@ Johns Hopkins University
Posts tagged halobacterium
“What Happens When You Stick Your Head Into a Particle Accelerator”
Feb 22nd
From Today I Found Out:
The beam itself measured 2000 gray as it entered Bugorski’s skull and about 3000 gray when it exited on the other side. A “gray” is an SI unit of energy absorbed from ionizing radiation. One gray is equal to the absorption of one joule of radiation energy by one kilogram of matter. An example where this is commonly used is in X-rays. For reference, absorption of over 5 grays at any time usually leads to death within 14 days. However, no one before had ever experienced radiation in the form of a proton beam moving at about the speed of light.
I’m posting this out because it immediately made me think of the interview we did with Dr. DiRuggiero for last week’s 365 Days of Astronomy podcast:
The organism we’re working on at the moment is Halobacterium. They’re fairly resistant to radiation. We measure the resistance to radiation as the D10, which corresponds to the radiation doses for which 10% of a population survive. So the D10 of the organism, that is called the wild type. The regular organism is five kilo Gray—that’s measured radioactivity—which is pretty high. This is 5000 Gray, and humans are killed by five Gray. Those survive 5000 Gray; humans died with five Grays.
Interview now available on 365 Days of Astronomy site
Feb 12th
The abridged version of the interview with Dr. Jocelyne DiRuggiero is now available on the 365 Days of Astronomy website!
Interview with Dr. Jocelyne DiRuggiero
Feb 11th
As mentioned on the email list, this year we’re attempting to do a little astrobiology public outreach and education. Our first series of efforts are interviews with faculty and researchers here at Johns Hopkins who are actively involved in astrobiology-related research. These interviews will be featured on the once-a-day podcast site, 365 Days Of Astronomy. We’ve done two interviews so far, and the first one goes live on that site tomorrow. It’s an abridged, 12-minute version of our discussion with Dr. Jocelyne DiRuggiero of the Biology department about her research with halobacterium and hyperthermophiles, extremophiles that live in high salt and high temperature regions, respectively. Below I’m attaching the full, 24-minute interview as well as the transcript.
Let us know, either through the comments section below or on the email list, if you’re interested in helping out by suggesting someone to interview, being interviewed yourself, or anything else you’re interested in trying (it’d be nice if we had a theme song….). Our next interview is with Dr. Naomi Levin of the Earth & Planetary Science department. It should be going up in the next month and will be featured on 365 Days Of Astronomy in April.
Now, on with the podcast!
Studying extremophiles on Earth to understand life in space
With the Kepler Mission’s discovery of 4 potential Earth-sized planets orbiting in their host star’s habitability zones, the main question about life is no longer “Is there life out there somewhere?” Instead we must ask, “Exactly what sort of life could exist on these strange planets?” For today’s 365 Days Of Astronomy podcast, the JHU Astrobiology Forum’s Adam Fuller begin answering this question by speaking with Dr. Jocelyne DiRuggiero, an associate research professor in the Biology department at Johns Hopkins University, about her research with microorganisms here on Earth that live in environments so hellacious, they could easily be thought to be from another world.