It will take six months for the MRO to attain its final orbit.

NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO) has survived a critical phase in its mission by parking itself in an elliptical orbit around the Red Planet.
News of its success followed a tense period of radio silence while the spacecraft passed behind Mars.
According to bbc.co.uk, over the next six months, the probe will steadily reduce the size of its orbit until it reaches an optimal position to start scientific studies. MRO will examine the Martian surface and atmosphere in unprecedented detail.
At 2124 GMT (1334 PST), as the spacecraft approached the south-side of the planet, its engines fired, slowing its speed and allowing it to be captured by Mars’ gravity. About 20 minutes later, MRO switched from solar to battery power as it passed behind the planet and entered into a period of radio silence.
The re-establishment of contact half an hour later was met with jubilation from the mission team at the US Space Agency’s (NASA) Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in Pasadena, California.
MRO project manager Jim Graf described Mars as “unpredictable“. The probe has joined three other satellites around the Red Planet: NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor and Mars Odyssey, and the European Space Agency’s Mars Express.
MRO is now in a 35-hour elliptical trajectory around Mars, where at its furthest point it will swing out to about 44,000km above the planet’s surface.
The next phase for the mission will be to slowly shrink the spacecraft’s path around the world until it achieves a tight, circular, two-hour orbit. This process will take six months, and employs a technique known as aerobraking, whereby the spacecraft slows itself down by using the friction created each time it brushes past the Martian atmosphere.
The orbiter will have to perform this technique more than 500 times and each maneuver is perilous. If it goes in the planet’s atmosphere too far it heats up and crashes and burns. If it hits the atmosphere at the wrong speed, it bounces off and goes off into deep space.
MRO will return 10-times more data than all of the previous Mars missions put together. The aim of the mission is to build up a detailed picture of how Mars has changed over the millennia: whether there were once rivers or oceans and what its climate was once like. The spacecraft will also locate landing sites for future Martian rovers. This should be the start of a mission that will tell us much more about a planet that was, in the distant past, probably more like our own. The great mystery is how it turned into the desolate world it has now become.

A novel device that could use light to harmlessly and almost instantly probe for early signs of cancer has been developed by researchers at Duke’s Pratt School of Engineering. The device would allow physicians to search for cancer in epithelial cells that line body surfaces, including the skin, lungs and digestive and reproductive tracts, by simply inserting a fiber optic probe.
The team has reported the first clinically practical version of their “angle-resolved low coherence interferometry“ (a/LCI) technology designed to diagnose incipient cancer in the esophagus. Adam Wax, professor of biomedical engineering at the Pratt School, and graduate student John Pyhtila, lead author of the study, reported tests of their device in the March 15, 2006, Optics Letters.
Preliminary results of a further study of the latest a/LCI device in human esophageal tissue look promising, Wax told sciencedaily.com. The next step will be to test the device in human trials.
In principle, the researchers said their technology could be adapted to detect pre-cancerous cells on the surfaces of any organ, where the disease most often begins.
“The majority of all cancers, or some 80 percent start in the epithelium,“ Wax said. “Fiber-optic probes have the potential to test for early evidence of cancer in seconds, providing biopsy-type information without removing tissue. They could also serve as a guide to biopsy, directing physicians to suspicious sites to increase the likelihood that cancer will be detected.“ Biopsy surveillance in the esophagus removes tissue at random, he said.
Acid reflux can lead to changes in the esophageal lining as the organ attempts to adapt to acids normally limited to the stomach, a condition called Barrett’s esophagus, he explained. The condition raises the risk of esophageal cancer, and patients are generally tested for cancer periodically through random biopsy.
Previous studies by Wax’s team used a/LCI to identify pre-cancer in animal tissue. Pre-cancerous cells are characterized by an enlarged nucleus, the structure that houses the cell’s genetic material. It is such cellular changes that pathologists rely on to identify cancer in biopsied tissue, Wax said.
The a/LCI device emits light that scatters when it hits the cell nucleus. To enable a/LCI to be used as a diagnostic technology, the researchers developed a model of how light is scattered by the nucleus of healthy cells versus cancerous ones.

