Science & TechnologyS


Binoculars

10 new songbird species and subspecies found on Indonesian islands

Natalie Parletta
Cosmos Magazine
Mon, 13 Jan 2020 13:00 UTC
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Peleng
© Philippe VerbelenA bird paradise: hill forest on the remote Indonesian island of Peleng.
Tucked away in three of the most geographically isolated Indonesian islands of Wallacea, known for their unique and rich biodiversity, researchers have discovered 10 new species and subspecies of songbirds.

Found on the remote isles of Taliabu, Peleng and Batudaka off the north-eastern coast of the larger island Sulawesi, and described in the journal Science, it's the largest number of new species named in a region of that size in more than a century.

"Birds are so well-known as compared to other animals, so it was a major surprise to find five new species and five subspecies in such a limited geographic area," says lead author Frank Rheindt, from the National University of Singapore.

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Microscope 1

Chromatin organizes itself into 3D 'forests' in single cells

Megan Fellman
Northwestern Now
Fri, 10 Jan 2020 08:30 UTC
chromatin forest
A 3D forest of chromatin predicted by the researchers’ model. Tree domains are colored from red to green according to their sizes.
A single cell contains the genetic instructions for an entire organism. This genomic information is managed and processed by the complex machinery of chromatin -- a mix of DNA and protein within chromosomes whose function and role in disease are of increasing interest to scientists.

A Northwestern University research team -- using mathematical modeling and optical imaging they developed themselves -- has discovered how chromatin folds at the single-cell level. The researchers found chromatin is folded into a variety of tree-like domains spaced along a chromatin backbone. These small and large areas are like a mixed forest of trees growing from the forest floor. The overall structure is a 3D forest at microscale.

Chromatin is responsible for packing DNA into the cell nucleus. In humans, that's about six feet of DNA in each cell. The new work suggests that chromatin is more structured and hierarchical in single cells than previously thought. Learning how chromatin correctly operates will help scientists understand what goes wrong with it in cancer and other diseases.

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Rose

Plants found to speak roundworm's language

Boyce Thompson Institute
Phys.org
Sun, 12 Jan 2020 21:47 UTC
nematodes
© BTI/Murli ManoharThese tomato roots have been infected with southern root-knot nematodes (Meloidogyne incognita). The microscopic roundworms form galls or "knots" where they feed, ultimately stunting the plants and reducing yield.
Nematodes are tiny, ubiquitous roundworms that infect plant roots, causing more than $100 billion in crop damage worldwide each year. New research has found that plants manipulate the worms' pheromones to repel infestations, providing insights into how farmers could fight these pests.

Led by Boyce Thompson Institute faculty member Frank Schroeder, the group studied a group of chemicals called ascarosides, which the worms produce and secrete to communicate with each other. As described in a paper published in Nature Communications on January 10, the researchers have shown that plants also "talk" to nematodes by metabolizing ascarosides and secreting the metabolites back into the soil.

"It's not only that the plant can 'sense' or 'smell' a nematode," Schroeder said. "It's that the plant learns a foreign language, and then broadcasts something in that language to spread propaganda that 'this is a bad place'. Plants mess with nematodes' communications system to drive them away."

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Better Earth

The 'desert' in the middle of the Pacific Ocean

Peter Dockrill
Science Alert
Sun, 12 Jan 2020 12:00 UTC
South Pacific Gyre
© (MPI Marine Microbiology/YouTube)South Pacific Gyre
In the centre of the South Pacific, there's a place as far away from land as anyone on Earth could ever hope to get. The ocean is different there.

These distant waters lie at the heart of the South Pacific Gyre, the centre of which holds the 'oceanic pole of inaccessibility': the ocean's remotest extreme, aka Point Nemo (a name meaning 'no-one'), famous otherwise for being a spacecraft cemetery.

But aside from the ghosts of burnt-up satellites, what dwells under these far-off waves?

Not much, scientists have long thought. Despite taking up 10 percent of the ocean's surface, the South Pacific Gyre (SPG) - the largest of Earth's five giant ocean-spanning current systems - is generally considered a 'desert' in terms of marine biology.

