the carnage on Friday, Obama went on television and wiped away tears as he mourned the slain, which included six adults killed at the Newtown, Connecticut, elementary school and another elsewhere.

The president stressed he was particularly saddened as a parent. He and wife Michelle have two young daughters.

"We have to come together and take meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this," Obama said in his weekly radio address on Saturday. "Regardless of the politics."

He did not go into details, however, and proponents of gun control are getting impatient.

"The country needs (Obama) to send a bill to Congress to fix this problem," said New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg. "Calling for 'meaningful action' is not enough. We need immediate action. We have heard all the rhetoric before."

White House spokesman Jay Carney said on Friday it was too early to address the issue. "There is I'm sure - will be, rather, a day for discussion of the usual Washington policy debates, but I don't think today is that day," Carney said.

People reacted quickly. "Today is the day," read banners held by activists outside the White House in a vigil within hours of the school shooting.

A petition for tougher gun control legislation had more than 80,000 signatures on the White House website Saturday.

The Connecticut killings are unspeakably gruesome because such small children were involved.

But they are not the first such massacre under Obama's watch.

In January 2011 in Arizona six people died at the hands of a shooter targeting Democratic Representative Gabrielle Giffords, who took a bullet in the head but survived.

This summer 12 people were shot in Colorado during a midnight screening of a Batman movie.

Obama visited both cities and spoke of the need to crack down on gun violence. He promised to work with Congress and achieve a consensus.

But that is all. His timidity on the issue has been attributed to wariness of alienating voters who believe their constitutional right to bear arms is sacred, deserves a broad interpretation and is not to be touched.

The gun buff and manufacturers lobby, the National Rifle Association, is very critical of Obama even though he has done little that goes against its platform. Its pockets are deep, and it tries to influence local elections. Both Democrats and Republicans are wary of tangling with it.

But after winning re-election in November, Obama will not face the voters again and Jonathan Lowy, director of the Brady Center's Legal Action Project, said the NRA is nothing to fear.

"President Obama and other Democrats have really misread and overestimated the strength of the gun lobby," said Lowy, whose organisation is named for James Brady, the White House press secretary who was shot and left disabled in an assassination attempt on then president Ronald Reagan in 1981.

"The fact is they have very loud bark, but they have very little bite," he told AFP on Saturday.

"In the past election, they (the gun lobby) spent a lot of money - 99 percent of it was towards losing candidates, and that holds true in virtually every election cycle," Lowy said. "They spend a lot of money, they make a lot of noise and their candidates lose, so they really are not a force to be afraid of."

Left-leaning or moderate news outlets also urged the president to take action.

"Obama told the nation that he reacted to the shootings in Newtown 'as a parent,' and that is understandable, but what we need most is for him to act as a President, liberated at last from the constraints of elections and their dirty compromises - a president who dares to change the national debate and the legislative agenda on guns," David Remnick wrote in The New Yorker.

- AFP/de

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Apple rumors never cease

The iPad Mini will be a magnet for lots of rumors in the coming months.

(Credit:
Apple)

Apple rumors are a fact of life.

And it's silly to think that tech sites will begin writing fewer stories about the latest
iPad/iPhone chatter.

It's like asking the Washington press corps to stop writing about Beltway scuttlebutt or Hollywood reporters to cease scribbling about la la land -- however frivolous. Ain't gonna happen.

Let's take the
iPad Mini Retina rumor-machine (which is just getting started, by the way).

Retina chatter: A Retina iPad Mini is an intriguing prospect, but it's hardly a fait accompli. If it were, Apple would have announced one on October 23.

So my guess is that any remotely tantalizing Retina rumor that surfaces will be picked up and propagated across the Apple universe.

Usually (but not always) for good reason. Getting a 300-pixel-per-inch display into the Mini's tiny chassis is really, really hard. One phone call and any analyst at NPD DisplaySearch -- who analyze the display industry for a living -- will tell you this.

So, a supply chain tidbit from DigiTimes, for example, that cites "backlighting industry" sources talking about a higher-resolution iPad Mini is definitely interesting.

A Retina Mini would require a smaller LED light apparatus than is used in conventional Retina-class displays, as the DigiTimes story alludes to.

DigiTimes: The Asia supply chain gossip sheet is invariably the source of more than a few rumors. The problem is it's accuracy is a reflection of the unpredictable supply chain it covers. I've discussed this with DisplaySearch analysts more than a few times.

It goes something like this. Some big component supplier gets an order from some big device maker, and a Taipei newspaper reports it. Then a few months pass and said supplier runs into a serious unexpected snag in ramping up production (like Sharp, for example, trying to ramp up IGZO display production and failing initially).

So the device maker has to turn to another supplier for a more practical (and less innovative) solution.

As a result, the Taipei newspaper's story doesn't pan out. But that doesn't mean the newspaper was just passing along bogus rumors. It means it reported what it was hearing as a credible development at the time.

