Science Simplified!

Comment

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on April 9, 2016 at 7:20am

Melanesians are the only people known to have DNA from two ancient human ‘cousins’ - i.e., they got a double dose of Stone Age DNA!
Unlike people in the rest of world, some modern-day Pacific Islanders have inherited genes from two different groups of Stone Age relatives. That’s the conclusion of new research. And the ancient DNA they carry still affects their health and well-being — in a good way.

Melanesians live in a group of islands northeast of Papua New Guinea. Their ancestors mated with Neandertals, the new data show. They also mated with mysterious Neandertal relatives, known as Denisovans.

Population geneticist Benjamin Vernot and his colleagues made the discovery. At the time, Vernot was working at the University of Washington in Seattle. His group published its findings online March 17 in Science.

The new study looked at DNA that both parents pass to their children. (Other DNA is typically passed down only by moms.) As earlier studies had shown, non-African people have a little bit of Neandertal DNA.

This includes the Melanesians. On average, they inherited 1.5 to 4 percent of their DNA from Neandertals. But Melanesians have DNA from Denisovans too. This makes up 1.9 to 3.4 percent of their DNA, the new study finds. (Today’s Africans have little to no Neandertal or Denisovan DNA.)

In modern Melanesians, the bits of Neandertal and Denisovan DNA include genes involved in metabolism and immunity. That means mating with other hominids — other species of human ancestors — may have helped ancient humans thrive, the scientists say.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on April 8, 2016 at 8:52am

Stop wasting food to manage climate change to good levels - scientists

Reducing food waste around the world would help curb emissions of planet-warming gases, lessening some of the impacts of climate change such as more extreme weather and rising seas, scientists said on 7th April, 2016.
Up to 14 percent of emissions from agriculture in 2050 could be avoided by managing food use and distribution better, according to a new study from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK).
"Agriculture is a major driver of climate change, accounting for more than 20 percent of overall global greenhouse gas emissions in 2010".
"Avoiding food loss and waste would therefore avoid unnecessary greenhouse gas emissions and help mitigate climate change."
Between 30 and 40 percent of food produced around the world is never eaten, because it is spoiled after harvest and during transportation, or thrown away by shops and consumers.
The share of food wasted is expected to increase drastically if emerging economies like China and India adopt Western food habits, including a shift to eating more meat, the researchers warned.
Richer countries tend to consume more food than is healthy or simply waste it, they noted.

Food loss and waste hurts people, costs money and harms the planet. Cutting (it) is a no-brainer, according to these scientists.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on April 7, 2016 at 7:31am

New state of matter detected in a two-dimensional material

A team of quantum physicists has discovered a mysterious new state of matter in a two-dimensional material. Scientists are calling the state "quantum spin liquid."

The novel state was predicted 40 years ago. Now, researchers have direct evidence.

Quantum spin liquid is characterized by the breaking apart of electrons. The electron fragments are called Majorana fermions. While observing particle behavior inside a graphene-like 2D material, scientists at the University of Cambridge recorded the signatures of these fractional particles.

What they saw matched the predictions of theoretical models for a quantum spin liquid.

The mysterious state explains anomalies inside magnetic materials. Electrons in magnetic materials each behave like miniature bar magnets. As a material is cooled, the electrons each line up in accordance with magnetic north -- all pointing the same direction.

This doesn't happen in magnetic materials boasting quantum spin liquid, where electrons refuse to align. Instead, their quantum fluctuations result in a soup of entangled electrons.
This is a new addition to a short list of known quantum states of matter.
http://www.nature.com/nmat/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nmat4604.html

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on April 6, 2016 at 6:25am

How scientists can reduce their carbon footprint
Cutting down on long-distance air travel is the best way to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases by the scientific community.
http://elifesciences.org/content/5/e15928v1?utm_source=content_aler...

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on April 5, 2016 at 6:19am

Somebody asked this Q...Would scientists go off into panic if something unusual happens like stars alongside everything else except the Sun mysteriously vanished without reason?
A: On the contrary, scientists would be the last ones to panic, because they would have something to do. Which would be to grab every appropriate instrument they could find, and science the hell out of the problem while everybody else fan around panicking.
in general scientists would not see this as a panic event. There's a tendency for scientists to ignore personal risk when faced with mystery, and this would be a large mystery. The phenomenun is similar to that of photographers faced with disasters or riots; they act as though the camera makes them immune to whatever is on the other side of the lens.
Scientists would probably be one of the few NOT going into a panic.

Most people would be like "What the hell is going on? It's the apocalypse repent your sins satan is upon us ahhrghhhg!"

A scientists would be like "Whoa, that's interesting. Let's try to figure out what just happened!"
Not all of them. A good number will be busy trying to take measurements of the darkness surrounding us and figure out what is causing it. I myself can already think of several hypotheses for explaining the phenomenon you described.

Then they would use their data to figure out if this darkness is dangerous to us, and what we can do to protect ourselves from it, or how we can use it to our benefit. Meanwhile they will continue to study it and collect more data. Eventually they will be able to make pretty good predictions about what the darkness will do in the next few years, or whether it will stay around or go away.

Good scientists don't have the time to freak out and panic. There's always something better to do or think about.

On the other hand, what would superstitious people do?

It's a rhetorical question, I don't really need to know.
No, it could have a very simple reason.

It could be something like a nebula we are passing through that blotted the Stars out and was charged and the charge damaged the spacecraft and satellites.

Until we found out what exactly happened most scientists would be busy trying to understand it and would not make any announcements.

Most scientists, however not creationists or ID supporters who would probably reinterpret one of the biblical prophecies of signs for Armageddon. It states the stars will fall to Earth. Obviously that is impossible but the ignorant power crazed priests were not aware that stars are Suns (they thought they were decorations or lights in the 'Dome of the sky' that is supposed to separate water on Earth and water above the Earth letting God make rain (they didn't know about evaporation and condensation), it's why they are called stars and not Suns by the general population.