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Microscope 1

You're as old as your microbiome? The bacteria in your gut may reveal your true age

Emily Mullin
Science
Sat, 11 Jan 2020 14:44 UTC
bacteria
© Dennis Kunkel Microscopy/Science SourceBacteroides are the most common bacteria species found in the human intestinal tract.
The billions of bacteria that call your gut home may help regulate everything from your ability to digest food to how your immune system functions. But scientists know very little of how that system, known as the microbiome, changes over time — or even what a "normal" one looks like. Now, researchers studying the gut bacteria of thousands of people around the globe have come to one conclusion: The microbiome is a surprisingly accurate biological clock, able to predict the age of most people within years.

To discover how the microbiome changes over time, longevity researcher Alex Zhavoronkov and colleagues at InSilico Medicine, a Rockville, Maryland-based artificial intelligence startup, examined more than 3600 samples of gut bacteria from 1165 healthy individuals living across the globe. Of the samples, about a third were from people aged 20 to 39, another third were from people aged 40 to 59, and the final third were from people aged 60 to 90.

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Chalkboard

Scientists have built a miniature particle accelerator on a silicon chip

Sophie Bushwick
Scientific American
Sat, 04 Jan 2020 01:02 UTC
miniature particle accelerator
© Neil SapraAs electrons flow through this channel etched in a silicon chip, laser light (shown in yellow and purple) accelerates the particles to high speeds.
The device uses lasers to accelerate electrons along an etched channel

In a full-scale particle accelerator, electrons fly along a kilometers-long path as microwaves bombard them, boosting the particles to near light speed. Such a high-energy electron beam, produced at facilities such as California's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, enables a variety of experiments, including capturing extremely detailed images and probing the structures of molecules. But particle accelerators are expensive, require scientists to travel from locations all over the world and cannot accommodate all the researchers who submit requests to book time. To make these devices more accessible, a team at Stanford University developed a laser-driven particle accelerator that fits on a tiny silicon chip — and that could eventually be scaled up to produce a beam with as much energy as SLAC's.

"The idea of using lasers in accelerators goes all the way back to the year the laser was invented, 1960," says Robert Byer, a Stanford researcher who has been working on this concept since 1974. Lasers produce electromagnetic waves with much shorter wavelengths than the microwaves used in a full-scale accelerator, which means they can accelerate electrons moving through a much smaller space. "The size of these devices is uncannily small," Byer says. The electrons in the new accelerator, for example, travel along a channel that is about three one-thousandths of a millimeter wide — around half the width of a human red blood cell.
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X

Russian journals retract more than 800 papers after 'bombshell' investigation

Dalmeet Singh Chawla
Science Magazine
Wed, 08 Jan 2020 17:34 UTC
russian academy sciences
© ISTOCK.COM/MORDOLFFThe Russian Academy of Sciences is trying to improve ethical standards in publishing.
Academic journals in Russia are retracting more than 800 papers following a probe into unethical publication practices by a commission appointed by the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS). The moves come in the wake of several other queries suggesting the vast Russian scientific literature is riddled with plagiarism, self-plagiarism, and so-called gift authorship, in which academics become a co-author without having contributed any work.

The RAS commission's preliminary report documenting the problems and journals' responses to them is "a bombshell," says Gerson Sher, a former staffer at the U.S. National Science Foundation and the author of a recent book on U.S.-Russia science cooperation. The report, released yesterday, "will reinforce the suspicions and fears of many — that their country is not going down the right path in science and that it's damaging its own reputation," says Sher, who applauds RAS for commissioning the investigation.

Russia's roughly 6000 academic journals, the vast majority published in Russian, are popular among the country's academics. A 2019 study found that Russian authors publish far more in domestic journals than, for instance, their counterparts in Poland, Germany, or Indonesia. But standards are often low. In March 2018, for instance, Dissernet, a network aimed at cleaning up the Russian literature, identified more than 4000 cases of plagiarism and questionable authorship among 150,000 papers in about 1500 journals.

Comment: And it's not just Russia. Science fraud is a major industry everywhere you find scientists. Kudos to the RAS commission for putting in the time and effort to make the science scene a bit cleaner.

