Science & TechnologyS


Beaker

Paper shows that "mutational load" arguments don't refute ENCODE findings


Evolution News
Sat, 02 May 2020 20:16 UTC
DNA sculpture steel
© Jarrod Doll/FlickrWatson and Crick DNA Memorial sculpture by Charles Jencks in Clare College Memorial Court
When the ENCODE project first proposed, on the basis of direct empirical research, that 80 percent of the genome may be biochemically functional, a huge prediction of intelligent design was fulfilled. Evolutionary biologists saw the writing on the wall and were quick to fight back. Perhaps one of ENCODE's staunchest critics has been Dan Graur, a molecular evolutionary biologist at the University of Houston. He argued in 2017 in the journal Genome, Biology and Evolution that ENCODE's empirically based conclusions could not possibly be correct because "Mutational load considerations lead to the conclusion that the functional fraction within the human genome cannot exceed 15%." What exactly is "mutational load"?

Mutational load is based upon the principal that populations of organisms can only tolerate a certain number of deleterious mutations before they reach a critical level and the population crashes. If every element of a genome is functional, then every possible mutation stands to have a non-neutral effect, and could be potentially deleterious. But if only a small portion of the genome is functional, then most mutations will happen to occur in functionally unimportant regions, and this spreads out mutations in a manner that greatly decreases the likelihood of experiencing a deleterious mutation. Thus, when your genome is filled with "junk," you can tolerate a much higher "mutational load."

Comment: More from the ENCODE project

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X

Best of the Web: Zoological clarification: No, we didn't get coronavirus from bats

Yossi Yovel, Maya Weinberg
Haaretz
Thu, 30 Apr 2020 10:58 UTC
fruitbats
© Itay Belson/Weizmann Institute of ScienceYoung fruit bats NOT the source of coronavirus
A distant relative of the coronavirus afflicting us today was found in a bat in China and that's all it took to demonize the extraordinary flying mammals.

Let's start from the punch line: Bats did not give us the latest coronavirus. Nor were its notorious cousins SARS-1 or MERS, or even the ebola virus, transmitted from bats to humans. So what did happen?

A distant relative of the current coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, was isolated in a bat in China. Genetic analyses that looked for similarity between the virus in the bat and SARS-CoV-2, and factored in the theoretical pace at which the virus mutates, estimated that the two viruses parted ways between five and 50 years ago. In other words, one possibility is that about five years ago, the bat coronavirus managed to infect some other different animal - we don't know which one at this time. In that next animal, the coronavirus lived and mutated over those five years, and one day infected a human for the first time. There are other hypotheses as well.

Science doesn't yet know where the coronavirus lurked in wait for the past few years, or when it became dangerous to people, or when the first person was infected, nor do we know which animal infected that first human. The only thing science knows for sure is that the coronavirus isolated from the Chinese bat cannot have infected humans and isn't dangerous to them.

Comment: See also:

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Info

Enzyme could hold key to improved allergy treatments says new study

Jim Schnabel
Cornell Chronicle
Fri, 01 May 2020 19:48 UTC
Interleukin33 Protein
© Weill Cornell Medicine/ProvidedThe protein interleukin-33 (in green) in the cell nucleus (blue) of stromal cells (red) of mucosal tissue that is embedded in visceral adipose tissue (large octagonal purple cells).
A class of immune cells push themselves into an inflammatory state by producing large quantities of a serotonin-making enzyme, according to a study in mice led by scientists at Weill Cornell Medicine.

The study, published March 10 in Immunity, found that the inflammatory and infection-fighting abilities of the cells, called type 2 innate lymphoid cells (ILC2s), are much impaired without the enzyme. The finding suggests possibilities for new treatments targeting ILC2s, which have been linked to asthma and other allergic disorders, to suppress their activation in inflammatory disorders.

The work also hints at what could be a major mechanism of "cross-talk" between the nervous system, which uses serotonin as a signaling molecule or neurotransmitter, and the immune system.

"There's a lot more to do in terms of understanding the biology of these innate lymphoid cells, but it's an exciting area that offers us potential new approaches to therapeutic intervention," said study senior author Dr. David Artis, director of the Jill Roberts Institute for Research in Inflammatory Bowel Disease and the Michael Kors Professor of Immunology in the Department of Medicine at Weill Cornell Medicine.

