Scientists from Newcastle University in the UK have demonstrated that a bacterium commonly found in soil can sniff and react to ammonia in the air.

It was previously thought that this “olfaction” was limited to more complex forms of life known as eukaryotes.

The finding, published in Biotechnology Journal, means that bacteria have four of the five senses that humans enjoy.

The discovery also has implications in the understanding and control of biofilms – the chemical coatings that bacteria can form on, for example, medical implants.

Bacteria have already demonstrated the ability to react to light, in analogy to sight, and to change the genes that they express when confronted with certain materials, in analogy to touch.

Sniff test

However, there is a distinction between an organism reacting to a chemical that it encounters directly (in analogy to the sense of taste) and a reaction to a chemical that is floating around in the air, says Reindert Nijland, lead author of the study.

“The difference is both in the mechanism that does the sensing, as well as in the compounds that are sensed,” Dr Nijland, now at University Medical Centre Utrecht in the Netherlands, told BBC News.

“The compounds detected by olfactory organs are generally much more volatile than things you can taste like ‘sweet’ or ‘salt’, and therefore can provide information about things that can be much further away; you can smell a barbecue from a few blocks away whereas you have to physically touch and eat the steak to be able to actually taste it.”

Bacteria are known to use their “senses” to detect chemicals that indicate the presence of other bacteria or competitors for food.

In some cases, they can produce a slimy material that causes them to stick together in what is known as a biofilm. Such biofilms can cause complications in cases ranging from implants to oil pipelines, but a familiar example is the plaque that forms on teeth.

Dr Nijland and Grant Burgess put a number of separate cultures of a bacterium called B. licheniformis in cylinders containing different “growth media” to cause them to multiply. Some were in a rich broth of food that allowed the bacteria to multiply quickly, releasing ammonia gas in the process, while others were in a medium that allowed the growth of biofilms – which can be initiated if the bacteria are in contact with ammonia.

They were surprised to find that some of the isolated bacteria cultures began to form biofilms spontaneously, with those physically closest to the “well-fed” bacteria showing the highest biofilm production.

The only explanation is that the bacteria sensed the presence of ammonia directly from the air above the cultures.

Film rights

Dr Nijland explained that the biofilm provides both a barrier and a means of transportation for the bacteria that have “smelled” nearby ammonia.

“It’s tempting to speculate that [ammonia] provides the bacteria with information of a nearby nutrient source, since ammonia generally is a waste product of bacteria growing on a rich nutrient source,” he said.

“The bacteria sense this, organise themselves in a biofilm which will prepare them for both competition with other species already feeding on the nutrient source, and enables swarming – migration via the matrix they have secreted to form the biofilm.”

The surprise find has implications in our understanding of the difference between prokaryotes like bacteria, which have no neatly packaged parts within their cells, and the more advanced eukaryotes that include everything from yeast to humans.

“If very simple organisms such as bacteria are capable of this that would imply that this ability evolved much earlier than expected,” said Dr Nijland.

“Understanding this phenomenon… will help us to develop methods to potentially interfere with this process and potentially develop new ways of preventing biofilm-related bacterial infections.”

Farmers say it is being done because it is only possible to tell that the animal’s meat is of exceptionally high quality by inspecting its carcass.

US scientists are using a variety of techniques to assess which animals have exceptional qualities.

These attributes include meat quality, productivity or longevity.

These exceptional animals are cloned to be used as breeding stock, with the aim of raising the quality of herds on beef, dairy and pig farms in the US.

There is a long tradition of resurrecting dead animals for cloning – Dolly the sheep being a case in point.

The head of the leading US animal cloning company has said that European farmers will fall behind the rest of the world unless they are allowed to use such techniques to improve the productivity of their livestock.

The aim of livestock cloning is to clone the best animals to produce the best beef.

But some cattle farmers believe it is impossible to pick the best quality animals until their meat has been properly analysed.

That is why there are cloned bulls here that have been produced from the cells taken from the carcasses of dead animals.

Brady Hicks of the JR Simplot company in Idaho said his organisation was among many that had tried out the technique successfully.

“The animals are hanging on a rail ready to go to the meat counter,” he told BBC News.

“We identify carcasses that have certain carcass characteristics that we want, but it’s too late to reproduce the genetics of the animal. But through cloning we can resurrect that animal.”

These “resurrected” animals are then bred with naturally born cows. The next step is to see if their offspring – whose meat can be sold to consumers in the US – have the same qualities as the grandparent from which the cells were originally taken.

Ranchers at the Simplot company also clone from live animals that are particularly productive or fertile.

The driving force behind the project is the head of the company, Scott Simplot, who firmly believes that cloning can be used to improve beef production. His stated aim is to raise the standard of the great American steak.