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Cow Skull

The brave new world of gene-edited farm animals

Pat Thomas
Organic Consumers Association
Wed, 08 Jan 2020 13:30 UTC
genetic animals
For decades, the biotech industry has spun a narrative around genetically engineered crops that could be summed up very simply as "jam tomorrow, instead of bread and butter today."

Sustained — and financed — largely on the promise of spectacular success at some unidentified point in the future, the research and development of new types of GMO foods, made with a whole host of new genetic engineering technologies, has gathered pace in recent years.

These days, without most people being aware of it, genetic engineering is spreading from the crops in the field to the animals in the barn.

Using new genome editing (sometimes referred to as "gene editing") techniques like CRISPR, biotech breeders are proposing to breed a brave new world of farm animals that don't get sick, don't feel pain and produce more meat, milk and eggs at a lower cost than ever before.

Comment: Gene-edited farm animals are coming...will you eat them?

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Brain

Study: Stem cells can rejuvenate brain function in old mice


EurekALERT!
Thu, 09 Jan 2020 07:48 UTC
mouse neural stem cells
© CRTDImage of neural stem cells and newborn neurons (green) artificially generated in the hippocampus and contacting mature cells (red) of the mouse brain.
We all will experience it at some point, unfortunately: The older we get the more our brains will find it difficult to learn and remember new things. What the reasons underlying these impairments are is yet unclear but scientists at the Center for Regenerative Therapies of TU Dresden (CRTD) wanted to investigate if increasing the number of stem cells in the brain would help in recovering cognitive functions, such as learning and memory, that are lost during ageing.

To investigate this, the research group led by Prof. Federico Calegari used a method developed in his lab to stimulate the small pool of neural stem cells that reside in the brain in order to increase their number and, as a result, to also increase the number of neurons generated by those stem cells. Surprisingly, additional neurons could survive and form new contacts with neighbouring cells in the brain of old mice. Next, the scientists examined a key cognitive ability that is lost, similarly in mice and in humans, during ageing: navigation.

It is well known that individuals learn to navigate in a new environment in a different way depending on whether they are young or old. When young, the brain can build and remember a cognitive map of the environment but this ability fades away in older brains. As an alternative solution to the problem, older brains without a cognitive map of the environment need to learn the fixed series of turns and twists that are needed to reach a certain destination. While the two strategies may superficially appear similar, only a cognitive map can allow individuals to navigate efficiently when starting from a new location or when in need of reaching a new destination.

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Galaxy

Astronomers spot distant galaxy group driving ancient cosmic makeover

Francis Reddy
NASA
Mon, 06 Jan 2020 07:34 UTC
Extended Groth Strip
© NASA, ESA and V. Tilvi (ASU)This composite of archival Hubble Space Telescope visible and near-infrared images shows a part of the Extended Groth Strip, a well-studied area located between the constellations Ursa Major and Boötes. The three galaxies of the EGS77 galaxy group, shown in the green circles, lie at a redshift of 7.7, which means we’re seeing the galaxies as they were when the universe was just 680 million years old. The image is 3.2 arcminutes across.
An international team of astronomers funded in part by NASA has found the farthest galaxy group identified to date. Called EGS77, the trio of galaxies dates to a time when the universe was only 680 million years old, or less than 5% of its current age of 13.8 billion years.

More significantly, observations show the galaxies are participants in a sweeping cosmic makeover called reionization. The era began when light from the first stars changed the nature of hydrogen throughout the universe in a manner akin to a frozen lake melting in the spring. This transformed the dark, light-quenching early cosmos into the one we see around us today.
This animation shows EGS77's place in cosmic history, flies to the galaxies, and illustrates how ultraviolet light from their stars create bubbles of ionized hydrogen around them. Credits: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
"The young universe was filled with hydrogen atoms, which so attenuate ultraviolet light that they block our view of early galaxies," said James Rhoads at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, who presented the findings on Jan. 5 at the 235th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Honolulu. "EGS77 is the first galaxy group caught in the act of clearing out this cosmic fog."

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