Learning Disability

Learning disability is a neurological condition that affects a persons potability to communicate and potential to be taught effectively.Learning disability includes such conditions:

•  Dysgraphia-writing disorder
• Dyslexia- reading disorder
• Dyscalculia-mathematics disorder
• Developmental Aphasia.

In the U.K. the learning disability is used more for developmental disability.When someone has a learning disability it doesn't mean that he has low or high intelligence,or any innate inability.It just means for them learning is harder and it takes them more time but they can some how learn it.

You can learn more about learning disability herehttp://www.sciencedaily.com/articles/l/learning_disability.htm

I also found this could video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GoM5HcfQBwE this video made me understand better what is it really.

Last Universal Common Ancestor More Complex Than Previously Thought

 Scientists call it LUCA, the Last Universal Common Ancestor, but they don't know much about this great-grandparent of all living things. Many believe LUCA was little more than a crude assemblage of molecular parts, a chemical soup out of which evolution gradually constructed more complex forms. Some scientists still debate whether it was even a cell.New evidence suggests that LUCA was a sophisticated organism after all, with a complex structure recognizable as a cell, researchers report. Their study appears in the journal Biology Direct.

The study builds on several years of research into a once-overlooked feature of microbial cells, a region with a high concentration of polyphosphate, a type of energy currency in cells. Researchers report that this polyphosphate storage site actually represents the first known universal organelle, a structure once thought to be absent from bacteria and their distantly related microbial cousins, the archaea. This organelle, the evidence indicates, is present in the three domains of life: bacteria, archaea and eukaryotes (plants, animals, fungi, algae and everything else).

The existence of an organelle in bacteria goes against the traditional definition of these organisms, said University of Illinois crop sciences professor Manfredo Seufferheld, who led the study.

"It was a dogma of microbiology that organelles weren't present in bacteria," he said. But in 2003 in a paper in the Journal of Biological Chemistry, Seufferheld and colleagues showed that the polyphosphate storage structure in bacteria (they analyzed an agrobacterium) was physically, chemically and functionally the same as an organelle called an acidocalcisome (uh-SID-oh-KAL-sih-zohm) found in many single-celled eukaryotes.

Their findings, the authors wrote, "suggest that acidocalcisomes arose before the prokaryotic (bacterial) and eukaryotic lineages diverged." The new study suggests that the origins of the organelle are even more ancient.

The study tracks the evolutionary history of a protein enzyme (called a vacuolar proton pyrophosphatase, or V-H+PPase) that is common in the acidocalcisomes of eukaryotic and bacterial cells. (Archaea also contain the enzyme and a structure with the same physical and chemical properties as an acidocalcisome, the researchers report.)

By comparing the sequences of the V-H+PPase genes from hundreds of organisms representing the three domains of life, the team constructed a "family tree" that showed how different versions of the enzyme in different organisms were related. That tree was similar in broad detail to the universal tree of life created from an analysis of hundreds of genes. This indicates, the researchers said, that the V-H+PPase enzyme and the acidocalcisome it serves are very ancient, dating back to the LUCA, before the three main branches of the tree of life appeared.

"There are many possible scenarios that could explain this, but the best, the most parsimonious, the most likely would be that you had already the enzyme even before diversification started on Earth," said study co-author Gustavo Caetano-Anollés, a professor of crop sciences and an affiliate of the Institute for Genomic Biology at Illinois. "The protein was there to begin with and was then inherited into all emerging lineages."

"This is the only organelle to our knowledge now that is common to eukaryotes, that is common to bacteria and that is most likely common to archaea," Seufferheld said. "It is the only one that is universal."

The study lends support to a hypothesis that LUCA may have been more complex even than the simplest organisms alive today, said James Whitfield, a professor of entomology at Illinois and a co-author on the study.

"You can't assume that the whole story of life is just building and assembling things," Whitfield said. "Some have argued that the reason that bacteria are so simple is because they have to live in extreme environments and they have to reproduce extremely quickly. So they may actually be reduced versions of what was there originally. According to this view, they've become streamlined genetically and structurally from what they originally were like. We may have underestimated how complex this common ancestor actually was."

The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the National Science Foundation provided funding for this study.

The study team also included Kyung Mo Kim, of the Korea Research Institute of Bioscience and Biotechnology; and Alejandro Valerio, of the Museum of Biological Diversity in Columbus, Ohio.

