Science & TechnologyS


Ice Cube

Remains of tiny, strange creatures discovered in 'lost' Antarctic lake

Aylin Woodward
Business Insider
Sun, 20 Jan 2019 00:00 UTC
Salsa Team Antarctica
© SALSA Antarctica/FacebookThe SALSA Drill Team uses McMurdo Station to prepare for its work drilling into Mercer Subglacial Lake.
Lake Mercer, a subglacial lake deep below the Antarctic Ice, sat untouched by humans for millennia - until now. Scientists accidentally discovered the lake in 2007, when they were examining satellite imagery of Antarctica's ice sheet. Then on December 26, 2018, they finally reached it.

To explore the 50-foot-deep subglacial lake, researchers from a project called SALSA (Subglacial Antarctic Lakes Scientific Access) had to bore a tiny hole nearly 1 kilometer into the ice. They did this using a drill with a pencil-sized nozzle that sprays heated water. Once the hole was made, they then used a corer tool to pull samples back to the surface.

The team anticipated finding microbial lifeforms in those samples - and they did - but they were surprised by what else was lurking in the mud.

The samples also contained carcasses of tiny crustaceans (creatures smaller than a poppy seed) and the body of a tardigrade, a type of eight-legged invertebrate known for its ability to withstand the very harshest conditions.

A surprise in the mud

The SALSA team wound up extracting a 5.5-foot-long core (the longest ever from a subglacial lake) along with "six out of six 'perfect' sediment cores."
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Info

Another blow to 'junk' DNA theory: Global function found for introns in budding yeast

Jonathan M.
Evolution News
Mon, 21 Jan 2019 17:52 UTC
Saccharomyces cerevisiae
© Rainis Venta [CC BY-SA 3.0] / Wikimedia CommonsSaccharomyces cerevisiae
Introns are segments of genes, found in eukaryotes, that do not code for proteins. Introns are removed from the pre-mRNA transcript by a protein complex called a spliceosome, and the protein-coding regions (called exons) are pasted together by another enzyme, RNA ligase.

Introns were first identified in 1977 by the lab of Richard Roberts and Phil Sharp (Chow et al., 1977; Berk and Sharp, 1977; Berget and Sharp, 1977). The introns of higher eukaryotes can often be very long indeed - in many cases spanning hundreds of thousands or even millions of bases. Lower eukaryotes (for example, yeast) tend to have shorter and fewer introns. While they were once thought to be junk - genetic debris left over from millions of years of evolution - more recent evidence has revealed many important functions for these non-coding regions of genes.

For example, it has been established that introns contain codes involved in the regulation of alternative splicing (e.g. Kabat et al., 2006). It has also been shown that the length of introns (and, consequently, the time taken to transcribe them) can contribute to timing mechanisms during development (Swinburne and Silver, 2010). Introns can also encode RNA molecules such as microRNAs (which are required for the expression of mRNAs during development) and small nucleolar RNAs (which play an important role in the processing of ribosomal RNAs) (e.g., Qi et al., 2010; Kiss and Filipowicz, 1995). Plenty of other functions of intronic sequences could be discussed.
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Saturn

Saturn acquired its rings relatively recently shows new data from NASA's Cassini


NASA
Sun, 20 Jan 2019 19:19 UTC
Saturn
© NASA/JPL-CaltechAn artist's concept of the Cassini orbiter crossing Saturn's ring plane. New measurements of the rings' mass give scientists the best answer yet to the question of their age.
The rings of Saturn may be iconic, but there was a time when the majestic gas giant existed without its distinctive halo. In fact, the rings may have formed much later than the planet itself, according to a new analysis of gravity science data from NASA's Cassini spacecraft.

The findings indicate that Saturn's rings formed between 10 million and 100 million years ago. From our planet's perspective, that means Saturn's rings may have formed during the age of dinosaurs.

The conclusions of the research - gleaned from measurements collected during the final, ultra-close orbits Cassini performed in 2017 as the spacecraft neared the end of its mission - are the best answer yet to a longstanding question in solar system science. The findings were published online Jan. 17 in Science.

