Pseudogenes, or stretches of DNA that have similar sequences to functional genes that make proteins but are not functional themselves, have been shown to have an effect in certain cancers and may be used to treat certain cancers.

Originally designated as "junk DNA" and not focused on during the Human Genome Project to decode all human genes, these evolutionarily inactive duplicate genes are showing their importance in the control and development of cancer.

A recent publication in Nature Structural & Molecular Biology looked at a pseudogene of PTEN, a gene that makes a protein that suppresses cancer development.

The pseudogene of this real gene has a similar stretch of DNA sequences but does not make a protein, and is therefore considered "non-functional." The vast majority of the DNA sequences in our genome are not genes and do not produce proteins.

But this new report indicates that pseudogenes may control functional genes in many ways.

Who says necessity is not the mother of invention in the New Normal. While a tiny fraction of the Japanese population is enjoying the transitory effects of Abe's latest reflating "wealth effect" policy (even as China has made it clear said policy will end quite soon), the bigger problem for Japan is that even sooner, more and more of it will be reliant on hamster wheels to generate electricity, as LNG prices have just hit a record high and are rising at a breakneck pace, and as local nuclear power generation has collapsed to virtually zero. Which means one thing: electricity will soon become so unaffordable only those who are invested in the daily 2% Nikkei surges will be able to electrify their immediate surroundings.

So what is Japan's solution? A quite ingenious one: as Geek.com and ASR both report, Japan's Fujifilm has created organic printed sheet that harvests energy from body heat, or in other words, converts body heat to electricity. Finally, at least one key part of the Matrix "reality" is now fully operational - the use of human beings as batteries.

Specifically, Fujifilm Corp. and the National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) have developed a resin sheet that generates electricity, utilizing the temperature difference between human body and the air.

The power-generating sheet developed by Fujifilm and AIST could be used to provide additional power for portable devices.

The sheet uses the thermoelectric effect, which generates a voltages due to the temperature difference between the surface of an object and its reverse side. The sheet is 0.4mm thick and soft. In a normal environment, the temperature of the air is lower than that of the human body or the surface of clothes. That temperature difference can be used to generate a steady flow of electricity.

Over at The Conversation Andrew Glickson asks Fact check: has global warming paused? citing an old Skeptical Science favorite graph, and that's the problem; it's old data. He writes:

As some 90% of the global heat rise is trapped in the oceans (since 1950, more than 20×1022 joules), the ocean heat level reflects global warming more accurately than land and atmosphere warming. The heat content of the ocean has risen since about 2000 by about 4×1022 joules.

To summarise, claims that warming has paused over the last 16 years (1997-2012) take no account of ocean heating.

A recently discovered comet will make an uncomfortably-close planetary flyby next year - but this time it's not Earth that's in the cosmic crosshairs.

According to preliminary orbital prediction models, comet C/2013 A1 will buzz Mars on Oct. 19, 2014. The icy interloper is thought to originate from the Oort Cloud - a hypothetical region surrounding the solar system containing countless billions of cometary nuclei that were outcast from the primordial solar system billions of years ago.

We know that the planets have been hit by comets before (re: the massive Comet Shoemaker - Levy 9 that crashed into Jupiter in 1994) and Mars, in particular, will have been hit by comets in the past. It's believed Earth's oceans were created by water delivered by comets - cometary impacts are an inevitable part of living in this cosmic ecosystem.

C/2013 A1 was discovered by ace comet-hunter Robert McNaught at the Siding Spring Observatory in New South Wales, Australia, on Jan. 3. When the discovery was made, astronomers at the Catalina Sky Survey in Arizona looked back over their observations to find "prerecovery" images of the comet dating back to Dec. 8, 2012. These observations placed the orbital trajectory of comet C/2013 A1 through Mars orbit on Oct. 19, 2014.

Could the Red Planet be in for a potentially huge impact next year? Will Mars rovers Curiosity and Opportunity be in danger of becoming scrap metal?

Last year, we reported on some mysterious booms in a small Wisconsin town that turned out to be small earthquakes. While it was an unusual story, it's actually not that uncommon of an occurrence. Early in the summer of 2001, folks in Spokane, Washington started reporting similar booms. The sounds continued, off and on, for about five months. The mystery didn't last long, as the earthquakes responsible were picked up by seismometers in the area. (A particularly loud one that took place exactly one month after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in New York did rattle some nerves, however.)


In total, 105 earthquakes were detected, with a couple as large as magnitude 4.0. For most of them, there wasn't good enough seismometer coverage to really pinpoint locations, but some temporary units deployed around the city in July located a number of events pretty precisely: the earthquakes were centered directly beneath the city itself.

