The synthetic sperm

Stem cells taken from the bone marrow of men can be coaxed into something that resembles an immature sperm cell.

They hope to use their findings to come up with new and better fertility treatments for both men and women.

Nayernia, now at Newcastle University and the North East England Stem Cell Institute in Britain, had previously grown sperm cells from mouse bone marrow and used them to fertilize mouse eggs and create living baby mice.

His team worked with men who were about to get bone marrow transplants, a common treatment for cancer.

They removed some of the bone marrow, a rich source of so-called adult stem cells. These stem cells are used by the body to replenish blood, bone, muscle and other tissues.

“Here we show that a small population of bone marrow cells is able to transdifferentiate to male germ cell-like cells,” Nayernia’s team wrote.

“Our findings provide direct evidence that human bone marrow cells can differentiate to putative male germ cells and identify bone marrow as a potential source of male germ cells that could sustain sperm production.”

Redirecting immature cells Stem cell science counts on being able to redirect a cell so it will create a particular tissue. The more immature a stem cell is, the more malleable it is, which is why many researchers want to work with and study stem cells taken from days-old embryos.

Unlike mature tissue, stem cells live longer, with some types being virtually immortal under the right lab conditions.

If scientists can take bone marrow cells from an infertile man and turn them into sperm, he could father a child using standard techniques such as in vitro fertilization (IVF).

Other researchers have done similar work in female mice, taking bone marrow cells and turning them into egg cells.

embryonic stem cells used in research most often come from embryos left over after in vitro fertilization procedures.

Step One: An egg is fertilized by a sperm in a lab dish

Step Two: The fertilized egg begins to divide and develop into an embryo. About five days later, the embryo becomes a blastocyst -- a hollow ball of about 100 cells. The inner cells are the embryonic stem cells.

Step Three: Stem cells are removed from the blastocyst and cultured in the laboratory where they theoretically can multiply indefinitely.

Step Four: By adding and removing certain proteins, scientists can coax the cells to develop into new heart, bone, nerve or other cells.

Source: www.msnbc.msn.com

Future of The Universe

Empty your mind. We’re about to take a BIG leap into the future. Not just a lousy few billions of years, but 10 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 years!

One ‘googol’ years, is the official word for that number. The problem is that the Universe gets bigger and cooler. Ever since the Big Bang, it expands, much like an expanding ball of fire after an explosion. Right now, the Universe is still young. It has these cute stars and twinkling galaxies. But in the long run, that will change. Slowly but inevitably, the Universe will empty itself.

First, the galaxies will fly out of sight, beyond the horizon of what we can possibly see. Next, the stars in our own galaxy will burn out, one after the other. The only thing that will remain, is a dull graveyard of cold planets, dead suns and black holes. In about one hundred trillion years, the Milky Way will go black, astronomers expect.

And eventually, even this graveyard decays. One after the other, the dead stars and planets are eaten by black holes, or kicked out of the Milky Way by collisions. Astronomers expect that in one hundred to one thousand billion billion years, our galaxy has dissolved completely.

Time goes on. After a while (more trillions of years) something else will kick in. You’ll notice that even the very stuff nature is made of, isn’t stable. A proton, the particle you’ll find in the core of atoms, has an average lifetime of 100 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 years. Wait long enough, and it will suddenly vanish. Poof, gone. The same goes for light particles, the so-called ‘photons’. They’re expected to last a few zero’s longer, but in the end, they too will kick the bucket, one after the other. Isn’t that just bizarre? The light will go out, literally.

The last thing that survives, are the black holes. But in the end, they too will vanish. They will evaporate in a puff of radiation.

So there we are, at our unimaginable one googol years. Finally, the Universe is totally and utterly empty. You won’t see any light or spot any planet -- in fact, you won’t even find the tiniest speck of dust. The Universe has sterilized itself. All there is left, is emptiness, and darkness. Total oblivion. And worst of all: there’s nothing we can do to stop it. We can build fancy machines or futuristic devices all we like -- but in the end, they’ll all get kicked out of existence, when the matter they are made of simply vanishes.

So there you have it: infinity. Booooring, we must add.

But don’t sob. There’s an upside.

As the quadrillions of years pass by, something very odd should happen. In eternity, even the rarest events get a chance to occur. Weird, bizarre phenomena that only happen once in a zillion years or so, become quite normal.

For example: the nothingness should yield a few surprises. Already, physicists know that in a vacuum, there is sometimes tiny little energy ‘blobs’. Little, random fluctuations of the so-called ‘quantum vacuum’. Out of nowhere, tiny particles pop in and out of existence. But theory predicts that on very, VERY rare occasions, the fluctuations should be a bit larger. Out of nowhere, an entire atom might appear! Or hey, the vacuum may even spit out a few of them!

Think of it like the static on TV. Wait long enough, and out of the random fuzz, a recognizable image might materialize. Wait REALLY long, and one day a complete episode of The Bold And The Beautiful should accidentally show up!

In the Universe, this should give some really surprising results. With eternity at hand, the vacuum should begin to yield all kinds of objects. Incoherent lumps of random garbage, most of the time. But on very, very rare occasions, you’ll see other objects popping into existence. The Eiffel tower. A purple camel. A golden parking garage filled with chocolate Cadillacs. Napoleon Bonaparte sitting next to Mike Tyson on top of a stack of comic books. As the googols of years pass by, it’s all there.

In the VERY, VERY, VERY long run, the vacuum will even belch up complete planets, and beautiful stars, burning and all. Theoretically the vacuum should even churn out a complete solar system one day, identical to ours, with a planet Earth inhabited by people. "In an infinite amount of time, one day, I will reappear", as physicist Katherine Freese of Michigan University once put it. "An crazy thought, but true."

One day the black nothingness should even produce a new Big Bang. Admittedly, we’ll have wait really long for it to happen. Researchers of the University of Chicago once tried to calculate it. And according to their best estimates, it should happen somewhere over the next 1 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 years. That’s a one with 1056 zero’s. You can count them, if you like.

A New Earth-like Planet; "Aliens home..??"

'Is there life anywhere else?'

Astronomers have discovered the most Earth-like exoplanet yet. The planet, the smallest yet discovered, orbits the red dwarf Gliese 581 at a distance one fourteenth of that from Earth to the sun; its year is just 13 days long. However, because the star is so much cooler and less luminous than our own sun, the so-called habitable zone, where planets can carry liquid water, is much nearer the star. As we know, liquid water is critical to life. Moreover, its radius should be only 1.5 times the Earth's radius, and models predict that the planet should be either rocky - like our Earth - or covered with oceans. Scientists made the discovery using the Eso 3.6m Telescope in Chile.

The planet orbits the faint star Gliese 581, which is 20.5 light-years away in the constellation Libra. Gliese 581 c was identified at the European Southern Observatory (Eso) facility at La Silla in the Atacama Desert. The team making the discoveries used the HARPS (High Accuracy Radial Velocity for Planetary Searcher), perhaps the most precise spectrograph in the world. It can spot signals - variations in the velocity of a star - that fall far below the "noise" threshold of most spectrographs. The instrument can measure tiny changes in the velocity of a star as it experiences the gravitational tug of a nearby planet. Professor Glenn White at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory is helping to develop the European Space Agency's Darwin mission, which will scan the nearby Universe, looking for signs of life on Earth-like planets.