University Daily Kansan / Friday, January 15, 1988
7B
Star studies find little to support life
The Associated Press
AUSTIN, Texas — The universe may be a more lonely place than once believed because many stars thought capable of producing planets are actually unable to do so, a scientist said Wednesday.
Frederick M. Walter, a University of Colorado astronomer, said he had found that most young sunlike stars appear to lack the clouds of gas and dust thought essential for the formation of planets, the eradle of evolving life.
"This could mean that the number of solar-like stars that could develop planets is smaller than many believe." Walter said. He emphasized that this is only speculation because "nobody really knows how disks (the star clouds) collapse into planets."
Walter, in a paper presented to the American Astronomical Society, disputed the traditional belief that all sun-sized stars go through a phase when they
Stars that could be in the planet-formation stage are commonly called T Tauri stars. When the dust surrounding these objects disappears, after about 10 million years, they are called post-T Tauri stars.
are surrounded by clouds that could eventually form planets.
But Walter said that a study of the star-forming areas of the constellations Taurus, Orion and Scorpius found that many stars considered post-T Tauri stars are actually young stars that have no dust clouds. He calls them "naked T Tauri" stars.
The popular concept is that all sun-sized stars are surrounded by a dust cloud after they are formed. It's believed that over a 10-million-year period, matter in the clouds clumps together and eventually form planets orbiting the star.
The theory is that life evolves on the planets where conditions are right.
Based on this idea, theorists have said there are
billions of stars that could be the cradles of planets and life. The idea has inspired an organized search for extraterrestrial intelligent life using powerful radio transmitters, but the effort has yet to produce evidence.
Walter said he found that "naked T Tauri" stars were actually 10 times more numerous than the traditional T Tauri stars.
Larry Traffan, a University of Texas astronomy professor, said that if Walter's conclusions were correct, it would significantly reduce the possible stars where planets could form by traditional concepts.
The new star class was found when Walter analyzed X-ray data collected by satellite. He said X-ray readings and followup observations located more than 150 "naked T Tauri" stars as young as the traditional T Tauri.
"This is important because of the large number of naked T Tauri stars that are implied." Walter said.
Biologist traces life to bacteria
The Associated Press
The organism, which apparently lived at least 3.5 billion years ago, was the last ancestor shared by all of today's life forms, said James Lake, professor of molecular biology at the University of California, Los Angeles.
NEW YORK — Every living thing now on Earth descended from bacteria that probably thrived in nearboiling water and raised a stench like rotten eggs, a new study suggests.
While the organism was not the origin of life, he said, "it's as far back as we've been able to get. Everything is related to it."
"What we've been able to do is get at the very bottom of the evolutionary tree that relates all known organisms," Lake said.
His conclusions come from analyzing evolutionary changes in material found in every living cell. The effort required more than 1 million comparisons of material from different organisms.
The research, which produced a new evolutionary family tree, is reported in Thursday's issue of the British journal Nature.
Scientists debating whether ancient ancestor 'liked it hot'
"It just gives us a new picture of the deepest branches in the tree of life and how they're related to one another," said Allan Wilson, biochemistry professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who has used methods like Lake's to trace human lineage.
Lake said the ancient ancestors probably resembled today's one-celled organisms called eocytes, which live in geothermal hot springs.
Likeocytes, the organism probably lived in very hot water and got energy by processing sulfur, Lake said. That would produce hydrogen sulfide gas, giving a rotten-egg smell to the swings, he said.
The work also suggests life may have begun in similarly high temperatures, he said.
Southern California, said he suspected life began in cooler temperatures instead because at high temperatures, key materials of today's living things tend to degrade faster.
Nobody knows when the ancestor organism appeared, but it is probably at least as old as bacteria that left fossils 3.5 billion years ago, he said.
Lake said "oecyte" meant "dawn cell," reflecting the suspected primitiveness of getting energy from sulfur.
Eukaryotes include humans and other animals, typical plants and some microscopic creatures such as
Lake's proposed family tree contains a two-way split after the ancestor organism. One branch leads to modern eocytes and to the eukaryotes, which are organisms that have a nucleus as sort of a central control room for the cell.
amoebas.
