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Navel Gazing Reveals New Species

Wynne Parry
Live Science
Fri, 12 Aug 2011 14:00 UTC
Bacteria
© Bellybutton Biodiversity projectThis dish contains bacteria grown from a sample taken from someone's belly button.
Forget trekking to the Amazon; new and mysterious species await discovery much closer to home. A new project is revealing the previously unknown inhabitants of our belly buttons.

The Belly Button Biodiversity project wants to know what miniscule organisms live on us and what we can learn from them. After analyzing swabs taken from 92 participants, researchers have found at least 1,400 species of bacteria - a number they say is conservative.

"About 600 or so don't match up in obvious ways with known species, which is to say either they are new to science or we don't know them well enough," said Rob Dunn, an associate professor in the North Carolina State University biology department, and the belly button principal investigator.

"The crazy thing about these species (is) we are discovering new things that are living on people. They are right there, incredibly close to us," Dunn said.

Once the researchers have the belly-button samples, the team runs a genetic analysis to determine the species present. They also attempt to culture the microbes in petri dishes; however, this technique doesn't work for many species, because they don't like the microbe food in the dishes. In fact, scientists have no idea what many of these species eat.
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Robot

Electronic Skin Tattoo has Medical, Gaming, Spy Uses


Agence France-Presse
Thu, 11 Aug 2011 14:43 UTC
tattoo
© unknown
A hair-thin electronic patch that adheres to the skin like a temporary tattoo could transform medical sensing, computer gaming and even spy operations, according to a US study published Thursday.

The micro-electronics technology, called an epidermal electronic system (EES), was developed by an international team of researchers from the United States, China and Singapore, and is described in the journal Science.

"It's a technology that blurs the distinction between electronics and biology," said co-author John Rogers, a professor in materials science and engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

"Our goal was to develop an electronic technology that could integrate with the skin in a way that is mechanically and physiologically invisible to the user."

The patch could be used instead of bulky electrodes to monitor brain, heart and muscle tissue activity and when placed on the throat it allowed users to operate a voice-activated video game with better than 90 percent accuracy.
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Weird! Our Universe May Be a 'Multiverse,' Scientists Say

Clara Moskowitz
Live Science
Fri, 12 Aug 2011 08:38 UTC
Multiverse
© Stephen Feeney / UCLIf multiple universes exist, they may collide with each other and leave behind signs in the cosmic microwave background radiation, researchers say.

Is our universe just one of many? While the concept is bizarre, it's a real possibility, according to scientists who have devised the first test to investigate the idea.

The potential that we live in a multiverse arises from a theory called eternal inflation, which posits that shortly after the Big Bang that formed the universe, space-time expanded at different rates in different places, giving rise to bubble universes that may function with their own separate laws of physics.

The idea has seemed purely hypothetical, until now. In a new study, researchers suggest that if our universe has siblings, we may have bumped into them. Such collisions would have left lasting marks in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, the diffuse light left over from the Big Bang that pervades the universe, the researchers say.

"It brings the idea of eternal inflation and bubble collisions into the realm of testable science," said research team member Daniel Mortlock, an astrophysicist at Imperial College London. "If it's not testable, it's hard to even call it science."
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Meteor

We could be aliens after all, claims Nasa study looking at meteorites from outer space


Daily Mail
Fri, 12 Aug 2011 06:27 UTC
Image
© NASA/ESAA Hubble Space Telescope image of what is thought to be a head-on collision between two asteroids travelling five times faster than a rifle bullet. The collision created a meteorite that was found to contain amino acids
Life on Earth may have its origins in outer space, according to Nasa research.

Scientists have analysed meteorites that formed billions of years ago before falling to Earth.

The carbon-rich fragments were found to contain chemicals similar to one of the key components of DNA, the building blocks of life.

Tests show that the presence of these chemicals cannot be explained away by Earthly contamination, suggesting DNA's origins may lie in outer space.

The find comes from U.S. scientists, predominantly Nasa researchers, who analysed the chemical make-up of 12 meteorites.

Writing in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers said their find has 'far-reaching implications'.
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EcoAlert: Rare Arctic Helium-3 Discovery Provides Pristine Snapshot of Earth Billions of Years Ago


The Daily Galaxy
Thu, 11 Aug 2011 20:20 UTC
Image

Last year, Arctic scientists discovered a new window into the Earth's violent past. Geochemical evidence from volcanic rocks collected on Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic suggests that beneath it lies a region of the Earth's mantle that has largely escaped the billions of years of melting and geological churning that has affected the rest of the planet. Researchers believe the discovery offers clues to the early chemical evolution of the Earth.

The mantle "reservoir," as it is called, dates from just a few tens of million years after the Earth was first assembled from the collisions of smaller bodies. This reservoir likely represents the composition of the mantle shortly after formation of the core, but before the 4.5 billion years of crust formation and recycling modified the composition of most of the rest of Earth's interior.

"This was a key phase in the evolution of the Earth," says co-author Richard Carlson of the Carnegie Institution's Department of Terrestrial Magnetism. "It set the stage for everything that came after. Primitive mantle such as that we have identified would have been the ultimate source of all the magmas and all the different rock types we see on Earth today."
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Animal's Genetic Code Redesigned

Roland Pease
BBC
Thu, 11 Aug 2011 10:42 UTC
Nematode Worm
© BBCThe artificial protein contains a dye that glows cherry red under UV light.

Researchers say they have created the first ever animal with artificial information in its genetic code.

The technique, they say, could give biologists "atom-by-atom control" over the molecules in living organisms.

One expert the BBC spoke to agrees, saying the technique would be seized upon by "the entire biology community".

