Posted: 3/26/2016
Sorry, I did not have the time to annotate as I usually do!
- Researchers take small step toward silicon-based life (“Researchers reported … that they have evolved a bacterial enzyme that efficiently incorporates silicon into simple hydrocarbons—a first for life. … cytochrome c’s silicon-adding ability is so feeble that it’s probably just a byproduct of the enzyme’s function—not even close to its primary role. To try to beef it up, the team incubated the bacteria with silicon and carbon compounds and selected the organisms that produced the most hydrocarbons that incorporated silicon. After only three rounds of this artificial selection, the enzymes had evolved to churn out silicon-containing hydrocarbons 2000 times as readily as natural cytochrome c.”)
- Voyage into darkness (“Marine biologists venturing into the polar night—the four winter months of the year when the Arctic sees no sunlight—are finding wondrous discoveries and rewriting the biological textbooks. Arctic dogma has held that the region is mostly dead in the winter, with organisms either dormant or migrated out of the polar region. But in recent journeys scientists have discovered zooplankton in all phases of reproduction, cod actively hunting for zooplankton, and six species of birds actively foraging, ... “)
- Hubble unveils monster stars (“The star cluster R136 is already home to the largest known star in the universe, a giant more than 250 times the mass of the sun. Now, astronomers observing the cluster in ultraviolet light using the Hubble Space Telescope have found a total of nine stars with masses of more than 100 suns, the largest collection of very massive stars found to date. This pack of heavyweights … some 170,000 light-years from Earth—burns bright and fast, collectively outshining the sun 30 million times and ejecting every month material equivalent to the mass of Earth. But how they form is a mystery—the current theory of star formation cannot explain how such behemoths could come together from the collapse of a cloud of gas and dust. ”)
- Water molecules break bonds through quantum tunneling (Water is a miracle and still unknown to man! " ... And within the smallest possible 3D droplet of water, which consists of just six molecules, those molecules can rearrange themselves not just one at a time, but in sets of two, ... Two molecules can simultaneously break their hydrogen bonds with their neighbors and rotate off one another like gears. The reconfiguration takes place through a subtle effect called quantum tunneling ...")
- Lifting molecular brake may have kept primeval cells running (Further progress in the origin of life science! “Szostak’s team therefore enclosed a ribozyme and several other short RNA oligonucleotide strands in fatty acid vesicles. ‘Vesicles containing short RNAs and ribozyme exhibited approximately constant enzyme activity as a function of vesicle volume as the vesicle grew,’ Engelhart says. ‘Without the short RNAs, they exhibited about a 90% drop in specific activity.’”)
- Most eccentric planet ever known flashes astronomers with reflected light (Alien contact maybe? (just kidding) “HD 20782 has the most eccentric orbit known, measured at an eccentricity of .96. This means that the planet moves in a nearly flattened ellipse, traveling a long path far from its star and then making a fast and furious slingshot around the star at its closest approach. … to detect a signal of reflected light from the planet known as HD 20782—a "flash" of starlight bouncing off the eccentric planet's atmosphere as it made its closest orbital approach to its star”)
- 400,000-year-old fossils from Spain provide earliest genetic evidence of Neandertals (“The nuclear DNA sequences recovered from two specimens secured in this way show that they belong to the Neandertal evolutionary lineage and are more closely related to Neandertals than to Denisovans. This finding indicates that the population divergence between Denisovans and Neandertals had already occurred by 430,000 years ago when the Sima de los Huesos hominins lived. According to Svante Pääbo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology "these results provide important anchor points in the timeline of human evolution. They are consistent with a rather early divergence of 550,000 to 750,000 years ago of the modern human lineage from archaic humans".”
- Bacterial resistance to copper in the making for thousands of years (“Under the pressure of "copper stress," bacteria have traded DNA that enabled some to outlive the threat, said Slot, who specializes in fungal evolutionary genomics. And over centuries, the genes that lead to copper resistance have bonded, forging an especially tough opponent for the heavy metal, a cluster scientists call the "copper homeostasis and silver resistance island," or CHASRI.”)
- http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/peculiar-pattern-found-in-random-prime-numbers (What took them so long to discover this?)
- http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-obesity-may-impair-memory/ and http://hms.harvard.edu/news/obesity-cancer-connection (Two articles related too obesity.)
- Pocket DNA sequencers make real-time diagnostics a reality (“These so-called nanopore sequencers, produced so far by a single company, have suffered from poor accuracy. But this month, researchers reported that the instruments passed an important field test, conducting on-the-spot sequencing of viruses isolated from patients during last year's Ebola epidemic in West Africa. In the lab, meanwhile, other researchers are tweaking sample preparation and data analysis to boost the devices' accuracy and speed. Real-time analyses of pathogens and the rest of life are within reach, ”)
- Scientists Identify a Memory Suppressor that May Play a Role in Autism (“Next, Davis and his colleagues tried to uncover which genes miR-980 [microRNA] regulates, identifying 95 specific targets that might fit that bill. Intriguingly, they found that miR-980 targets and inhibits a gene known as A2bp1. This gene previously had been shown to be involved in susceptibility to autism [and epilepsy]. In addition, it works to promote memory.”)
- These Glass Discs Can Store Data for Billions of Years “Five-dimensional” data discs could be the future of information storage (“The idea for this method, known as “five-dimensional storage,” has floated around for a few years since scientists at the United Kingdom’s University of Southampton first demonstrated it in a 2013 paper. Back then, they were only able to code a single 300 kilobyte text file into a glass disc. Three years later, the same scientists say that they believe they have refined the technique to the point where they can code about 360 terabytes of data onto a single disc. … using a femtosecond laser, the scientists engrave the data into the glass disc’s structure. … into a series of miniscule dots. When the disc is read later, a laser interprets the information based off of the three-dimensional position of the dot in the disc, as well as its size and orientation - hence the name five-dimensional storage.”)
- Five-dimensional black hole could 'break' general relativity (“The researchers, from the University of Cambridge and Queen Mary University of London, have successfully simulated a black hole shaped like a very thin ring, which gives rise to a series of 'bulges' connected by strings that become thinner over time. These strings eventually become so thin that they pinch off into a series of miniature black holes, similar to how a thin stream of water from a tap breaks up into droplets. Ring-shaped black holes were 'discovered' by theoretical physicists in 2002, but this is the first time that their dynamics have been successfully simulated using supercomputers.”)
- Hyperactive magnetic field may have led to one of Earth’s major extinctions (“Rapid reversals of Earth’s magnetic field 550 million years ago destroyed a large part of the ozone layer and let in a flood of ultraviolet radiation, devastating the unusual creatures of the so-called Ediacaran Period and triggering an evolutionary flight from light that led to the Cambrian explosion of animal groups.”)
