Science & Technology

FDA approves genetically altering pigs, to potentially make food, drugs, and transplants safer

Elizabeth Cooney
STAT
Mon, 14 Dec 2020 00:00 UTC

Genetically engineering pigs so they lack a certain sugar on the surface of their cells that triggers meat allergies or organ rejection won approval from the Food and Drug Administration Monday. The regulatory clearance — the first of an intentional genomic alteration in a product with both food and medical uses — means the animals could be safer sources of not just food but also treatments such as the blood-thinner heparin.

"Today's first ever approval of an animal biotechnology product for both food and as a potential source for biomedical use represents a tremendous milestone for scientific innovation," FDA Commissioner Stephen Hahn said in a statement.

Comment: And if you believe that then I have a lovely bridge to sell you in the middle of the Pacific Ocean.

There have been four previous approvals for such genetic engineering in animals, three for biomedical purposes and one for food, but none for both biomedicine and food, Steven Solomon, director of the FDA's Center for Veterinary Medicine, said in a conference call with reporters.

GalSafe pigs, named for their lack of detectable alpha-gal sugar, could potentially provide tissues and organs for patients without the danger of rejection caused by the presence of the sugar in cross-species procedures known as xenografts or xenotransplantation. Alpha-gal is considered a primary cause of rejection, Solomon said, but he was hesitant to say it is the only source.

Comment: The funny thing about GMO-anything is that the results quite often tend to be worse than the problems the scientists say they are trying to avoid.

NASA Hubble telescope tracks dark storms on Neptune behaving oddly

Amanda Kooser
CNET
Wed, 16 Dec 2020 10:36 UTC

© NASA/ESA/STScI/M.H. Wong (University of California, Berkeley)/L.A. Sromovsky/P.M. Fry (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
Hubble Space Telescope tracked two dark storms on Neptune.

We marvel at Mars, puzzle over gases on Venus and stare deeply into Jupiter. NASA and the Hubble Space Telescope are here to remind us there are amazing and mysterious things happening on Neptune, an ice giant with an atmosphere of hydrogen, helium and methane.

Scientists have been using Hubble to track a dark storm on Neptune since 2018, and the vortex is behaving oddly. Storms like this normally form, drift toward the planet's equator and then dissipate. Not this one. It moved like normal and then took a turn and headed back north in August 2020.

Computer simulations have backed up previous observations of Neptune storm migration patterns, ending in what NASA describes as the equatorial "kill zone." "It was really exciting to see this one act like it's supposed to act and then all of a sudden it just stops and swings back," said planetary scientist Michael Wong Wong in a NASA statement on Tuesday. "That was surprising."

The dark spot wasn't alone. Scientists saw a smaller spot appear at the same time the big storm changed course. The new one may be a piece of the original vortex. The researchers nicknamed the possible fragment "dark spot jr."

A new toy for Big Brother: This satellite can peer inside buildings, day or night

Dan Robitzski
Futurism
Wed, 16 Dec 2020 07:23 UTC

A few months ago, a company called Capella Space launched a satellite capable of taking clear radar images of anywhere in the world, with incredible resolution — even through the walls of some buildings.

And unlike most of the huge array of surveillance and observational satellites orbiting the Earth, its satellite Capella 2 can snap a clear picture during night or day, rain or shine.

"It turns out that half of the world is in nighttime, and half of the world, on average, is cloudy," CEO Payam Banazadeh, a former system engineer at the NASA Jet Propulsion laboratory, told Futurism. "When you combine those two together, about 75 percent of Earth, at any given time, is going to be cloudy, nighttime, or it's going to be both. It's invisible to you, and that portion is moving around."

On Wednesday, Capella launched a platform allowing governmental or private customers to request images of anything in the world — a capability that will only get more powerful with the deployment of six additional satellites next year. Is that creepy from a privacy point of view? Sure. But Banazadeh says that it also plugs numerous holes in the ways scientists and government agencies are currently able to monitor the planet.

