With no dissolved oxygen to sustain animals or plants, ocean anoxic zones are areas where only microbes suited to the environment can live.

"You don't get big fish," said UC Santa Barbara biogeochemist Morgan Raven. "You don't even get charismatic zooplankton." But although anoxic oceans may seem alien to organisms like ourselves that breathe oxygen, they're full of life, she said.

These strange ecosystems are expanding, thanks to climate change — a development that is of concern for fisheries and anyone who relies on oxygen-rich oceans. But what piques Raven's interest is the changing chemistry of the oceans — the Earth's largest carbon sink — and how it could move carbon from the atmosphere to long-term reservoirs like rocks.

To explain what sets human apart from their ape relatives, researchers have long hypothesized that it is not so much the DNA sequence, but rather the regulation of the genes (i.e. when, where and how strongly the gene is expressed), that plays the key role. However, precisely pinpointing the regulatory elements which act as 'gene dimmers' and are positively selected is a challenging task that has thus far defeated researchers.

Positive selection: a hint of the functional relevance of a mutation

Most random genetic mutations neither benefit nor harm an organism: they accumulate at a steady rate that reflects the amount of time that has passed since two living species had a common ancestor. In contrast, an acceleration in that rate in a particular part of the genome can reflect a positive selection for a mutation that helps an organism to survive and reproduce, which makes the mutation more likely to be passed on to future generations. Gene regulatory elements are often only a few nucleotides long, which makes estimating their acceleration rate particularly difficult from a statistical point of view.

Think about great movies, novels, and plays. They probe the physical world of flesh and blood and, at the same time, draw us into things spiritual and immaterial: the sublime and the ridiculous; love, heroism, envy and prejudice; good and evil.

But a strain of modern thought says that those immaterial things aren't real. Darwinian materialism holds that all species evolved from the first tiny cell in a process without guidance or design. And the human mind is no exception. Harvard evolutionist E. O. Wilson describes it as just a byproduct of the physical brain, and the brain as "the product of genetic evolution by natural selection."

On this view, if fiction reaches toward a higher plane, then it reaches toward an illusion, since matter and energy are the only fundamental reality. Free will, good and evil, love and heroism, all are a mirage.

As for our favorite movies, novels, and plays, along with our favorite songs and paintings, all of these artistic creations, according to Wilson, have "been produced by the genetic evolution of our nervous and sensory tissues."

He's serious. "To treat them as other than objects of biological inquiry," he says, "is simply to aim too low."¹

Enigmatic booming sounds called the "Seneca Guns" have reverberated off parts of coastal North Carolina for more than 150 years, with some powerful enough to rattle windows and vibrate buildings.

Now, scientists are using seismic data to pinpoint where the explosions come from and what causes them.

They presented their findings on Dec. 7 at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU), held virtually this year due to the COVID-19 pandemic. But spoiler alert: They haven't quite solved the mystery yet.

The name Seneca Guns comes not from North Carolina, but from Lake Seneca in upstate New York where a similar phenomenon occurred. The lake's ominous booming sounds, described in 1850 by the writer James Fenimore Cooper in his short story "The Lake Gun," had at the time been heard for centuries.

A wealth of new research in glacier and sea ice extent show modern Iceland is 2-4°C colder than all of the last 8000 years except for a slightly colder late 19th century. Even the 1700s were warmer with less ice than today in and around Iceland.

A new study (Geirsdóttir et al., 2020) now affirms peak Holocene warmth at least "∼3-4 °C above modern in Iceland" prevailed throughout much of the last 8000 years. Data from tree growth, glacier-induced soil erosion, algae productivity, sea ice biomarker proxies (IP25), and other climate indices affirm these conclusions.

Harning et al., 2020 report an overall 7°C Holocene cooling trend In Iceland's surrounding sea surface temperatures (SST).

"In terms of foraminifera-reconstructed SST there is an overall trend of cooling throughout the last 8 ka from ~10 °C to ~3 °C."