Typically, mutations that silence genes are bad for your health. But that’s not the case with caspase-12. When this gene doesn’t work anymore, the immune system goes into high gear. Geneticists now think that this aberration survived because it protected early humans against serious infections that arose from more crowded living conditions, science.com reports.
In its normal form, caspase-12 curtails the production of regulatory proteins called cytokines, which help mount an immune response against bacterial infection. People with a so-called “nonsense“ mutation in this gene make a shortened form of the caspase-12 protein. In 2004, researchers discovered that this defect helps to protect against potentially lethal infections because it can no longer control cytokine activity. People with two copies of the mutated gene are eight times more likely to avoid severe sepsis, which leads to kidney, gut, lung, and liver failure. And when sepsis does develop, they are three times more likely to survive than those with the original gene.
Geneticist Chris Tyler-Smith from the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Hinxton, U.K., and his colleagues decided to find out how the mutated gene spread around the world. They surveyed 1000 people representing 52 populations and took a more intensive look at caspase-12 in 77 people from China, Africa, and Utah. The genetic variations of those populations had been extensively cataloged as part of the HapMap project.
The researchers found that the original caspase-12 gene has disappeared or is very rare almost everywhere. The exception is sub-Saharan Africa, where it’s found in 28% of the population and 60% of the Pygmies there, the group reports in the April issue of the American Journal of Human Genetics.
Based on the similarity in the DNA sequences located near the caspase-12 gene, Tyler-Smith and his colleagues estimate that the nonsense mutation occurred about 500,000 years ago in Africa. But it didn’t start to become common until within the last 100,000 years. That’s about when people began migrating out of Africa and interacting more with each other. Individuals better equipped, genewise, to fight off pathogens had the upper hand, says Tyler-Smith.
As a The researchers concluded that the increased risk of sepsis caused the defective variant to replace the original gene. It is a very compelling case for the importance of evolutionary pressures in controlling the magnitude of the immune response.

Green veggies could keep us seeing longer.

As Kids, many of us thought eating carrots could make us see better. Now, as sciencentral.com explains, researchers have found that green veggies could keep us seeing longer.
Spinach may not give you popeye’s super strength, but digging into that spinach salad could help to protect you against the leading cause of blindness worldwide Ñ cataracts Ñ as well as helping your wasteline.
“I’ve always been interested in the role of diet in disease,“ says nutrition researcher Joshua Bomser. He had a particular interest in the plant pigments that play a critical role in photosynthesis, known as carotenoids, that are found in many of the everyday fruits and vegetables we eat. “There’s been some speculation that they can prevent the development of skin cancer, as well as the development of macular degeneration and age-related cataracts,“ he explains. “There are about 40 carotenoids that naturally occur in the diet. Of those, only lutein and zeaxanthin accumulate in the lens of the eye.“ Lutein and zeaxanthin are found in vegetables like kale, spinach and collard greens.
So, Bomser and his colleagues at Ohio State University wanted to find out whether these plant pigments, which are found in high concentrations in dark green leafy vegetables, could protect the lens of the eye against the damaging ultraviolet rays of the sun and prevent cataracts.
“We were able to show that lutein and zeaxanthin could reduce ultraviolet radiation induced damage in the lens,“ Bomser says.
Many things, including UV light, smoking, genetics and general aging cause oxidative damage in the body that can lead to a variety of diseases including cataracts. “Ultraviolet radiation can cause a host of changes in the lens of the eye, including damage to DNA, protein and lipids, and these changes can then result in the development of age-related cataracts,“ he explains.
When cataracts form, the lens of the eye Ñ which helps to focus images on the retina Ñ gradually becomes cloudy, eventually causing blurred vision and blindness. “It’s like a dirty window,“ explains opthamologist Lama Al-Aswad. “People who are on the inside can’t see out because it’s cloudy, and people on the outside can’t see inside. It’s the same thing with the cataract, the patient can’t see outside.“ Cataracts, which have to be surgically removed, affect the vision of millions of people over the age of 40.

Children in Ecuador whose mothers were exposed to pesticides while pregnant had increased blood pressure and diminished ability to copy geometric figures as compared to a control group, reports sciencedaily.com.
A team of researchers led by Philippe Grandjean, adjunct professor in the Department of Environmental Health at HSPH, analyzed data on 72 children aged seven or eight years old in the rural Tabacundo-Cayambe area in Northern Ecuador. The children were examined by a physician and were given a battery of standardized tests for neurobehavioral functions. Thirty-seven of the children had mothers whose self-described occupational histories indicated that the women had been exposed to pesticides during pregnancy, typically by working in greenhouses. Dose-response relationships and the exact timing of the exposures’ impact were not established due to the nature of the study design.
In the exposed children, the average systolic blood pressure was higher than in those who were unexposed. An increase in diastolic pressure was not statistically significant. Hypertension among children and adolescents is defined based on a range of blood pressures in healthy children, and children above the 95th percentile are considered hypertensive. In the Pediatrics study, nine children exceeded the approximate 95th percentile of 113 mm Hg. Seven of those children had prenatal pesticide exposure.
Prenatal pesticide exposure was also associated with a decreased ability to copy figures presented to the children as part of a standardized Stanford-Binet test. Adjusted regression analysis indicated that the exposed children experienced a developmental delay on this aptitude of four years. The authors noted that the confidence interval, or range of value, for this coefficient was relatively wide but was a statistically significant finding in a study of limited size, suggesting that the effect could be substantial.