Smarticle

This week’s image roundup is a particularly good one: the best “blue marble” picture we’ve ever seen, a video of the aurora resulting from the biggest solar storm in seven years, a foldable car, a stunning green-energy art installation, blah, blah, blah. All great. But what we really want to talk about is that ultra-creepy snub-nosed monkey, or, as we’ve christened it, the Hell-Monkey of Doom. Feel free to describe in detail exactly how much this picture (and a Google image search for the snub-nosed monkey) gave you the shivers.

Click to launch our guide to the upcoming year in science.

On January 27, 1967, Apollo 1′s crew–Virgil I. “Gus” Grissom, Edward H. White II and Roger B. Chaffee–was killed when a fire erupted in their capsule during testing. Apollo 1 was originally designated AS-204 but following the fire, the astronauts’ widows requested that the mission be remembered as Apollo 1 and following missions would be numbered subsequent to the flight that never made it into space.

Image credit: NASA

An atom-level view of the nanoscale–mere billionths of a meter–interface between amorphous carbon and diamond. At such a small scale, the surfaces are rough, although researchers have been treating them as smooth. A team of engineers from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, used computer simulations to demonstrate that friction at the atomic level behaves similarly to friction generated between large objects. They found that friction is proportional to the number of atoms that interact between two nanoscale surfaces. The researchers’ simulations showed that, at the nanoscale, materials in contact behave more like large, rough objects rubbing against each other, rather than as two perfectly smooth surfaces, as was previously imagined. The research was supported in part by a grant from the National Science Foundation.

Further information is available in the UW news story Models present a new view of nanoscale friction. (Date of Image: 2009)
Credit: Courtesy University of Wisconsin

Researchers at Michigan State University (MSU) have demonstrated how a new virus evolves, shedding light on how easy it can be for diseases to gain dangerous mutations. The findings appear in the current issue of the journal Science.

The scientists showed for the first time how the virus called “Lambda” evolved to find a new way to attack host cells, an innovation that took four mutations to accomplish. This virus infects bacteria, in particular the common E. coli bacterium. Lambda isn’t dangerous to humans, but this research demonstrated how viruses evolve complex and potentially deadly new traits, noted Justin Meyer, MSU graduate student, who co-authored the paper with Richard Lenski, MSU Hannah Distinguished Professor of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics.
“We were surprised at first to see Lambda evolve this new function, this ability to attack and enter the cell through a new receptor–and it happened so fast,” Meyer said. “But when we re-ran the evolution experiment, we saw the same thing happen over and over.”
This paper follows recent news that scientists in the United States and the Netherlands produced a deadly version of bird flu. Even though bird flu is a mere five mutations away from becoming transmissible between humans, it’s highly unlikely the virus could naturally obtain all of the beneficial mutations at once. However, it might evolve sequentially, gaining benefits one-by-one, if conditions are favorable at each step, Meyer added.
Through research conducted at BEACON, MSU’s National Science Foundation Center for the Study of Evolution in Action, Meyer and his colleagues’ ability to duplicate the results implied that adaptation by natural selection, or survival of the fittest, had an important role in the virus’ evolution.
Funding for the research was provided in part by NSF and MSU AgBioResearch.
-NSF-