A viable quantum internet — a network in which information stored in qubits is shared over long distances through entanglement — would transform the fields of data storage, precision sensing and computing, ushering in a new era of communication.

This month, scientists at Fermilab, a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science national laboratory, and their partners took a significant step in the direction of realizing a quantum internet.

In a paper published in PRX Quantum, the team presents for the first time a demonstration of a sustained, long-distance (44 kilometers of fiber) teleportation of qubits of photons (quanta of light) with fidelity greater than 90%. The qubits were teleported over a fiber-optic network using state-of-the-art single-photon detectors and off-the-shelf equipment.

"We're thrilled by these results," said Fermilab scientist Panagiotis Spentzouris, head of the Fermilab quantum science program and one of the paper's co-authors. "This is a key achievement on the way to building a technology that will redefine how we conduct global communication."

In a new paper published in Stem Cell Reports, Bhanu Telugu and co-inventor Chi-Hun Park of the University of Maryland (UMD) Department of Animal and Avian Sciences show for the first time that newly established stem cells from pigs, when injected into embryos, contributed to the development of only the organ of interest (the embryonic gut and liver), laying the groundwork for stem cell therapeutics and organ transplantation. Telugu's start-up company, Renovate Biosciences Inc. (RBI), was founded with the goal of leveraging the potential of stem cells to treat terminal diseases that would otherwise require organ transplants, either by avoiding the need for transplants altogether or creating a new pipeline for growing transplantable human organs. With the number of people who suffer from organ failures and the 20 deaths per day in the U.S. alone purely from a lack of available organs for transplant, finding a new way to provide organs and therapeutic options to transplant patients is a critical need. In this paper, Telugu and his team are sharing their first steps towards growing fully transplantable human organs in a pig host.

"This paper is really about using the stem cells from pigs for the first time and showing that they actually can be injected into embryos and only go to the endodermal target organs like the liver, which is very important for delivering safe therapeutic solutions going forward," says Telugu. "This is an important milestone. It's a pipe dream in a way because a lot of things need to work out between here and full organ transplantation, but this paper sets the stage for all our future research. We can't really just go and start working with humans in work like this, so we started with pig-to-pig transfer in this paper, working with the stem cells and putting them back into other pigs to track the process to make sure it is safe for liver production as proof-of-concept."

Telugu and his team pitched this work at UMD Bioscience Day on behalf of his company, RBI, and received the Inventor Pitch Award and the UMD Invention of the Year Award in 2018. In order to protect the intellectual property, Telugu worked with the UMD Office of Technology Commercialization (OTC) to secure patents and open the work up for additional fundraising to carry this technology through the preclinical and clinical stages. The Maryland Stem Cell Foundation provided some funding to advance this work, and Telugu is thankful that Maryland funds technologies in the human stem cell space.

By monitoring the cosmos with a radio telescope array, an international team of scientists has detected radio bursts emanating from the constellation Boötes - that could be the first radio emission collected from a planet beyond our solar system.

The team, led by Cornell postdoctoral researcher Jake D. Turner, Philippe Zarka of the Observatoire de Paris - Paris Sciences et Lettres University and Jean-Mathias Griessmeier of the Université d'Orléans will publish their findings in the forthcoming research section of Astronomy & Astrophysics, on Dec. 16.

"We present one of the first hints of detecting an exoplanet in the radio realm," Turner said. "The signal is from the Tau Boötes system, which contains a binary star and an exoplanet. We make the case for an emission by the planet itself. From the strength and polarization of the radio signal and the planet's magnetic field, it is compatible with theoretical predictions."

Among the co-authors is Turner's postdoctoral advisor Ray Jayawardhana, the Harold Tanner Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, and a professor of astronomy.

"If confirmed through follow-up observations," Jayawardhana said, "this radio detection opens up a new window on exoplanets, giving us a novel way to examine alien worlds that are tens of light-years away."

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.


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.

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."