Comment: See also:

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Pi

Eugene Wigner's scientific treason: The connection between physics and math is a miracle


Uncommon Descent
Sun, 20 Jan 2019 16:37 UTC
eugene wigner
Eugene Wigner (1902-1995) won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1963 but he was more famous for something else, an essay published in 1960 called 'The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences' where he said things like:
It is difficult to avoid the impression that a miracle confronts us here, quite comparable in its striking nature to the miracle that the human mind can string a thousand arguments together without getting itself into contradictions, or to the two miracles of the existence of laws of nature and of the human mind's capacity to divine them...

The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve. We should be grateful for it and hope that it will remain valid in future research and that it will extend, for better or for worse, to our pleasure, even though perhaps also to our bafflement, to wide branches of learning...
Whoa! What happened to the pre-human of evolutionary psychology, who spread his selfish genes by knowing arithmetic the way a hog knows truffles?

Wigner's essay was viewed as a sort of "treason" against science, meaning that his thinking did not lead in a naturalist (nature is all there is) direction. Naturalism is often called "materialism."


Comment: Except that both materialists and religionists forget there's a third option: non-materialistic naturalism.

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Monkey Wrench

Scientists want to use CRISPR to make one spicy tomato

Melissa Locker
Fast Company
Tue, 08 Jan 2019 18:00 UTC
tomatoes
© Trends in Plant Science
In the future, making salsa could involve simply forking a spicy tomato with a tortilla chip.

Some presumably spaghetti-al'arrabiata-loving scientists have realized that CRISPR can be used to make spicy tomatoes by using the gene-editing technology to turn on nascent spicy genes within the tomatoes themselves.

As you may recall from high school biology-or from the bottle of Tabasco that you dumped in your Bloody Mary-what gives peppers their spiciness are molecules called capsaicinoids, which can be found in arthritis creams, pepper spray, and, of course, jalapeño peppers. Peppers are the only plants that naturally produce those spicy molecules, but peppers apparently take a lot of work to cultivate.

Comment: Read more about CRISPR:

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Binoculars

Cross-border bridge connecting Russia & China will be completed in 2020


RT
Sat, 19 Jan 2019 13:39 UTC
Amur River
© Sputnik / Igor OnuchinAmur River
The construction of a long-awaited bridge across the Amur River, aimed at connecting Russia's Far East city of Blagoveshchensk with the northeastern Chinese city of Heihe, will be completed next year.

The bridge will be ready for traffic this year, according to the head of Amur Region, Vasily Orlov. He told journalists that construction works are on schedule, with a temporary border checkpoint to be launched soon. A permanent checkpoint will start working in summer 2020, Orlov said.

Construction of the cross-border bridge officially started in 2016, following 28 years of negotiations between Russia and China. The new bridge and its corresponding infrastructure will cost more than $300 million and will be 19.9km long. Some 6.5km of the bridge and road junctions will lie in China, and the remaining 13.5km in Russia, according to China's CNS agency. The length of the main suspension bridge will be roughly 1,300 meters and its width 14.5 meters.
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Moon

Super blood wolf moon: A total lunar eclipse meets a supermoon this Sunday

Marcia Dunn
Associated Press
Fri, 18 Jan 2019 00:00 UTC
lunar eclipse
© Peter Hartenfelser/Global Look PressLunar eclipse
Here comes a total lunar eclipse and supermoon, all wrapped into one.

The moon, Earth and sun will line up this weekend for the only total lunar eclipse this year and next. At the same time, the moon will be ever so closer to Earth and appear slightly bigger and brighter than usual - a supermoon.

"This one is particularly good," said Rice University astrophysicist Patrick Hartigan. "It not only is a supermoon and it's a total eclipse, but the total eclipse also lasts pretty long. It's about an hour."

The whole eclipse starts Sunday night or early Monday, depending on location , and will take about three hours.

It begins with the partial phase around 10:34 p.m. EST Sunday. That's when Earth's shadow will begin to nip at the moon. Totality - when Earth's shadow completely blankets the moon - will last 62 minutes, beginning at 11:41 p.m. EST Sunday.

