The Little Fox and the Giant Stars

New stars are the lifeblood of our Galaxy, and there is enough material revealed by this Herschel infrared image to build stars for millions of years to come.

Situated 8000 light-years away in the constellation Vulpecula – latin for little fox – the region in the image is known as Vulpecula OB1. It is a ‘stellar association’ in which a batch of truly giant ‘OB’ stars is being born.

The vast quantities of ultraviolet and other radiation emitted by these stars is compressing the surrounding cloud, causing nearby regions of dust and gas to begin the collapse into more new stars. In time, this process will ‘eat’ its way through the cloud, transforming some of the raw material into shining new stars.

The giant stars at the heart of Vulpecula OB1 are some of the biggest in the Galaxy. Containing dozens of times the mass of the Sun, they have short lives, astronomically speaking, because they burn their fuel so quickly.

At an estimated age of two million years, they are already well through their lifespans. When their fuel runs out, they will collapse and explode as supernovas. The shock this will send through the surrounding cloud will trigger the birth of even more stars, and the cycle will begin again.

NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day 2016 June 23 

Solstice Dawn and Full Moonset 

Cerussite on Rossasite

A “completely unexpected” mineral has been discovered on Mars

NASA’s Curiosity rover found the mineral in the Gale crater on Mars, and it could change what we know about how the planet formed. It’s a type of silica mineral called tridymite. The presence of tridymite on Mars was a surprise to scientists because it’s associated with a phenomenon that no one thought was ever present on Mars.

Opal in Ironstone Matrix

The milkyway meets the northern lights. I really wanna go there someday.

The Novaya Zemlya Effect is an optical phenomenon named after the archipelago located just north of Russia, in the Arctic Ocean where it was first observed. It was first described by the crew of a Dutch ship in 1597 during an expedition into the Arctic Ocean to try to find a passage connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Unfortunately, their ship got caught in the sea ice, forcing the crew to overwinter on the island. The sun went down on November 3rd, and they didn’t expect to see it again until February 8th of the following year. 

However, to their great surprise, they awoke on the morning of January 24th to see this - a glimpse of the sun two full weeks before predicted. Three days later, it happened again; and the crew was so confused by its appearance that they decided to write a report about it and submit it to the scientific community for review. 

News of the Novaya Zemlya Effect spread throughout the scientific community, and it was met with disbelief and skepticism almost everywhere that it was heard. Most scientists dismissed the observation, attributing it to an error in date-keeping, and the incident was largely forgotten. Only Kepler accepted the possibility of such sightings, and even made a surprisingly good attempt at scientific explanation.

Nearly three hundred years later, in 1894, Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen made another observation of the fabled Novaya Zemlya Effect during his North Pole expedition. He described this in his book ‘Farthest North’. Again, in 1918, the phenomenon was observed by Ernest Shackleton during an expedition to Antarctica. But it wasn’t until 1956 that the Novaya Zemlya Effect was proven to be a genuine natural phenomenon.

So, what exactly is the Novaya Zemlya Effect? According to Wikipedia, 

“The Novaya Zemlya effect will give the impression that the sun is rising earlier than it actually should (astronomically speaking), and depending on the meteorological situation, the effect will present the sun as a line or a square (which is sometimes referred to as the “rectangular sun”), made up of flattened hourglass shapes. This occurs when the conditions that require a mirage to occur are inverted. A mirage occurs when air near the ground gets heated; conversely, the Novaya Zemlya Effect occurs when air above the ice surface gets cooled so that a strong temperature inversion layer is formed. Rays of sunlight enters the colder layer and gets channeled around the curvature of the Earth. The effect can only be observed near the poles where conditions are frigid.”

Saturn and Tethys

Study reveals how HIV enters cell nucleus

Loyola University Chicago scientists have solved a mystery that has long baffled HIV researchers: How does HIV manage to enter the nucleus of immune system cells?                                

The discovery, reported in the journal PLOS Pathogens, could lead to effective new drugs to treat HIV/AIDS, said Edward M. Campbell, PhD, corresponding author of the study. Campbell is an associate professor in the Department of Microbiology and Immunology of Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine.

HIV infects and kills immune system cells, including T cells and macrophages. This cripples the immune system, making the patient vulnerable to common bacteria, viruses and other pathogens that usually don’t cause problems in people with healthy immune systems.

Once HIV enters a cell, it has to find a way to get inside the nucleus, the compartment that contains the cell’s DNA. Many related viruses do this by waiting until the cell divides, when the protective membrane surrounding the nucleus breaks down. But HIV has the insidious ability to enter the nucleus in a non-dividing cell with an intact nuclear membrane. (This membrane also is known as the nuclear envelope.)

How HIV gets through the nuclear envelope has been a mystery. In part, this is because the HIV core (the protein shell that protects the HIV genome) is 50 percent larger than the pores in the envelope. These pores normally enable cellular proteins and other materials to go back and forth between the nucleus and the rest of the cell.

Campbell and colleagues discovered that a motor protein, called KIF5B, interacts with both the HIV-1 core and the nuclear pore in a way that allows HIV into the nucleus. Normally KIF5B transports various cargoes within the cell, away from the nucleus. But HIV hijacks KIF5B to serve a different purpose: It induces KIF5B to tear off pieces of the nuclear envelope and transport them away from the nucleus, thus making the pore wide enough for HIV to pass through. (The pieces that are torn off are proteins called Nup358.)

The discovery opens a potential new strategy for fighting HIV. Developing a drug that prevents KIF5B from disrupting nuclear pores would prevent HIV from sneaking into the nucleus without detection. This would give the immune system enough time to sound the alarm to attack and destroy HIV.

Cells have surveillance mechanisms to detect viruses, and their DNA, in the cytoplasm (the part of the cell outside the nucleus). But HIV typically can enter the nucleus before it is detected by these mechanisms. Trapping HIV in the cytoplasm would not only prevent an infection, it might also lead to HIV being detected and thus prompt an immune response.

“It’s like making a bank vault harder to break into,” Campbell said. “In addition to making the money more secure, it would increase the chance of sounding the alarm and catching the burglars.”

The study is titled “KIF5B and Nup358 cooperatively mediate the nuclear import of HIV-1 during infection.”

Image: IV-1 viral cores (red) accumulate around the cell nucleus (blue) but remain unable to enter following depletion of the motor protein KIF5B.

Zircon on Calcite

Beryl var. Aquamarine with Mica, Schorl & Feldspar

Andradite with Epidote