The other branch leads to methanogens, organisms that get energy by processing methane, eubacteria, which are common bacteria, and halobacteria, which are found in salty environments.
To construct the tree, Lake focused on cell structures called ribosomes, which make proteins under instructions from the cell's genes. Part of a ribosome is ribonucleic acid, composed of a long string of substances called nucleotides.
All ribosomes came from a common ancestor. But as various kinds of organisms started to evolve independently, the sequence of nucleotides in their ribonucleic acid began to differ.
Lake compared sequences from 32 diverse modern organisms to look for similarities and differences that would hint at how the organisms are related.
He used a computer to make 1.4 million comparisons, analyzing four sequences each time, and concluded that the present-day necropsy was the ancestor.
Berkeley's Wilson called Lake's technique "an advance in the method of tree-building."
Man sentenced to prison for stealing oreos
SAN ANTONIO, Texas — A transient has been sentenced to three years in prison after pleading guilty to breaking into a church nursery, school and eating Oreo cookies and drinking Kool-Aid, officials said.
The Associated Press
David Deskin, 25, drew the sentence because he already was on probation for another burglary.
before church officials filed charges.
The Rev. Mike Sutton of the Pearsall Road Baptist Church, angered by repeated break-ins, told prosecutors he was unable to turn the other cheek
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Deskin was accused of breaking into the school nursery and stealing a package of Oreo cookies and a loaf of bread in August.
Bexar County Assistant District Attorney Anne Kelly said Deskin had been suspected in the other break-ins
Deskin was on trial for burglary, which could have landed him in jail for 20 years. On Tuesday, two days into the trial, he pleaded guilty to a reduced burglary charge in return for the three-year sentence.
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Type A heart patients more likely to survive
The Associated Press
The research also casts new doubt on the theory that Type A behavior puts people at higher risk of getting heart disease in the first place. That idea has already been questioned by several other researchers in recent years.
BOSTON - Men with aggressive, Type A personalities are almost twice as likely as calm people to survive heart disease, according to a study that challenges the advice that heart attack victims should slow down and relax.
1 am coming more to the opinion that Type A behavior may not have much to do with coronary heart disease in the final analysis," said Dr. David R. Raagland, who directed the latest study.
In the 1960s, a large research project called the Western Collaborative Group Study concluded that men with Type A personalities were twice as likely to suffer heart attacks, parts, the Type B's, to suffer heart attacks and heart pain called angina.
That study, based on $8_{1/2}$ years of follow-up, was the first major evidence of a link between Type A behavior and heart disease. It is still the only study of its kind to find such an association.
According to the theory, Type A's are ambitious, irritable and competitive people who are always in a hurry. Type B's are more self-secure and patient, and they do not let small aggravations bother them.
In the latest research, Ragland and Richard J. Brand, both of the University of California at Berkeley, returned to the Western Collaborative study to see what happened to the same people years later. They studied 257 men, both Type A and Type B, who were identified as having heart disease.
To their surprise, Ragland and Brand found that during the next 13
years, the Type A's were only 58 percent as likely as the Type B's to die of heart problems.
But Meyer W. Friedman, co-author of the Western Collaborative research and a leading proponent of the Type A theory, questioned the new study.
"This study is flawed," he said, because it misclassifies Type A's as Type B's. Friedman said he had changed his definition of Type A personality and now contends that virtually everyone who has a heart attack under age 65 is Type A.
Ragland's study was published in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine, along with an editorial by Joel E. Dimsale of the University of California, San Diego.
Dimsdale wrote that the new data cast a shadow over the Type A theory.
"It is clear that the simple model linking Type A behavior to coronary heart disease is no longer tenable," he said. "If there is a link, it applies only to certain persons and to certain end points of coronary heart disease."
Friedman believes he can help Type A's live longer by teaching them to overcome their aggressive tendencies. The new study contradicts this, concluding that such an effort "is not justified."
Some researchers believe that if Type A's do have more heart attacks, it is because of smoking and poor living habits that contribute to high cholesterol and blood pressure. Others say there may be a link between personality and heart disease, but hostility and anger, not competitiveness, are the key traits.
The Berkeley researchers are unsure why the Type A men were more likely to survive once they got heart disease. One theory is that the aggressive men are less likely to accept their disease and give in to it.
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