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GU
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SOUTHERN Italy’s active volcanoes
mean that living in the region is not
for the risk-averse. Less well known,
though, is the threat from the sea.
Tsunamis occur around once a
century in the Mediterranean Sea.
In 1908, a magnitude 7 earthquake
created a tsunami that almost
destroyed the Italian cities of
Messina and Reggio Calabria.
Stefano Lorito of the National
Institute of Geophysics and
Vulcanology in Rome and his team
used historical data to estimate
earthquake risk for three different
fault zones in the Mediterranean
region, and simulated the tsunami
that would result from such a quake.
(Journal of Geophysical Research,
DOI: 10.1029/2007JB004943).
They found that a major rumble
in the quake-prone region off the
coast of Greece would trigger a
tsunami 5 metres high, which
would strike the south-east coasts
of Sicily and mainland Italy within
an hour. Meanwhile, waves as high
as 1.5 metres could be triggered by
earthquakes off north Africa and in
the Tyrrhenian Sea, north of Sicily.
Other countries could also be
vulnerable. “A comparable or even
greater threat exists for the coasts
of Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and
Greece,” says Lorito.
Mediterranean
tsunami coming?
JUST like twins recognising and
approaching each other through
a crowd at a party, identical
stretches of double-stranded
DNA will seek each other out.
Although we know that
single complementary strands
of DNA attract each other, such
attraction was unheard of in
zipped-up, double-stranded
DNA, which must “unzip”
itself before it can be copied
or repaired. The finding could
suggest a preparatory stage
in the mechanism by which
DNA repairs itself.
Alexei Kornyshev of Imperial
College London and his team
mixed together two distinct
variants of double-stranded DNA
in water. One was labelled with a
fluorescent green marker and the
other red. The team found that
over time the reds and greens
congregated with their own kind
(The Journal of Physical Chemistry
B, DOI: 10.1021/jp7112297).
The researchers think the
recognition results from
complementary electrostatic
attractions between identical
regions of the double helix. The
pairing balances negative charges
in the sugar “backbone” of one
helix exactly with positive charges
within the central “groove” of
the other helix. “Therefore, you’d
get a symmetry,” says Kornyshev.
And the longer the strand, the
stronger the attraction.
Kornyshev says the
phenomenon might explain
how identical DNA strands line
themselves up ready for repairs,
and for the shuffling that takes
place when genes from each
parent are mixed up during the
formation of eggs and sperm.
When it comes to double-stranded DNA, identicals attract
AN INTERNAL clock hidden in your skin
cells could reveal whether your body
clock is out of sync with your lifestyle.
Steven Brown of the University
of Zurich in Switzerland and his
colleagues knew that the brain’s
circadian clock causes a gene called
Bmal1 to be more active in peripheral
cells during the daytime. To find out
how closely matched this activity
was, they used a virus to equip skin
cells from 11 early-rising “larks” and
17 late-rising “owls” with a firefly
gene that would produce a visible
glow whenever Bmal1 was active.
“The result is light coming out of the
cell in a 24-hour rhythm,” says Brown.
By monitoring times when the
cells glowed, they demonstrated
that skin cells showed the same
sleep-wake patterns as those reported
in questionnaires by at least half the
donors. But there were discrepancies
too – most notably in three
individuals with seasonal affective
disorder, suggesting that skin biopsies
might be useful for diagnosing sleep
and circadian disorders (Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences,
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0707772105).
“Knowing that skin clocks ‘tick’
in the same way as brain clocks
provides a nice tool to address
whether a person is likely to be
an early or late riser,” says Russell
Foster, a circadian rhythm specialist
at the University of Oxford. “It’s
remarkable that measures from the
skin allow predictions of brain-
driven behaviour.”
Skin tells the time of your body clock
COULD sterilising plastic bottles in hot
water do more harm than good? Scott
Belcher and his colleagues at the
University of Cincinnati in Ohio have
found that polycarbonate plastic
bottles release up to 55 times more
bisphenol A (BPA) after they’ve been
washed in boiling water.
BPA is found in many plastic food
and drink containers and has been
linked to breast and prostate cancer.
Because they are often reused, Belcher
wanted to test whether old containers
leached BPA into their contents faster
than new ones. His team filled new
and used polycarbonate plastic bottles
with water and kept them at room
temperature for a week. They found
that the rate of BPA release into the
water by new and used bottles was
an average of 0.49 nanograms an hour.
But when the team mimicked
sterilisation by filling the bottles with
boiling water and leaving them to cool,
they found that the average rate of
BPA release jumped to 18.67 nanograms
per hour. This continued even after
the bottles had cooled and been
rinsed out (Toxicology Letters, DOI:
10.1016/j.toxlet.2007.11.001).
While the levels of released BPA
fall within safe limits as currently
defined by the European Food Safety
Authority, Belcher suggests switching
to bottles made of high-density
polyethylene as a precaution.
Be careful which bottles you sterilise
www.newscientist.com 2 February 2008 | NewScientist | 15
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