These on-again, off-again scenarios occur constantly in the supply chain, according to DisplaySearch. And it's a real challenge for supply chain analysts to determine what is panning out and what isn't.

DigiTimes' problem is that it doesn't filter the rumors as well as, let's say, a DisplaySearch analyst would. But maybe that's not the intention anyway. Maybe DigiTimes feels it needs to pass along gossip as it hears it. Maybe that's what its Asia-based supply chain readership wants.

And analysts are hardly infallible, either. Some analysts in the financial community come up with much whackier Apple theories, masquerading as erudite analysis, that end up being reported as credible speculation.

But reporters will still regurgitate financial analyst musings, complaints about "dumb" Apple rumors notwithstanding.

Like I said, it's a fact of life.

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Space Pictures This Week: Frosty Mars, Mini Nile, More

Photograph by Mike Theiss, National Geographic

The aurora borealis, also known as the northern lights, illuminates the Arctic sky in a recent picture by National Geographic photographer Mike Theiss.

A storm chaser by trade, Theiss is in the Arctic Circle on an expedition to photograph auroras, which result from collisions between charged particles released from the sun's atmosphere and gaseous particles in Earth's atmosphere.

After one particularly amazing show, he wrote on YouTube, "The lights were dancing, rolling, and twisting, and at times looked like they were close enough to touch!" (Watch his time-lapse video of the northern lights.)

Published December 14, 2012

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Conn. Victim's Father Remembers 'Loving' Daughter

(Image credit: Emilie Parker Fund/Facebook)

Emilie Parker, the little girl with the blond hair and bright blue eyes, would have been one of the first to comfort her classmates at Sandy Hook Elementary School, had a gunman’s bullets not claimed her life, her father said.

“My daughter Emilie would be one of the first ones to be standing and giving support to all the victims because that’s the kind of kid she is,” her father, Robbie Parker said as he fought back tears, telling the world about his “bright, creative and loving” daughter” who was one of the 20 young victims in the Newtown, Conn., shooting.

“She always had something kind to say about anybody,” her father said.  ”We find comfort reflecting on the incredible person Emilie was and how many lives she was able to touch.”

Emilie, 6, was helping teach her younger sisters to read and make things, and she was the little girls would go to for comfort, he said.

“They looked up to her,” Parker said.

READ: Complete List of Sandy Hook Victims

Parker moved his wife and three daughters to Newtown eight months ago after accepting a job as  a physician’s assistant at Danbury Hospital. He said Emilie, his oldest daughter, seemed to have adjusted well to her new school, and he was very happy with the school, too.

“I love the people at the school. I love Emilie’s teacher and the classmates we were able to get to know,” he said.

      (Image Credit: Alex von Kleydorff/AP Photo)

The family dealt with another tragic loss in October when Emilie lost her grandfather in an accident.

“[This] has been a topic that has been discussed in our family in the past couple of  months,” Parker said. “[My daughters ages 3 and 4] seem to get the that there’s somebody who they will miss very much.”

Emilie, a budding artist who carried her markers and pencils everywhere, paid tribute to her grandfather by slipping a special card she had drawn into his casket, Parker said.  It was something she frequently did to lift the spirits of others.

“I can’t count the number of times Emilie would find someone feeling sad or frustrated and would make people a card,” Parker said. “She was an exceptional artist.”

The girl who was remembered as “always willing to try new things, other than food” was learning Portuguese from her father, who speaks the language.

(Image Credit: Emilie Parker Fund/Facebook)

On Friday morning, Emilie woke up before her father left for his job and exchanged a few sentences with him in the language.

“She told me good morning and asked how I was doing,” Parker said. “She said she loved me, I gave her a kiss and I was out the door.”

Parker found out about the shooting while on lockdown in Danbury Hospital and found a television for the latest news.

“I didn’t think it was that big of deal at first,” he said. “With the first reports coming in, it didn’t sound like it was going to be as tragic as it was. That’s kind of what it was like for us.”

CLICK HERE for full coverage of the Sandy Hook shooting.

Parker said he knows that God can’t take away free will and would have been unable to stop the Sandy Hook shooting. While gunman Adam Lanza used his free agency to take innocent lives, Parker said he plans to use his in a positive way.

“I’m not mad because I have my  [free] agency to use this event to do whatever I can to make sure my family and my wife and my daughters are taken care [of],” he said “And if there’s anything I can do to help to anyone at any time at anywhere, I’m free to do that.”

(Image credit: Emilie Parker Fund/Facebook)

Friday night, hours after he learned of his daughter’s death, Parker said he spoke at his church.

“I don’t know how to get through something like this. My wife and I don’t understand how to process all of this,” he said today. “We find strength in our religion and in our faith and in our family. ”

“It’s a horrific tragedy and I want everyone to know our hearts and prayers go out to them. This includes the family of the shooter. I can’t imagine how hard this experience must be for you and I want you to know our family … love and support goes out to you as well.”

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