Parting gift from 2020? NASA warns FIVE asteroids headed this way

RT
Wed, 16 Dec 2020 11:38 UTC

As the widely perceived terrible year of 2020 draws to a close, NASA has shared an alert about five asteroids due to shoot past the Earth on Wednesday and later this week, two of which will come closer to our planet than the Moon.

Some three space rocks, ranging in diameter from roughly a telephone pole size all the way up to two London buses end-to-end, will shoot past the Earth on Wednesday.

The 11-meter asteroid named 2020 XF4 will flyby at 343,000km (213,130 miles) followed by the 24-meter 2020 VY1 at five million kilometers, with 2020 XS5 bringing up the rear at an equally safe distance of three million km. For reference, the average distance between Earth and the Moon is roughly 385,000 kilometers (239,000 miles).

And right as the weekend is beginning for many, on Friday, the comparatively tiny 6.6-meter 2020 XX3 will scream past the Earth at a distance of 57,100km, followed shortly afterwards by the 30-meter space rock 2020 XF3 which will give the planet a much wider berth, passing at 6.9 million km.

Comment: Why are so many asteroids having close calls with Earth in 2020?

Ryugu asteroid samples prove to be beyond Japan's scientists' expectations

RT
Tue, 15 Dec 2020 10:46 UTC

© AFP / JAXA / Handout
This handout photograph released by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) on December 15, 2020 shows samples of surface dust and pristine material collected from the asteroid Ryugu by the Hayabusa-2 space probe, at the JAXA Sagamihara Campus in Sagamihara, Kanagawa prefecture.

Japanese researchers were lost for words after asteroid samples that could shed light on the origin of life in the universe, retrieved from a space probe's six-year operation, proved even better than they had hoped for.

The Japan Space Exploration Agency (JAXA) launched the probe, named Hayabusa2, on December 3, 2014. It was part of an 18-month mission to survey the asteroid Ryugu, 300 kilometers from Earth, and samples were returned to scientists earlier this month.

Researcher Hirotaka Sawada revealed that his colleagues had been hoping to secure 100mg or more of material. However, when they first opened the probe and saw the amount that had been collected in the sample, they were left speechless.

Comment: See also:

Child's bones buried 40,000 years ago solve a longstanding Neanderthal mystery

Peter Dockrill
Science Alert
Thu, 10 Dec 2020 01:56 UTC

We don't know whether it was a boy or a girl. But this ancient child, a Neanderthal, only made it to about two years of age.

This short life, lived about 41,000 years ago, was uncovered at a famous archaeological site in southwestern France, called La Ferrassie. The remains of several Neanderthals have been found there, including the most recent discovery, the child, known only as La Ferrassie 8.

When the ancient remains were first found - most at various stages of the early 20th century - archaeologists had assumed the skeletons represented intentional burials, with Neanderthals laying their departed kin to rest under the earth.

Nonetheless, in contemporary archaeology, doubts now swirl around the question of whether Neanderthals did indeed bury their dead like that, or whether this particular aspect of funerary rites is a uniquely Homo sapien custom.

Humans may not be the only species to domesticate others

Natalie Parletta
Cosmos Magazine
Mon, 14 Dec 2020 21:08 UTC

Researchers have discovered that a species of coral fish uses shrimp to help fertilise its algae farms, which, they suggest, is the first evidence of a non-human animal domesticating another species.

Longfin damselfish (Stegastes diencaeus) are known to aggressively defend the farms they rely on for food - but not, it seems, against planktonic mysid shrimps (Mysidium integrum).

"We found that the damselfish keep swarms of mysid shrimps within their farms, providing them with a long-term safe haven from predators," says Rohan Booker from Australia's Deakin University, lead author of a paper in Nature Communications.

"The mysids, in return, swim over that farm all day and passively pump out waste material. All that extra waste acts as fertiliser, improving the farmed algae, and, in turn, the condition of the farmer, the damselfish."

This is known as a "domesticator-domestica relationship", a mutually beneficial arrangement where one species provides ongoing support to another in exchange for predictable benefits, such as cleaner fish picking parasites off other fish or insects pollinating flowers.

Humans have had such relationships with many different animals since domesticating dogs around 10,000 years ago, selectively breeding them for certain appealing characteristics such as tameness.