“The notion behind what we are doing is to find that animal that created that great steak – and once we have it, we want to reproduce it,” he said.

“So (if we are successful), every time we have a steak at a restaurant it will have that memorable taste.”

But the idea is not to everyone’s taste. The leading whole food chain in the US, Whole Foods Market, has banned the sale of products of cloning.

According to its global vice-president, Margaret Wittenberg, although meat and milk from cloned animals has been allowed to go on sale in the US, most Americans have never heard of it.

“A lot of customers in the United States are oblivious of it,” she said.

“You don’t hear about it in the media. And when you do tell people about it they look at you and say ‘you’re kidding! They’re not doing that are they? Why would they?’”

Ban bid

Mark Walton, president of the leading US animal cloning company, ViaGen, says livestock farmers have a very good reason to use his services.

He says scientists in many countries are trying to find ways of using the technology to boost production and quality.

Cloning is not used by livestock farmers in Europe, and there are moves by some members of the European Parliament to ban it altogether. Mr Walton believes that would be a mistake.

“If I were a European farmer and my competitors in the US, China and South America were using the technology, I’d be concerned about losing all access to it,” he said.

It is early days for cloning in US agriculture. There are only a thousand clones in the one hundred million-strong American cattle herd.

The idea is to pick the best animals and use them to breed from. ViaGen charges cattle farmers $17,000 to clone an animal.

It would cost them around $4,000 to buy a high quality bull to breed from. So for cloning to be worthwhile, the technology has to produce animals that are substantially better than the ones that can be obtained via traditional methods.

At the moment, the technique is at an experimental phase. Beef, pig and dairy farmers are all trying to establish whether cloning is an economic proposition.

Two years ago, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) ruled that meat and milk from cloned animals were safe to eat. Ever since then, products from the offspring of cloned animals have entered the food chain

Supporters of the technology say that costs will come down – and as farmers become better able to identify their exceptional animals, cloning technology will begin to pay big dividends.

Mark Walton believes that the use of cloning in agriculture will eventually become the norm – not just in the US but across the world.

In the backstreets of downtown Srinagar is an old building known as the Rozabal shrine.

It’s in a part of the city where the Indian security forces are on regular patrol, or peering out from behind check-posts made of sandbags.

There are still occasional clashes with militants or stone-throwing children, but the security situation has improved in recent times and the tourists are returning.

When I first searched for Rozabal two years ago, the taxi circled around a minor Muslim tomb in a city of many mosques and mausoleums, the driver asking directions several times before we found it.

The shrine, on a street corner, is a modest stone building with a traditional Kashmiri multi-tiered sloping roof.

A watchman led me in and encouraged me to inspect the smaller wooden chamber within, with its trellis-like, perforated screen.

Through the gaps I could see a gravestone covered with a green cloth.

When I returned to the shrine recently though, it was shut – its gate padlocked because it had attracted too many visitors.

The reason? Well, according to an eclectic combination of New Age Christians, unorthodox Muslims and fans of the Da Vinci Code, the grave contains the mortal remains of a candidate for the most important visitor of all time to India.

‘Crazy professor’

Officially, the tomb is the burial site of Youza Asaph, a medieval Muslim preacher – but a growing number of people believe that it is in fact the tomb of Jesus of Nazareth.

They believe that Jesus survived the crucifixion almost 2,000 Easters ago, and went to live out his days in Kashmir.

“What else could they do? They had to close it,” Riaz told me.

His family home almost overlooks the shrine, and he is witheringly dismissive of the notion that Jesus was buried there.

“It’s a story spread by local shopkeepers, just because some crazy professor said it was Jesus’s tomb. They thought it would be good for business. Tourists would come, after all these years of violence.

“And then it got into the Lonely Planet, and too many people started coming.

“And one foreigner…” he gave me an apologetic look, “broke off a bit from the tomb to take home with him. So that’s why it’s closed now.”

On cue, a couple of unwashed and exhausted Australians appeared, carrying the latest edition of the Lonely Planet travel guide to India, which, sure enough, carried the tale of Jesus’s tomb, with some caveats about crackpots and blasphemy.

They asked me to take a photo of them outside the shrine – but were not desperately disappointed that it was closed.

The tomb of Jesus was just another place to tick off on their tourist-in-India must-visit list.

Famous meeting

The ruins of a Buddhist monastery in a spectacular location halfway up a mountainside north of Srinagar are not, yet, mentioned in the Lonely Planet.

It’s a spot that I had previously been unable to visit, because as a senior police officer told me, it was “infested with terrorists”.

But the watchman now seemed prepared for the arrival of mass tourism, with his 50 words of English, and his hidden stock of ancient terracotta tiles for sale.

He informed me that Jesus was among the religious leaders who attended a famous Buddhist meeting here in AD80, and even pointed to the place where he sat.

