Science & TechnologyS


Beaker

UK ethics panel gives cautious green-light to DNA altered babies

Ian Sample
The Guardian
Tue, 17 Jul 2018 06:01 UTC
designer babies, DNA altered babies
The creation of babies whose DNA has been altered to give them what parents perceive to be the best chances in life has received a cautious green light in a landmark report from a leading UK ethics body.

The Nuffield Council on Bioethics said that changing the DNA of a human embryo could be "morally permissible" if it was in the future child's interests and did not add to the kinds of inequalities that already divide society.

The report does not call for a change in UK law to permit genetically altered babies, but instead urges research into the safety and effectiveness of the approach, its societal impact, and a widespread debate of its implications.

"It is our view that genome editing is not morally unacceptable in itself," said Karen Yeung, chair of the Nuffield working group and professor of law, ethics and informatics at the University of Birmingham. "There is no reason to rule it out in principle."

But the report drew immediate criticism from some quarters, with one lobby group accusing the authors of opening the door to the unrestricted use of heritable genetic engineering, and an age of genetic haves and have-nots.

Comment: Meanwhile, scientists and researchers haven't been waiting for ethics committees to opine on the morality of DNA editing; they're going full steam ahead and to hell with the consequences:

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Microscope 1

CRISPR technology used to create cancer cells that slay their own kin

Laurel Hamers
Science News
Wed, 11 Jul 2018 16:31 UTC
CRISPR killer cancer cells
© Khalid Shah lab/CSTIGene-edited cancer cells (green) release a protein deadly to other tumor cells (red).
The technique reduced the size of tumors, a study in mice finds

Using gene editing, scientists have hoodwinked tumor cells into turning against their own kind.

Cancer cells circulating in the bloodstream have something of a homing instinct, able to find and return to the tumor where they originated. To capitalize on that ability, researchers engineered these roving tumor cells to secrete a protein that triggers a death switch in resident tumor cells they encounter. The cancer-fighting cancer cells also have a built-in suicide switch - so the weaponized cells self-destruct before they can start tumors of their own, the team reports in the July 11 Science Translational Medicine.

The new study isn't the first attempt to fight cancer with cancer. Previous research has used circulating tumor cells to deliver cancer-killing viruses to noncirculating tumor cells, for example. But the new approach uses a gene-editing technology called CRISPR/Cas9 to manipulate the offensive-line cancer cells and give them more sophisticated properties, such as the ability to self-destruct once no longer needed.
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Archaeology

Newly discovered dinosaur fossil could explain how Diplodocus evolved to become so massive

Frank Swain
New Scientist
Mon, 09 Jul 2018 00:00 UTC
dinosaur named Ingentia
© Cecilia ApaldettiThe new fossils belonged to a dinosaur that has been named Ingentia
Diplodocus is the largest creature to have walked, but not much is known about how it evolved such proportions. A new fossil challenges current ideas about the path to giant dinosaurs.

Cecilia Apaldetti and her colleagues at the National University of San Juan, Argentina, discovered a previously unknown dinosaur in north-west Argentina within a formation that dates to the late Triassic, around 220 million years ago. The researchers have christened it Ingentia prima, and placed it in a group of early sauropodomorphs called the lessemsaurids.

The lessemsaurids are distant relatives of giant sauropods like Diplodocus, and developed into giants around 50 million years before Dipolodocus. Although nowhere near as big as the 50-tonne Dipolodocus, Ingentia, short-necked and walking on two legs, still weighed up to 10 tonnes.
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Cassiopaea

NASA cooked best evidence for life on Mars 40 years ago

Shannon Hall
New Scientist
Tue, 10 Jul 2018 12:00 UTC
Mars landers
© NASA/GSFCEven Mars landers make mistakes
NASA recently announced its Curiosity rover had discovered complex organic molecules - key raw materials for life as we know it - on the surface of Mars. But now it seems a previous NASA probe may have made the same discovery more than 40 years ago, then accidentally burned it up.

In 1976, NASA's twin Viking landers conducted the first experiments that searched for organic matter on the Red Planet. Researchers had long known that all planets receive a steady rain of carbon-rich micrometeorites and dust from space, meaning that Mars should be smothered in organic molecules. But the Viking landers found nothing, leaving researchers dumbstruck.

"It was just completely unexpected and inconsistent with what we knew," says Chris McKay at NASA's Ames Research Centre in Mountain View, California.

Haunted by Mars's missing molecules, researchers proposed one explanation after another, but none seemed to fit - until yet another probe came into play.

