Scientists focus on another Sandy loss _ lab mice

NEW YORK (AP) — It was one of the most dramatic stories from Superstorm Sandy: more than 300 patients including tiny babies safely removed from a flooded New York hospital that lost power. But in a research building at the complex, where thousands of lab mice were kept, the story had a sadder ending.

A storm surge into the basement swamped some 7,000 cages of mice used for studying cancer, diabetes, brain development and other health issues. Each cage held up to five of the little rodents, and even four months later, nobody knows exactly how many perished.

Now, about 50 scientists at the NYU Langone Medical Center are going through the slow process of replacing them. What they lost in a few minutes one terrible night in October will take more than a year to recover, at a cost of tens of millions of dollars.

That's because, for the most part, they can't simply buy the mice off the shelf. Most were tailor-made, engineered to carry specific genetic mutations to mimic human diseases and conditions like autism. Some breeds can be found only in a few labs worldwide. Others were too new to have been shared yet with researchers elsewhere and will take many months or even two years to recreate.

Besides the mice, researchers lost precious specimens and suffered damage to sensitive equipment from the blackouts and flooding from the nearby East River. The 700-bed hospital closed for almost two months; the emergency room is still shut down.

For researcher Sergei Koralov, the flooding meant the loss of about 600 mice. Gone, for example, were his animals that helped illuminate how genetic changes in white blood cells lead to lymphoma and those he used to study what triggers chronic lung inflammation in asthma. An experiment for improving lung function was also washed away.

"I was devastated," he recalls.

Koralov has contacted scientists in the U.S., Switzerland and Germany in an effort to rebuild his mouse colonies. Scientists often share mice with other labs, which comes in handy at a time like this.

But it's not as easy as just shipping mice to New York. The mice at NYU live in a super-clean environment, and those imported from other labs carry a risk of contamination. So scientists use them to create a new generation of animals that are quarantined and checked for germs before they enter their NYU home.

Not all the mice in the basement died in the flood; those in about 600 cages were rescued about a week afterward. Their handlers had put extra food in their cages just in case before the storm. But because of contamination, new generations have to be created from them, too, in sterile surroundings.

When no mice with the right genetic makeup are available, researchers have to start from scratch. Koralov works with mice that have many genetic modifications, perhaps as many as seven per mouse, and recreating such animals can require breeding over half a dozen generations.

In all, he figures it will take two years to recover the most complicated ones. But the storm has given him the chance to take a new look at his research.

"The silver lining of the whole storm, what little there is, is the fact it allows me to refocus myself," he said. Now he can "go after what is interesting to me now, not what was interesting to me two years ago."

Much of the effort to replace the mice is taking place elsewhere. The Jackson Laboratory in Bar Harbor, Maine, which distributes more than 6,000 kinds of modified mice to labs around the world, is working on at least 200 types for the New York researchers, said the lab's Stephen Linnell.

So what can be done to prepare for the next big storm?

At NYU Langone, officials will consider waterproofing strategies for one building that houses mice underground and they are working on "an aggressive evacuation plan," said Dafna Bar-Sagi, the center's vice dean for science.

A new science building is due to open in 2016, with one feature planned even before the storm: It will keep mice on the third floor.

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Malcolm Ritter can be followed at http://www.twitter.com/malcolmritter

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Finding Another Earth: How Will Scientists Confirm It Exists?

LONG BEACH, Calif. — The announcement this week that astronomers have found a potential alien world that could be the most Earth-like exoplanet yet is raising a big question: How will scientists confirm the existence of a true alien Earth?

While NASA's planet-hunting Kepler space telescope, which discovered the newfound Earth-like planet candidate KOI 172.2, is great for finding large numbers of exoplanets, it is not our best bet for characterizing an Earth twin circling a distant star, researchers say.

In order to understand what an "alien Earth" candidate really looks like, it takes a more refined approach than what Kepler can provide at the moment.

"It’s a statistical mission," Kepler deputy science team lead Natalie Batalha said at the 221st meeting of the American Astronomical Society on Tuesday (Jan. 8).

The Kepler mission is designed to find out how many possible exoplanets there could be in any given part of the galaxy. The space telescope launched in 2009 and stares unblinking at a single patch of the sky to scan for dips in light from stars, a telltale sign of an orbiting planet passing in front of the star. Kepler's observations can tell scientists where a planet is in relation to its home star, but the spacecraft has little to add about important details such as an exoplanet's climate, researchers said. [Most Earth-like Exoplanet Discovery Explained (Infographic)]

But how can scientists study those important questions that need to be answered before a planet can be deemed a true Earth twin?