Innate lymphoid cells are a recently discovered family of white blood cells that reside in the skin, airways and other barrier tissues of the body. They appear to have important roles as first responders against environmental pathogens, but scientists also recognize that ILCs may hold the keys to understanding common inflammatory and autoimmune conditions such as asthma and inflammatory bowel disease.
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Question

Tiny Hero shrews have the most extreme spine in nature — for no discernable reason

Jason Bittel
National Geographic
Sat, 02 May 2020 17:13 UTC
hero shrew
© Bill Stanley, Field MuseumDiscovered in 2013, Scutisorex thori is one of two known species of hero shrew. It's named after Thor, the brawny god of strength in Norse mythology.
The tiny African mammals have an interlocking and highly flexible spine, new x-rays reveal — but they only deepen the intrigue.

When the Mangbetu people of the Democratic Republic of the Congo introduced Western scientists to a smoky-gray, rat-size animal, they told tales of how a grown man could stand on the mammal's back without hurting it.

That was back in 1910, and since then, studies of the animal in question — which came to be called the hero shrew — have cast light on what may account for such lore. (Another species of hero shrew was discovered, also in DRC, in 2013.)

In 2019, scientists led by Stephanie Smith, a mammologist and postdoctoral researcher at the Field Museum of Natural History, in Chicago, Illinois, took sophisticated x-rays of hero shrews. The scans showed that these little creatures have a spine unlike any other animal on Earth.
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Radar

Hundreds of towering hydrothermal chimneys discovered on seafloor off Washington

Mindy Weisberger
Live Science
Fri, 01 May 2020 12:00 UTC
hydrothermal vent washington
© MBARIAn autonomous diving robot captured the vents in unprecedented detail.
In the dark ocean depths off the coast of the Pacific Northwest, a magical fairyland of towering spires and hydrothermal chimneys sprout from the seafloor, a stunning new underwater map reveals.

These towers belch superheated liquid warmed by magma deep inside Earth.

The field of hydrothermal chimneys stretches along the ocean bottom on the Juan de Fuca Ridge to the northwest of coastal Washington state, in an area known as the Endeavor Segment.

Research on the Endeavor vents began in the 1980s, and scientists had previously identified 47 chimneys in five major vent fields. But recent expeditions, using an autonomous underwater vehicle operated by the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) revealed more than 500 chimneys in a zone about 9 miles (14 kilometers) long and 1 mile (2 km) wide.

Comment: See also:

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Health

Best of the Web: Big Pharma beware: Dr. Luc Montagnier shines new light on COVID-19 and the future of medicine

Matthew Ehret
Strategic Culture
Thu, 30 Apr 2020 00:01 UTC
dr luc montagnier
This April 16th, Dr. Luc Montagnier became a household name around the world. This occurred as the controversial virologist decided to publicly state his support for the theory that Covid-19 is indeed a laboratory-generated creation and not a naturally occurring effect of viral evolution.

Referring to a study published at the Kusama School of Biology in New Dehli on January 31st, Montagnier (the 2008 Nobel Prize winner for his 1983 discovery of the HIV virus) made the point that the specific occurrence of HIV RNA viral segments spliced surgically within the COVID-19 genome could not have originated naturally and he described it in the following words:

"We have carefully analyzed the description of the genome of this RNA virus. We weren't the first, a group of Indian researchers tried to publish a study showing that the complete genome of this virus that has within the sequences of another virus: that of HIV."

Comment: It is incredibly frustrating that Montagnier, like Beneviste before him, has been so maligned and smeared for his honest and humble scientific inquiries. The old guard will tightly protect their interests at all costs and so medicine will remain in the dark ages for the foreseeable future. There is little doubt that our ancestors will owe a great debt to these pioneers, if the truth is ever allowed to fluorish.

See also:

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Seismograph

Reflected tsunamis and space weather


Space Weather
Sat, 02 May 2020 02:18 UTC
Ionospheric disturbances over Japan on March 11, 2011.
Ionospheric disturbances over Japan on March 11, 2011.
When the Earth trembles, even the edge of space moves. Researchers have known for decades that earthquakes and tsunamis send waves of air pressure to the very top of Earth's atmosphere. Up there, in the ionosphere, the waves scramble GPS signals and interfere with radio communications much like solar flares do. Earthquakes, it turns out, can mimic space weather.