The work by a Cambridge University team, which used nematode worms, appears in the Journal of the American Chemical Society.

The worms - from the species Caenorhabditis elegans - are 1mm long, with just a thousand cells in their transparent bodies.

What makes the newly created animals different is that their genetic code has been extended to create biological molecules not known in the natural world.

Genes are the DNA blueprints that enable living organisms to construct their biological machinery, protein molecules, out of strings of simpler building blocks called amino acids.

Just 20 amino acids are used in natural living organisms, assembled in different combinations to make the tens of thousands of different proteins needed to sustain life.
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Binoculars

'Super' mouse evolves resistance to most poisons

Matt McGrath
British Broadcasting Corporation
Wed, 10 Aug 2011 16:05 UTC
Image
© UnknownThe mice acquired the trait through breeding with an Algerian species
Scientists say that some European house mice have developed resistance to the strongest poisons.

German and Spanish mice have rapidly evolved the trait by breeding with an Algerian species from which they have been separate for over a million years.

The researchers say this type of gene transfer is highly unusual and normally found in plants and bacteria.

The Current Biology report says this process could yield mice resistant to almost any form of pest control.

Warfarin is a drug widely used in medicine as an anti-coagulant to prevent the build-up of harmful blood clots. It works through inhibiting a protein called VKORC1. This protein turns on our ability to produce vitamin K, which is essential for clotting.

Too much warfarin can cause fatal bleeding, and it was this quality that led to its introduction as a pesticide against rats and mice in the 1950s.

But the creatures have been slowly evolving traits to survive warfarin, and pockets of resistant rodents have been found in many different parts of the world.
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Why Do Women Have Twins?

Sara Reardon
Science Now
Tue, 09 Aug 2011 18:03 UTC
Twins
© U.K. Medical Research Council, Gambia UnitDouble trouble. Twins are an evolutionary disadvantage for themselves and their mothers, but their siblings might be better off in the long run.

Giving birth to twins is rough, especially in rural regions. They tend to be born smaller and weaker than single babies, and their mothers have more complications during childbirth. So why did twinning evolve? A new study in Gambia finds that women who have twins also tend to have single babies that are heavier than average at birth, which makes them more likely to survive.

Since the 1950s, the U.K. Medical Research Council has been collecting data and providing medical care in Gambia. It's a highly unusual data set, says evolutionary anthropologist Rebecca Sear of Durham University in the United Kingdom, with a length and thoroughness that's "unheard of for populations without good access to medical care." Evolutionary biologist Ian Rickard of the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom wondered whether the data could shed light on the biology of twins.

Rickard and colleagues looked at the birth weights of 1889 single babies born to Gambian women over a 30-year period. Then they examined which of these mothers also had twins. Single babies born after twins were 226 grams heavier on average than single babies whose mothers had no twins, the team reports today in Biology Letters. This wasn't surprising, Rickard says, because carrying twins is thought to improve blood flow to the uterus and "prime" it for later children, allowing them to more easily receive nutrients. What did surprise the researchers was the discovery that when single babies were born before twins, the singles tended to be 134 grams heavier than average.
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Gene-Therapy Enzymes Make Unpredicted Errors

Heidi Ledford
Nature
Sun, 07 Aug 2011 15:39 UTC
Genes
© K. Eward / Science Photo LibraryZinc-finger nucleases can delete or swap genes by recognizing and cutting specific DNA sequences.

Molecular tools that alter specific sites in the genome hold huge promise for genetic research and gene therapy. But the first genome-wide surveys of where these tools, called zinc-finger nucleases, act has surprised researchers.

Two papers published today, one in Nature Biotechnology1 and one in Nature Methods,2 show that although zinc-finger nucleases are highly specific, the methods previously used to predict where they might go wrong miss the mark.

Zinc-finger nucleases are enzymes that can be designed to find specific DNA sequences in the genome and cut them out, deleting those sequences or swapping one gene for another. Clinical trials are underway in HIV patients of zinc-finger nucleases that remove a gene that allows the virus to enter immune cells.

The enzymes should be a vast improvement over conventional gene therapy, which uses viruses to insert genes into the genome almost at random. This unpredictability has caused problems: in one of the first clinical trials of gene therapy, five children treated for a rare immune disorder developed leukaemia because the viral vector embedded itself near cancer-causing genes.3

Zinc-finger nucleases are far more specific, but they still have the potential to make unwanted changes. "We need to know if they actually go where we think they will go," says David Segal, a molecular biologist at the University of California, Davis, who was not involved in the latest studies. "Nobody wants to have a zinc-finger nuclease loose in their cells that could make cancer-causing mutations."
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Tiny Gene Changes Linked to Intelligence

Charles Q. Choi
Live Science
Tue, 09 Aug 2011 07:05 UTC
genes adn
© Desconocido

When it comes to smarts, which is more important - nature or nurture, genetics or environment? Well, yes, it seems. New findings now suggest that half of all differences in intelligence between people appear rooted in the collective influence of many tiny genetic variations. That leaves plenty of influence open to other factors, the researchers said.

Past research had suggested that bright parents tend to have bright kids. However, the extent to which genetics contributes to intelligence, as opposed to other contributing factors such as environment, has been hotly debated.

No single gene variant has yet been identified as reliably linked with intelligence. Instead, scientists investigated the potential role of many common genetic variations on human intelligence.

A gene is a string of molecules known as nucleotides, much as a word is a sequence of letters. The recipe of nucleotides making up each gene is not always precise - for instance, the copy of a gene a person has might differ by one nucleotide from the copy of that same gene seen in someone else, much as the word "cat" differs from "car" by a single letter.
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