The stories of Jesus in India are not just aimed at gullible tourists – they date back to the 19th Century.

They were part of attempts to explain the striking similarities between Christianity and Buddhism, a matter of great concern to 19th Century scholars – and also a desire among some Christians to root the story of Jesus in Indian soil.

Missing years

There is talk of the missing years of Jesus, unmentioned in the gospels, when he was between the ages of 12 and 30.

Some say he was in India, picking up Buddhist ideas. These aren’t notions that have entirely died out.

The US-based Christian sect, known as the Church Universal and Triumphant, is the best-known modern supporter of the belief that Jesus lived in Kashmir, though they don’t believe he died there.

And in Islam, in which Jesus is the penultimate prophet, there is also a minority tradition adopted by the controversial Ahmeddiya sect, that Rozabal does contain the grave of Jesus.

Professional historians tend to laugh out loud when you mention the notion that Jesus might have lived in Kashmir – but his tomb is now firmly on the tourist trail – and a growing number of credulous visitors believe that he was buried in the Rozabal shrine.

And for those who scoff, remember that others have argued, just as implausibly, that Jesus came to Britain.

A theory that was much in vogue when the poet William Blake famously asked: “And did those feet in ancient time, walk upon England’s mountains green? And was the holy Lamb of God on England’s pleasant pastures seen?”

Surprisingly, the long-dead man appears to have originated in Siberia and is unrelated to modern Greenlanders, Morten Rasmussen of the University of Copenhagen and colleagues found.

“This provides evidence for a migration from Siberia into the New World some 5,500 years ago, independent of that giving rise to the modern Native Americans and Inuit,” the researchers wrote in Thursday’s issue of the journal Nature.

Not only can the findings help transform the study of archeology, but they can help answer questions about the origins of modern populations and disease, they said.

“Such studies have the potential to reconstruct not only our genetic and geographical origins, but also what our ancestors looked like,” David Lambert and Leon Huynen of Griffith University in Queensland, Australia, wrote in a commentary.

The DNA gives strong hints about the man, nicknamed Inuk. “Brown eyes, brown skin, he had shovel-form front teeth,” Eske Willerslev, who oversaw the study, told a telephone briefing. Such teeth are characteristic of East Asian and Native American populations.

He had the genes for early hair loss, too. “Because we found quite a lot of hair from this guy, we presume he actually died quite young,” Willerslev said.

The man lived among the Saqqaq people, the earliest known culture in southern Greenland that lasted from around 2500 BC until about 800 BC.

Scientists have disagreed on who these people were — whether they descended from the peoples who crossed the Bering Strait 30,000 to 40,000 years ago to settle the New World or whether they were more recent immigrants.

Willerslev’s team pulled DNA from hairs found in a frozen Saqqaq site and sequenced it just as they would a modern person’s full genome, looking for characteristic mutations.

“Recent advances in DNA sequencing technologies have initiated an era of personal genomics,” the researchers wrote.

“The sequencing project described here is a direct test of the extent to which ancient genomics can contribute knowledge about now-extinct cultures,” they added.

The DNA links Inuk to modern-day Arctic residents of Siberia. He had almost none of the mutations seen in Indians living in Central and South America.

“We have an increasingly powerful forensic tool with which to ‘reconstruct’ extinct humans and the demographics of populations,” Lambert and Huynen wrote.

A year ago scientists sequenced the genome of a Neanderthal — early humans who went extinct 30,000 years ago — and other groups have sequenced DNA from dried-out mammoth hair.

(BBC NEWS) – Meet Sinosauropteryx, a very spiky little dinosaur.

A team of scientists from China and the UK has now revealed that the bristles of this 125-million-year-old dinosaur were in fact ginger-coloured feathers.

The researchers say that the diminutive carnivore had a “Mohican” of feathers running along its head and back. It also had a striped tail.

The team revealed details of the dinosaur’s coloured feathers in an article published on Nature’s website.

The team began by studying the fossilised remains of a bird, Confuciusornis, which also lived during the early cretaceous period.

Confuciusornis’ feathers were preserved in extraordinarily complete fossils that were recently discovered in northern China.

Using a powerful electron microscope to look inside the feathers, researchers were able to see microscopic structures called melanosomes, which, in life, contain the pigment melanin.

“Melanin is what gives colour to human hair and animal fur,” said Professor Mike Benton from the University of Bristol, UK, who led this study. “They are also the most common way that colours are [produced] in feathers.”

Professor Benton explained that differently shaped melanosomes produced different colours, with blacks or greys produced by “sausage-shaped” melanosomes, and reddish or “russet” shades found in spherical ones.

“A ginger-haired person would have more spherical melanosomes, and a black-haired or grey-haired person would have more of the sausage-shaped structures,” said Professor Benton.