Other possibilities:
A super dense concentration of dark matter.
If the sun was also gone, a possible effect on the upper atmosphere that made it opaque (not see through).
I don't think there would be "panic" exactly - but you can bet that a lot of scientists would be dropping everything to investigate it. Scientists love nothing more than to find things that don't fit with current theory because it's an opportunity to learn more and fix whatever problem that theory has. So generally, "excitement" would probably be the first emotion.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on April 5, 2016 at 5:34am

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on April 1, 2016 at 8:09am

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on March 30, 2016 at 9:35am

Scientists have built a bacterium that contains the minimal genetic ingredients needed for free living.

This bacterium’s entire set of genetic blueprints, its genome, consists of only 473 genes, including 149 whose precise biological function is unknown, researchers report in the March 25 Science.

The newly-created bacterium contains a minimalist version of the genome of Mycoplasma mycoides. Mycoplasma already have some of the smallest known genomes. M. mycoides used in the experiments started with 901 genes. In comparison, other bacteria, including E. coli, may have 4,000 to 5,000 genes. Humans have more than 22,000 genes, although not all are necessary.

In 2010, researchers at the J. Craig Venter Institute in La Jolla, Calif., replicated the entire genome of M. mycoides and popped it into a cell of a different species, Mycoplasma capricolum, creating what some people called the first synthetic organism. The new work strips the M. mycoides genome down to its essential elements before transplanting it to the M. capricolum shell, producing a minimal bacteria dubbed syn3.0.

Researchers hope syn3.0’s uncluttered genome will teach them more about the basics of biology. Such minimal genome bacteria also may be chassis on which to build custom-made microbes for producing drugs or chemicals.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on March 30, 2016 at 7:11am

South Asians share ancestry with a mysterious population...
Many bloodlines around the world, particularly of South Asian descent, may actually be a bit more Denisovan- a mysterious population of hominids.
Denisovans lived around the same time as the Neanderthals - scientists have revealed. The team from Harvard Medical School and University of California-Los Angeles (UCLA) has created a world map and also used comparative genomics to make predictions about where Denisovan and Neanderthal genes may be impacting modern human biology. The analysis also proposes that modern humans interbred with Denisovans about 100 generations after their trysts with the Neanderthals.
Denisovan genes can potentially be linked to a more subtle sense of smell in Papua New Guineans and high-altitude adoptions in Tibetans.
Meanwhile, Neanderthal genes found in people around the world most likely contribute to tougher skin and hair. Most non-Africans possess at least a little bit Neanderthal DNA.
There was also negative selection to systematically remove ancestry that may have been problematic from modern humans. We can document this removal over the 40,000 years since these admixtures occurred.
They found evidence that both Denisovan and Neanderthal ancestry has been lost from the X chromosome as well as genes expressed in the male testes.
The team theorises that this has contributed to reduced fertility in males, which is commonly observed in other hybrids between two highly divergent groups of the same species.
The researchers collected their data by comparing known Neanderthal and Denisovan gene sequences across more than 250 genomes from 120 non-African populations publicly available through the Simons Genome Diversity Project.
The new map of archaic ancestry was published in the journal Current Biology.

Comment by Dr. Krishna Kumari Challa on March 24, 2016 at 10:15am

A Korean research team has engineered gut bacteria to create non-natural polymers in a biorefinery—allowing various plastics to be made in an environmentally-friendly and sustainable manner. The research was published in Nature Biotechnology.
biorefineries which transform non-edible biomass into fuel, heat, power, chemicals and materials have received a great deal of attention as a sustainable alternative to decreasing the reliance on fossil fuels. Renewable non-food biomass could potentially replace petrochemical raw materials to produce energy sources, useful chemicals, or a vast array of petroleum-based end products such as plastics, lubricants, paints, fertilizers and vitamin capsules. In the present study, a team headed by Distinguished Professor Lee Sang Yup of the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) adopted a systems metabolic engineering approach to develop a microorganism that can produce various non-natural polymers which have biomedical applications. According to the researchers, this approach is the first successful example of biological production of poly(lactate-co-glycolate) (PLGA) and several novel copolymers from renewable biomass by one-step direct fermentation of metabolically engineered Escherichia coli (E. coli) bacteria. The researchers drew inspiration from the biosynthesis process for polyhydroxyalkanoates, biologically-derived polyesters produced in nature by the bacterial fermentation of sugar or lipid. From there, they designed a metabolic pathway for the biosynthesis of PLGA through microbial fermentation directly from carbohydrates in E. coli strains. PLGA is a biodegradable, biocompatible and non-toxic polymer. PLGA has been widely used in biomedical and therapeutic applications such as surgical sutures, prosthetic devices, drug delivery, and tissue engineering. In order to produce PLGA by microbial fermentation directly from carbohydrates, the team incorporated external and engineered enzymes as catalysts to co-polymerize PLGA while establishing a few additional metabolic pathways for the biosynthesis to produce a range of different non-natural polymers. This bio-based synthetic process for PLGA and other polymers could substitute for existing complicated chemical production methods. Lee and his team has also managed to produce a variety of PLGA copolymers with different monomer compositions such as the US Food and Drug Administration-approved monomers 3-hydroxyburate, 4-hydroxyburate, and 6-hydroxyhexanoate. Newly applied bioplastics such as 5-hydroxyvalerate and 2-hydroxyisovalerate were also made.http://www.nature.com/nbt/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nbt.3485.html

• ‹ Previous
• 1
• …
• 652
• 653
• 654
• 655
• 656
• …
• 849
• Next ›
• Page