A new paper published in the research journal Space Weather shows that earthquakes and tsunamis may, in fact, affect the ionosphere much more than previously thought.

"On 11 March 2011, a magnitude 9.0 earthquake occurred near the east coast of Honshu, Japan, unleashing a savage tsunami as well as unprecedented ripples at the space‐atmosphere interaction region," report the authors, led by Min-Yang Chou of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research (UCAR) in Boulder, CO.

Using satellites and ground-based GPS receivers, Chou and colleagues took a close look at what happened to the ionosphere over Japan in the aftermath of the earthquake. As expected, it was disturbed. Surprisingly, though, the ionospheric disturbances didn't peter out after the initial quake and tsunami; they kept going for many more hours.

The reason: Reflected tsunamis.

Comment: Massive Japan Earthquake Altered Earth's Gravity

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Sun

Our Sun is surprisingly weak compared to other stars

Michelle Starr
Science Alert
Thu, 30 Apr 2020 12:00 UTC
sun flare
© (NASA/SDO)
We're pretty familiar with our Sun. We've even sent a probe to go study it; we haven't done that with any other star. Given how closely we study it, it would be tempting to think of it as a typical example of a G-type main-sequence star, or yellow dwarf.

New research suggests that this is not the case. After conducting a survey of stars similar to the Sun, scientists have discovered that our star is unusually subdued, at least at this stage of its life.

Compared to its peers, the Sun fluctuates in brightness much less, and has much lower sunspot activity, than the average. It's a curious result - and one that could have implications for the future of our life on this planet.

Comment: One important point that is strangely absent from the article is that many stars are known to have a 'twin', in fact a significant proportion of star systems seem to be in a binary configuration - although some have more than that - and so, with this in mind, could it be that the position of our Sun's own twin (that is speculated to exist) is effecting its output? In addition, perhaps there have been were events within our solar system, prior to 9,000 years ago, that have affected our Sun's rhythms?

It's also worth bearing in mind that scientists are at a loss as to explain why Betelgeuse has been flickering in brightness and why its temperature has been fluctuating, so is it because they're missing some significant factor? Could the Electric Universe also hold some of the answers?

See also: And check out SOTT radio's:

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Fireball 3

Sky fall: Huge fireballs fall from space each year; new estimates say 40 million kilos of 'extra-terrestrial' material plummets to Earth annually

Charlotte Edwards
The Sun
Thu, 30 Apr 2020 17:40 UTC
Manchester scientist Romain Tartèse meteorite Antarctica
© University of Manchester / Katie JoyManchester scientist Romain Tartèse with a meteorite in Antarctica
A NEW estimate of how must space rock is falling to Earth each year has been revealed and it's probably a lot more than you thought.

A team of UK scientists focussed on meteorites above 50g and think about 16,000kg's worth rains down on us annually.

This 16,000kg (17 ton) figure doesn't even take into account the space dust that regularly settles on our planet or the infrequent impacts of larger space rocks.

These are said to boost the figure up to 40,000,000 kg.

Comment: The reason the estimates have been revised is that the number of space rocks whizzing past earth has been steadily increasing in recent years: And they bring a few things with them:

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R2-D2

NASA awards contracts to Blue Origin, SpaceX & Dynetics to begin work on lunar landers; Boeing left out

Michael Sheetz
CNBC
Thu, 30 Apr 2020 19:02 UTC
Full moon
NASA awarded contracts worth a combined $967 million to three teams of companies on Thursday to begin work on lunar landers toward the agency's goal of putting astronauts on the Moon by 2024.

Teams led by Blue Origin, SpaceX and Dynetics won awards under NASA's Human Landing Systems program. These awards are study contracts for the next 10 months, at the end of which NASA will pick one or more winners to begin building the spacecraft.

NASA awarded the Blue Origin team with $579 million, the Dynetics team with $253 million and SpaceX with $135 million. The wide range in award totals comes due to the differences in each team's bid and approach to achieving NASA's goal.

Boeing also bid on HLS but was not awarded with a study contract. The Boeing proposal included using an upgraded Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, which Boeing is currently building for NASA.

Comment: NASA's video announcement:



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