Exoplanet Rockstar and Venom

Exoplanet Rockstar and Venom: some not-to-be-missed science news headlines from the week!

Size Does Matter

Telomeres, those intriguing things at the end of your chromosomes that seem to do a lot with aging, were in the news this week.

First, a Discover feature about UCSF Nobel Prize winner Elizabeth Blackburn’s new company. Soon, the general public will be able to send her their telomeres to see how they measure up. The longer the better, of course:

…shortened telomeres do appear to correlate with a higher risk of certain diseases… in The Lancet study, those with short telomeres were three times as likely to die of heart disease and more than eight times more likely to die of infectious disease than those with longer telomeres.

Then a new study, published in Molecular Psychiatry this week, demonstrated that stressful childhoods can shorten telomeres. According to Nature News:

Children who spent their early years in state-run Romanian orphanages have shorter telomeres than children who grew up in foster care…

Other studies have shown similar results with adults who had stressful childhoods, but this is the first published study with children.

Gliese 581d

We love Gliese 581d! The California Academy of Sciences first proposed this exoplanet’s habitability in the Morrison Planetarium’s inaugural show, Fragile Planet, in 2008. Since then we’ve been following it’s exoplanet rockstar-status (and that of it’s potential neighbor, 581g). This week is no exception. Publishing in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, European scientists report that climate simulations illustrate that the planet could support Earth-like life. From Wired UK:

To the team’s surprise, it believes that 581d would have a dense carbon dioxide atmosphere, which would give the planet a stable and warm climate. In a press release, France’s National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) concluded that 581d is likely warm enough to hold liquid water, in “oceans, clouds and rainfall”.

The researchers concede that it would still be a pretty strange place to visit—it has denser air and thick clouds that would keep the surface in a perpetual murky red twilight, and its large mass means that surface gravity would be around double that on Earth. If we could travel the 20 light years, it might be fun to take a walk around the block…

Snake Venom

What is the viscosity of snake venom? Leave it to physicists to find out! Since only few snakes inject their venom into their victims' bodies using hollow fangs, researchers wondered how all snakes delivered their venom successfully into prey. Discover’s 80beats breaks it down:

It turns out that snake venom has unusual viscosity properties that keep it cohering together until it’s time to flow down the fangs and into the snake’s soon-to-be-snack—the same properties that account for how ketchup seems stuck in the bottle, then flows freely onto your fries.

If you want to get into more of the nitty-gritty of it, check out the study in Physical Review Letters with those fries.