While a dangerously large earthquake is pretty unlikely in Wisconsin, the possibility can't be ignored in Washington. The 2011 earthquake in Christchurch, New Zealand was only a magnitude 6.3, but the damage was extensive because the epicenter was so close to the city. In L'Aquila, Italy, a swarm of small earthquakes in 2009 was followed by a deadly magnitude 6.3. (The poor public communication of risk during that swarm netted six seismologists manslaughter convictions.)

For obvious reasons, it's important to learn more about what's going on beneath Spokane. A group of researchers from the US Geological Survey and the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network have turned to satellites to start piecing the story together.

From 19-21 February 2013, noctilucent clouds were observed in the UK, Denmark, Norway and the Netherlands. Since these clouds are usually only seen in summer, it is suspected that they may be the result of comet dust deposited in the upper atmosphere by the Chelyabinsk/Chebarkul meteor or comet fragment explosion over Southern Russia on 15 February.

The following images were submitted to spaceweather.com

With help from seals, scientists have discovered a new source for the coldest, deepest water in the ocean.

Instruments glued to seals' heads tracked Antarctic Bottom Water flowing down deep canyons off Cape Darnley in East Antarctica. The spot was an unexpected font of the bottom water - cold, dense, salty water - because it lacks the broad underwater shelf of the unique current's three known sources. These shallow shelves stick out from the continent's edge. Cold water flows over the edge to the abyssal depths like a frigid underwater waterfall.

Finding the Cape Darnley bottom water, which accounts for about 10 percent of the world's Antarctic Bottom Water, solves a long-standing problem. The amount of cold water coming from Antarctica exceeded that from the three other sites.

"At least one more source was inferred to exist, but had stubbornly eluded detection," Michael Meredith, an oceanographer with the British Antarctic Survey, wrote in an article accompanying the study in the journal Nature Geoscience. Meredith was not involved in the research.

"Our discovery is the missing piece of a 30-year-old puzzle regarding the circumpolar distribution of global Antarctic Bottom Water supply," said Kay Ohshima, an oceanographer at Hokkaido University in Japan and lead author of the study.

The discovery will also affect climate change models, in which bottom water circulation plays an important role. The deep bottom current drives large-scale ocean circulation, helping regulate Earth's climate, Ohshima said.

"It is vital that this newly found Cape Darnley Bottom Water be incorporated into the global assessment of the meridian ocean circulation, a key element of the climate system. This will improve numerical simulations predicting its response to long-term climate change," Ohshima told OurAmazingPlanet.

The findings are detailed in the Feb. 24 issue of the journal Nature Geoscience.

Geological detectives are piecing together an intriguing seafloor puzzle. The Indian Ocean and some of its islands, scientists say, may lie on top of the remains of an ancient continent pulled apart by plate tectonics between 50 million and 100 million years ago. Painstaking detective work involving gravity mapping, rock analysis, and plate movement reconstruction has led researchers to conclude that several places in the Indian Ocean, now far apart, conceal the remnants of a prehistoric land mass they have named Mauritia. In fact, they say, the Indian Ocean could be "littered" with such continental fragments, now obscured by lava erupted by underwater volcanoes.

The Seychelles, an archipelago of 115 islands about 1500 kilometers east of Africa, are something of a geological curiosity. Although a few of Earth's largest islands, such as Greenland, are composed of the same continental crust as the mainland, most islands are made of a denser, chemically distinct oceanic crust, created midocean by magma welling up beneath separating tectonic plates. Geologists think they separated from the Indian subcontinent 80 million to 90 million years ago.

But those islands might not be so unique. Researchers from Norway, Germany, and Britain, writing in Nature Geoscience, now suggest that the Indian Ocean is harboring other fragments of ancient continental crust. Those fragments, the researchers say, lie buried beneath more recent oceanic crust erupted by underwater volcanoes.

Infrasound, or extremely low frequency sound waves, from the meteor that broke up over Russia's Ural mountains were some of the largest ever recorded by the CTBTO's network of infrasound stations.


Credit: CTBTO

Peer review is at the heart of the processes of not just medical journals but of all of science. It is the method by which grants are allocated, papers published, academics promoted, and Nobel prizes won. It has allowed government agencies to approve untold numbers of drugs and vaccines, or rubber stamp thousands of chemicals as safe. It has until recently been unstudied. And its defects are easier to identify than its attributes. Yet it shows no sign of going away.

When something is peer reviewed it is in some sense blessed. Even journalists recognize this. When the BMJ published a highly controversial paper that argued that a new 'disease', female sexual dysfunction, was in some ways being created by pharmaceutical companies, a friend who is a journalist was very excited - not least because reporting it gave him a chance to get sex onto the front page of a highly respectable but somewhat priggish newspaper (the Financial Times). 'But,' the news editor wanted to know, 'was this paper peer reviewed?'. The implication was that if it had been it was good enough for the front page and if it had not been it was not.