Comment: See also: Double feature: Lunar eclipse will occur simultaneously to a supermoon this month

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Brain

How we can now rapidly image entire brains at nanoscale resolution


HHMI
Thu, 17 Jan 2019 13:33 UTC
A powerful new technique combines expansion microscopy with lattice light-sheet microscopy for nanoscale imaging of fly and mouse neuronal circuits and their molecular constituents that's roughly 1,000 times faster than other methods.

dendritic spines
© Gao et al./ Science 2019A forest of dendritic spines protrudes from the branches of neurons in the mouse cortex.
Eric Betzig didn't expect the experiment to work.

Two scientists, Ruixuan Gao and Shoh Asano, wanted to use his team's microscope on brain samples expanded to four times their usual size - blown up like balloons. The duo, part of Ed Boyden's lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), uses a chemical technique to make small specimens bigger so scientists can more easily see molecular details.

Their technique, called expansion microscopy, worked well on single cells or thin tissue sections imaged in conventional light microscopes, but Boyden's team wanted to image vastly larger chunks of tissue. They wanted to see complete neural circuits spanning millimeters or more. The scientists needed a microscope that was high-speed, high resolution, and relatively gentle - something that didn't destroy a sample before they could finish imaging it.

So, they turned to Betzig. His team at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute's Janelia Research Campus had used their lattice light-sheet microscope to image the rapid subcellular dynamics of sensitive living cells in 3-D. Combining the two microscopy techniques could potentially offer rapid, detailed images of wide swaths of brain tissue.
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Comet 2

Earth may be in the middle of a giant asteroid spike

Brandon Specktor
Live Science
Thu, 17 Jan 2019 17:08 UTC
Impact Craters on the Moon
© Dr. A Parker/Southwest Research Institute
Impact craters on the moon reveal that the number of asteroid impacts increased dramatically over the last 300 million years. Here, a map of all the impact craters larger than 6 miles (10 kilometers) in diameter and younger than 1 billion years old.
Like a motorcycle windshield splattering bugs on the highway, Earth's atmosphere is constantly deflecting tiny bits of extraterrestrial rock, dust and other space garbage that get in the way of our planet's 67,000-mph (107,000 km/h) joyride. Occasionally, that debris breaks through - as it did 66 million years ago, when an asteroid the size of Manhattan crashed into the Gulf of Mexico and killed the dinosaurs.

That impact was singularly catastrophic. But, according to a new study published today (Jan. 17) in the journal Science, that smashup was also just one episode in an ongoing spike of gargantuan asteroid impacts bombarding our neck of the solar system. After studying 1 billion years of asteroid craters on the Earth and moon, the study's authors found that the rate of huge asteroid impacts on Earth has nearly tripled in the past 290 million years - and nobody's sure why.

"It's perhaps fair to say it was a date with destiny for the dinosaurs," study co-author Thomas Gernon, associate professor of Earth science at the University of Southampton in the U.K., said in a statement. "Their downfall was somewhat inevitable given the surge of large space rocks colliding with Earth."
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Comet 2

Named after ancient Egyptian god of evil, darkness and destruction, Apophis asteroid could strike Earth in 2068, warn Russian scientists


RT
Fri, 18 Jan 2019 17:42 UTC
Asteroid
© AFP / Mark A. Garlick / Warwick & Cambridge Universities
The ominously-named Apophis asteroid could have hundreds of opportunities to hit the Earth over the course of the next century, Russian scientists have warned.

Named after the Ancient Egyptian god of evil, darkness and destruction, Apophis 99942 is expected to come within 37,600km (23,363 miles) of the Earth, just a tenth of the distance between our planet and the moon, in 2029.

Researchers from the Department of Celestial Mechanics at St. Petersburg State University have warned that the 370-meter-wide near-Earth orbit space rock could smash into the planet at a speed of 7.43km per second sometime in 2068. However, to be on track for such a strike, it would somehow have to thread the cosmic needle of passing through a two-meter wide area of space during its 2029 close-Earth flyby.

"The [asteroid's] approach causes a significant scattering of possible trajectories, among them trajectories indicating convergence in 2051," the report says. "Further orbital resonance reentries contain a great number (about one hundred) possible collisions between Apophis and the Earth, the most dangerous of them in 2068."
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