What might have been in Earth's ancient 'chemical soup'? Scientists don't know much about LUCA, the Last Universal Common Ancestor, the great-grandparent of all living things. Many believe LUCA was little more than a crude assemblage of molecular parts, a chemical soup out of which evolution gradually constructed more complex forms. New evidence suggests that LUCA was a sophisticated organism, with a complex structure recognizable as a cell.

Measuring Global Photosynthesis Rate: Earth's Plant Life 'Recycles' Carbon Dioxide Faster Than Previously Estimated

A Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego-led research team followed the path of oxygen atoms on carbon dioxide molecules during photosynthesis to create a new way of measuring the efficiency of the world's plant life. A team led by postdoctoral researcher Lisa Welp considered the oxygen atoms contained in the carbon dioxide taken up by plants during photosynthesis. The ratio of two oxygen isotopes in carbon dioxide told researchers how long the CO₂ had been in the atmosphere and how fast it had passed through plants. From this, they estimated that the global rate of photosynthesis is about 25 percent faster than thought. The authors of the study, published in the journal Nature, said the new estimate of the rate of global photosynthesis enabled by their method will in turn help guide other estimates of plant activity such as the capacity of forests and crops to grow. Understanding such variables is becoming increasingly important to scientists and policymakers attempting to understand the potential changes to ecosystems that can be expected from global warming.

Click here is the link where i got it from http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/09/110928222003.htm

Aboriginal Australians: The First Explorers

 In an exciting development, an international team of researchers has, for the first time, pieced together the human genome from an Aboriginal Australian.

The results, published in the journalScience, re-interpret the prehistory of our species.

By sequencing the genome, the researchers demonstrate that Aboriginal Australians descend directly from an early human expansion into Asia that took place some 70,000 years ago, at least 24,000 years before the population movements that gave rise to present-day Europeans and Asians. The results imply that modern day Aboriginal Australians are in fact the direct descendents of the first people who arrived in Australia as early as 50,000 years ago.

The study derived from a lock of hair donated to a British anthropologist by an Aboriginal man from the Goldfields region of Western Australia in the early 20th century. One hundred years later, researchers have isolated DNA from this same hair, using it to explore the genetics of the first Australians and to provide insights into how humans first dispersed across the globe.

Separation

The genome, shown to have no genetic input from modern European Australians, reveals that the ancestors of the Aboriginal man separated from the ancestors of other human populations some 64-75,000 years ago. Aboriginal Australians therefore descend directly from the earliest modern explorers, people who migrated into Asia before finally reaching Australia about 50,000 years ago. In showing this, the study establishes Aboriginal Australians as the population with the longest association with the land on which they live today. This research is presented with the full endorsement of the Goldfields Land and Sea Council, the organization that represents the Aboriginal traditional owners for the region.

New model for migration

The history of Aboriginal Australians plays a key role in understanding the dispersal of the first humans to leave Africa. Archaeological evidence establishes modern human presence in Australia by about 50,000 years ago, but this study re-writes the story of their journey there.

Previously, the most widely accepted theory was that all modern humans derive from a single out-of-Africa migration wave into Europe, Asia, and Australia. In that model, the first Australians would have branched off from an Asian population, already separated from the ancestors of Europeans. However, this study shows that when ancestral Aboriginal Australians began their private journey, the ancestors of Asians and Europeans had not yet differentiated from each other. Once they did, some 24,000 years after the first Australians had begun their explorations, Asians and remnants of the ancestral Australians intermixed for a period of time.

Click here:

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/09/110922141858.htm

Scientists Take First Step Towards Creating 'Inorganic Life'

Professor Lee Cronin and his team have demonstrated a new way of making inorganic-chemical-cells or iCHELLs.The profesor said that alomst all of the life on earth is based on organic biology,but the inorganic world is considered to be inanimate. 
They are trying to create self-replicating, evolving inorganic cells that would essentially be alive.The cells can be compartmentalised by creating internal membranes that control the passage of materials and energy through them, meaning several chemical processes can be isolated within the same cell just like biological cells.
Its still a work in progress

Summer with science ( London)

For teh summer i went to London! It was really fun i got to see a lot of stuff with friends and have fun.The most amazing thing and the thing ill alwayes remember is my ride on the London Eye!It was really cool.You could see the whole London,even the top of Big Ben when your on top!The science part was the part when your going up because your going oposite the earths gravity and when your going down because your going the way the earth gravity is pulling you.There is a part when your on top and your normal because you don't feel like the earths gravity is pulling you that much because your like on a straight line.But i think that the rife wouldn't be so cool if it wasn't for my awesome friends! 

My new blog

My name is Kristina and this is my new science blog!