Other examples of non-human domestication are best known in insects that tame plants such as fungi-farming ants. This study shows non-human vertebrates also domesticate other animals and suggests it may be more commonly than previously known, says Booker.

Researchers synthesise a psychedelic that could treat depression without hallucinations

Tessa Koumoundouros
Science Alert
Sat, 12 Dec 2020 09:36 UTC

Recently advances have shown that psychedelics like ketamine have powerful potential for treating mental health conditions such as addiction, anxiety, and depression. But psychedelics can come with serious side effects, like cardiac toxicity and their infamous hallucinations.

"Psychedelics are some of the most powerful drugs we know of that affect the brain," said chemist David Olson from University of California. "It's unbelievable how little we know about them."

So University of California neuroscientist Lindsay Cameron, Olsen and colleagues decided to take a closer look and see if they could mess with a psychedelic compound in a way that allows them to keep its useful features, but do away with the more dangerous parts.

Comment: It's interesting that these scientists are seeing beneficial results when the hallucinatory substances have been removed. Many people attribute the anti-depressive effects of psychedelics to the hallucinations themselves - almost as if they've been shown something that allows them to adopt a different perspective. It will be interesting to see how this research proceeds in humans.

See also:

Study finds mass extinctions of Earth's land animals follow a cycle

Doyle Rice
USA Today
Fri, 11 Dec 2020 19:41 UTC

© NASA/Donald E. Davis
An artist's impression of a giant space rock slamming into Earth 65 million years ago near what is now Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula. A consortium of scientists now says this was indeed what caused the end of the Age of Dinosaurs.

Asteroids aren't completely random?

Mass extinctions of life on Earth appear to follow a regular pattern, a new study suggests.

In fact, widespread die-offs of land-dwelling animals - which include amphibians, reptiles, mammals and birds - follow a cycle of about 27 million years, the study reports. The study also said these mass extinctions coincide with major asteroid impacts and devastating volcanic outpourings of lava.

"The global mass extinctions were apparently caused by the largest cataclysmic impacts and massive volcanism, perhaps sometimes working in concert," said study lead author Michael Rampino of New York University, in a statement.

New super highway network discovered in the Solar System

Ioana Patringenaru
University of California - San Diego
Wed, 09 Dec 2020 16:45 UTC

Researchers have discovered a new superhighway network to travel through the Solar System much faster than was previously possible. Such routes can drive comets and asteroids near Jupiter to Neptune's distance in under a decade and to 100 astronomical units in less than a century. They could be used to send spacecraft to the far reaches of our planetary system relatively fast, and to monitor and understand near-Earth objects that might collide with our planet.

In their paper, published in the Nov. 25 issue of Science Advances, the researchers observed the dynamical structure of these routes, forming a connected series of arches inside what's known as space manifolds that extend from the asteroid belt to Uranus and beyond. This newly discovered "celestial autobahn," or celestial highway, acts over several decades, as opposed to the hundreds of thousands or millions of years that usually characterize Solar System dynamics.

The most conspicuous arch structures are linked to Jupiter and the strong gravitational forces it exerts. The population of Jupiter-family comets (comets having orbital periods of 20 years) as well as small-size solar system bodies known as Centaurs, are controlled by such manifolds on unprecedented time scales. Some of these bodies will end up colliding with Jupiter or being ejected from the Solar System.

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Science & Technology

FDA approves genetically altering pigs, to potentially make food, drugs, and transplants safer

NASA Hubble telescope tracks dark storms on Neptune behaving oddly

A new toy for Big Brother: This satellite can peer inside buildings, day or night

Parting gift from 2020? NASA warns FIVE asteroids headed this way

Ryugu asteroid samples prove to be beyond Japan's scientists' expectations

Child's bones buried 40,000 years ago solve a longstanding Neanderthal mystery

Humans may not be the only species to domesticate others

Researchers synthesise a psychedelic that could treat depression without hallucinations

Study finds mass extinctions of Earth's land animals follow a cycle

New super highway network discovered in the Solar System

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