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NEWSBITS
The man who helped unlock DNA dies
Francis Crick, who helped discover the double helix shape of DNA along with James Watson, has died aged 88.
Professor Crick died at Thornton Hospital in San Diego, US, where he had been battling colon cancer.
The British-born scientist won the Nobel Prize for his work on DNA’s structure, which he helped model in 1953 at the University of Cambridge.
“I will always remember Francis for his extraordinarily focused intelligence,” said Professor Watson.
“He treated me as though I were a member of his family. Being with him for two years in a small room in Cambridge was truly a privilege,” he continued.
Professor Crick was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1959, three years before he was awarded a Nobel prize. Primarily this was for his work on DNA, but also for his study of the structure of proteins and viruses.
Research undertaken by Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin paved the way for Francis Crick and James Watson’s famous discovery.
Wilkins and Franklin took the first X-ray images of DNA in 1950, which caught the attention of Crick and Watson — inspiring them to investigate further.
Professor’s Crick’s death comes one year after the 50th anniversary of the discovery of the structure of DNA.
“Just last year we were celebrating the 50th anniversary of the publication in the journal ‘Nature’ of his landmark scientific paper, written with James Watson, which described the correct double helix structure of DNA for the first time,” said Lord May.
It is now one of the most famous scientific papers of all time, but began with an unassuming pair of sentences: “We wish to suggest a structure for the salt of deoxyribose nucleic acid (DNA). This structure has novel features which are of considerable biological interest.” — Sci-tech World Report
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Nasa launches its Aura satellite
The US space agency has successfully launched its Aura satellite which is designed to check the health of the Earth’s atmosphere. The satellite blasted away from Earth on a Boeing Delta 2 rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base.
A problem with the rocket’s battery system stopped the countdown three minutes before lift-off on Wednesday.
Aura will peer through the stratosphere and troposphere, to study in detail the thin layer of gas in which we live.
Launch attempts were also scrubbed because of technical issues, first with the rocket and then with its payload.
Among its many tasks, Aura will test whether international atmospheric treaties, such as the Montreal Protocol to repair the ozone layer, are working.
Nasa describes the spacecraft as one of the most sophisticated environmental monitoring satellites ever built.
It is the third in the agency’s series of satellites aimed at providing definitive data on the global environment.
The first two, Terra and Aqua, are studying the ground and the oceans. Aura will concentrate on the atmosphere, looking at gases, pollutants, and chemical reactions.
The three-tonne spacecraft will help scientists understand how atmospheric composition affects and responds to Earth’s changing climate.
“Aura’s going to be very helpful in tracking whether the ozone layer is recovering, in establishing the relationship between particulates and atmospheric gases and climate change; and Aura will hopefully also be a very useful tool in developing better predictions of air quality,” said Rick Pickering, Aura Project Manager at the Goddard Space Flight Center.
Last year, scientists produced the first concrete evidence that the ozone layer is in the process of recovering (even if the hole is presently getting bigger) after decades of damage caused by substances like CFCs.
But a return to full health will take about 50 years by current estimates — and global warming could change that timescale.
On climate change itself, one outstanding issue is the role of tiny particles in the atmosphere.
These aerosols, typically containing sulphur or carbon, come from natural sources, such as volcanoes, and from human sources, such as the soot from fossil fuel burning.
Aerosols are an important but uncertain agent of climate change. By absorbing or scattering radiation, they can either warm or cool the troposphere. They can also modify clouds and affect precipitation.
If Aura can help scientists understand precisely what these particles are doing, how they behave and what they mean for the future of the global climate, that would be a significant return on the satellite’s billion-dollar cost.
Aura has four instruments, the High Resolution Dynamics Limb Sounder (HIRDLS); the Microwave Limb Sounder (MLS); the Ozone Monitoring Instrument (OMI); and the Tropospheric Emission Spectrometer (TES).
The HIRDLS and MLS were built with a substantial UK contribution.
MLS scientist Hugh Pumphrey, from the University of Edinburgh, was pleased to see Aura finally fly. — Sci-tech World Report
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