Finding Earth’s twin

The Kepler mission is a starting point in the search for a true Earth-like planet, Nicolas Cowen a postdoctoral fellow in astronomy at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. told SPACE.com. "Kepler just told us how big the telescope we have to build is."

There could be more than 17 billion Earth-sized planets in the Milky Way galaxy alone, but that doesn’t mean they’re easy to research once detected. Once planets of interest are confirmed by Kepler, then other instruments can be used to investigate the specifics of the planet.

A ground-based telescope could be just the right tool for finding Earth’s twins, said Cowen. If the exoplanet in question is near enough to the Earth and in exactly the right position, researchers could aim a 10-meter (33 foot) dish toward the planet to optically observe its transit between the Earth and its home star. After researchers have measured the radius of the planet, and if a telescope can make direct observations of the planet in question, Cowen said, then it is just a matter of patience.

Cowen added that all it takes after a researcher knows the size and rotation of the planet is as much observation time as possible. Watching the way a planet rotates and taking measurements of the different colors that come in and out of view as the planet orbits its star gives researchers a sense of what might lie under the surface of the atmosphere.

Water, land and clouds reflect light in different ways, and by directly observing those reflections, astronomers like Cowen can start to see how an exoplanet might be an Earth twin.

“That’s what would happen in an ideal world,” Cowen said.

Closer than we think?

Those days of "ideal" research might not be as far off as some believe. Cowen thinks that it could only be a matter of time before astronomers are able to peer into the atmosphere of an exoplanet and see what’s happening on the surface using a ground-based telescope.

In a presentation earlier this week, astronomer Ian Crossfield suggested that it’s likely that an Earth-size planet in the “habitable zone” of an M-dwarf star — a type of star smaller and dimmer than the sun, but plentiful in the Milky Way — will be found within 31 parsecs of Earth, a relatively short distance in astronomical terms.

“This is the first meeting where any of these ideas have even brought up,” Cowen said. “It’s very exciting.”

You can follow SPACE.com staff writer Miriam Kramer on Twitter @mirikramer. Follow SPACE.com on Twitter @Spacedotcom. We're also on Facebook & Google+. 

Copyright 2013 SPACE.com, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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Lions Kill and Go Away, to Kill Again Another Day (LiveScience.com)

Lions apparently flee the scenes of their crimes, withdrawing after successful kills while other potential prey are still on high alert, researchers have found by using satellites to track some of the deadly African cats.

This research into the minds of lions sheds light on why and when large predators move on from one hunting ground to the next, a crucial decision when the stakes are survival or starvation. In turn, such insights could lead to better designs of protected areas for African lions, whose numbers have shrunk by half in 30 years.

Deciphering the strategies of predators is difficult enough when they are captive, not to mention when they are free to range far in the wild.

"Such fieldwork is time-consuming, difficult and potentially dangerous," said researcher Marion Valeix, an ecologist at the University of Oxford in England and the French National Center for Scientific Research.

Scientists have had two ideas regarding why large mammalian carnivores depart a hunting ground. In the "unsuccessful hunt" hypothesis, predators hunt everything they can and then move on. In the alternate "patch disturbance" hypothesis, hunters leave after a successful kill to give remaining prey time to lower their guard — allowing the predators to return and blindside them. [Lions Attack Humans When Full Moon Wanes]

To see which strategy lions adopted, researchers followed the movements of eight African lions wearing global positioning system collars and ranging over about 2,700 square miles (7,000 square kilometers) in Hwange National Park in Zimbabwe.

Scientists matched the whereabouts of these big cats with 164 lion kills tracked down between 2005 and 2007. They found that after 87 percent of kills, the lions traveled at least three miles (five kilometers) or more, suggesting they were departing the scenes of their crimes.

"We showed the need for these animals to rotate their hunting between several hunting grounds — for example, waterholes in the Hwange ecosystem," Valeix told LiveScience. "This has implications regarding the configuration and size of lion home range and needs to be taken into account in the design of small conservation reserves."

Most studies focusing on large carnivores have considered them and large herbivores to be rather static variables.

"The most important implication of our findings is that they make a strong case for the crucial need to consider the behavior of large carnivores and large herbivores in a dynamic framework — lions continuously adjust to the behavior of their prey, which continuously adjust to the whereabouts of their predators."

In the future, the scientists plan to study both the behavior of predator and prey at the same time. They detailed their new findings in the August issue of the journal American Naturalist.

Follow LiveScience for the latest in science news and discoveries on Twitter @livescience and on Facebook.

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