The scientists found both types of melanosome in Confuciusornis and decided to turn their attention to Sinosauropteryx, which is the most primitive feathered dinosaur yet found.

It was about the size of a turkey and would have fed on lizards and other small prey.

“There’s a very clear rim of feathers running down the top of its head like a Mohican, all the way along its back,” Professor Benton described.

Bands of dark and light along the tail can be seen in the fossils. This close examination has shown that the dinosaur’s “Mohican” was russet or ginger-coloured, and that these bands were in fact ginger and white stripes.

“This is the first time anyone has ever had evidence of original colour of feathers in dinosaurs,” said Professor Benton.

He said the study has also confirmed that the bristles on this “rather primitive flesh-eating dinosaur… really were feathers”.

This gives more weight to a very well-supported theory that modern birds evolved from theropods, the group of small carnivorous dinosaurs to which Sinosauropteryx belonged.

“Critics have said that these visible spiny structures could be shredded connective tissue,” Professor Benton explained. “But the discovery of melanosomes within the bristles finally proves that some early dinosaurs were indeed feathered.”

The findings also help to resolve a long-standing debate about the evolution and original function of feathers.

“We now know that feathers did not originate as flight structures,” said Professor Benton. This suggests that they evolved, initially, for insulation and perhaps for display.

Dr Richard Butler, a palaeontologist at the Bavarian State Collection for Palaeontology, in Munich, Germany, said this was a “fascinating and exciting discovery with important implications for understanding dinosaur evolution and biology”.

Dr Butler, who was not involved in this research, told BBC News: “When people ask how we know what colour dinosaurs were, the answer has always been that we make an educated guess.

“This discovery suggests that with more work we may be able to accurately reconstruct colour patterns in some dinosaur species, and begin to understand how those colour patterns may have functioned for camouflage or display.”

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The barely visible plume knocked into the air by NASA’s Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite or LCROSS mission last month contained at least some water. Scientists are now working to find out more about it.

“We’re unlocking the mysteries of our nearest neighbor and, by extension, the solar system,” Michael Wargo, chief lunar scientist at NASA, said in a statement.

Water had already been found on the moon but the NASA scientists had hoped they could find significant deposits in the permanently shadowed regions of craters, in this case, a crater called Cabeus.

If this water is billions of years old, it could contain information about the formation of the solar system. And if it is widespread, it could be used to sustain space travellers or broken down into fuel for space missions.

The researchers used a spectrograph to analyze the light coming from the plume of dust. These instruments can tell what elements are found in any material by their effects on light wavelength.

“We are ecstatic,” said Anthony Colaprete of NASA’s Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California.

“The concentration and distribution of water and other substances requires further analysis, but it is safe to say Cabeus holds water.”

And there is other material in the dark crater.

“Along with the water in Cabeus, there are hints of other intriguing substances. The permanently shadowed regions of the moon are truly cold traps, collecting and preserving material over billions of years,” Colaprete said.

Out of the 47,677 species in the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, 17,291 were deemed to be at serious risk.

These included 21% of all known mammals, 30% of amphibians, 70% of plants and 35% of invertebrates.

Conservationists warned that not enough was being done to tackle the main threats, such as habitat loss.

“The scientific evidence of a serious extinction crisis is mounting,” warned Jane Smart, director of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) Biodiversity Conservation Group.

“The latest analysis… shows that the 2010 target to reduce biodiversity loss will not be met,” she added.

“It’s time for governments to start getting serious about saving species and make sure it’s high on their agendas for next year, as we are rapidly running out of time.”

The Red List, regarded as the most authoritative assessment of the state of the planet’s species, draws on the work of thousands of scientists around the globe.

The latest update lists amphibians as the most seriously affected group of organisms on the planet, with 1,895 of the 6,285 known species listed as threatened.

Of these, it lists 39 species as either “extinct” or “extinct in the wild”. A further 484 are deemed “critically endangered”, 754 “endangered” and 657 “vulnerable”.

The Kihansi Spray Toad (Nectophyrnoides asperginis) is one species that has seen its status change from critically endangered to extinct in the wild.

It was only found in the Kihamsi Falls area of Tanzania, but its population had crashed in recent years from a high of an estimated 17,000 individuals.

Conservationists suggest that the rapid decline was primarily the result of of a dam being constructed upstream from the toads’ habitat, which resulted in a 90% reduction in the flow of water.

“In our lifetime, we have gone from having to worry about a relatively small number of highly threatened species to the collapse of entire ecosystems,” observed Professor Jonathan Baillie, director of conservation programmes at the Zoological Society of London (ZSL).

“At what point will society truly respond to this growing crisis?”

The updated data from the 2009 Red List is being made publicly available on the IUCN website on Tuesday.

Source: Philippine Institute for Volcanology and Seismology