Comment: The evidence suggest that space is teaming with life:

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Microscope 2

'Unprecedented': Genetic researchers reverse wrinkles, gray hair and balding in mice

Jennifer Harper
The Washington Times
Fri, 20 Jul 2018 00:01 UTC
dna mouse genetic sequence
© NIHImage courtesy of the National Human Genome Research Institute, a federal agency within the National Institutes of Health.
Science has made mice look good by reversing age-related wrinkles and hair loss at the genetic level. Humanity could get a similar make-over in the future.

"Wrinkled skin and hair loss are hallmarks of aging. What if they could be reversed?" asked researchers at the University of Alabama at Birmingham - who appear to have accomplished that feat, according to the research team.

They introduced a specific gene mutation on a test mouse, which prompted a change in profound appearance. Within four weeks, the mouse had developed wrinkled skin and extensive, visible hair loss. When regular function was restored within the gene by turning off the culprit mutation, the mouse returned to a previous life of smooth skin and luxurious fur only two months later - deemed "indistinguishable" from a healthy mouse of the same age.

Comment: Something seems off here. They introduce a genetic mutation that causes signs of aging. They turn off that mutation and the signs of aging disappear. This doesn't seem like a profound discovery. They have yet to show that its this same gene that causes the signs of aging we see naturally in aging humans. It seems rather unlikely, actually.

See also:

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Microscope 1

How viruses cooperate to defeat CRISPR

Ed Young
The Atlantic
Thu, 19 Jul 2018 18:22 UTC
Phages attached to a bacterial cell
© GRAHAM BEARDS / WIKIMEDIAPhages attached to a bacterial cell
Some weaken their hosts' immune systems by sacrificing themselves in kamikaze fashion, paving the way for successful infections later.

No single wolf can take down a bison on its own, but the pack has strength in numbers. A lone army ant is little threat, but an entire colony is a mighty destructive force. The natural world abounds with examples of predators that cooperate to take down their prey. And such teamwork also exists at a microscopic scale, among things that some scientists wouldn't even classify as alive: viruses.

Most viruses don't infect humans; instead, they target bacteria. These viruses, known as phages, are like miniature syringes. They commandeer bacteria by landing on them and injecting their genetic material inside. But bacteria can defend themselves from these incursions. They can store phage genes within their own DNA to build up a dossier of enemies past. They then use this cached information to guide destructive, scissor-like enzymes, which seek out any matching viruses and slice them up.
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Info

Did a rogue star alter our Solar System?

Bob Yirka
Phys Org
Fri, 20 Jul 2018 06:43 UTC
Rogue Star Disturbance
© arXiv:1807.02960 [astro-ph.GA]Effect of a prograde, parabolic fly-by of a star with a) M=0.5 M, b) M2= 1, M and c) M2= 5 M that is inclined by 60 degree and has a angle of periastron equal zero. The perihelion distance is always chosen in such a way as to lead to a 30-35 AU disc. The top row indicates the eccentricity distribution of the matter with a central area of most particles on circular orbits and more eccentric orbits at larger distances form the Sun. The eccentricities are indicated by the different colours given in the bar. The origin of the different eccentricity populations in the original disc can be seen in bottom row, where matter indicated in grey becomes unbound from the Sun. Note that in c) the path of the perturber is not visible because it is outside the shown frame.
A team of researchers from the Max-Planck Institute and Queen's University has used new information to test a theory that suggests a rogue star passed close enough to our solar system millions of years ago to change its configuration. The group has written a paper describing their ideas and have posted it on the arXiv preprint server.

In recent years, space scientists have begun to suspect that something out of the ordinary happened to our solar system during its early years. Many have begun to wonder why there is not as much material in the outer solar system as logic would suggest. Also, why is Neptune so much more massive than Uranus, which is closer to the sun? And why do so many of the smaller objects in the outer solar system have such oddly shaped orbits? In addressing such questions, many space scientists have begun to wonder if a star might have wandered by during the early years of the solar system-coming just close enough to pull some of the objects in the outer parts of the solar system from their prior positions.

The idea of a rogue star has been debated for some time, but the theory has not been embraced because of the timing-if a star had wandered by, it would have been approximately 10 million years after the birth of our galaxy. But objects in the outer solar system would have still just been forming, making it unlikely that they would have been impacted by a rogue star.
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Info

Weird sound waves discovered in quantum liquids

Lisa Zyga
Phys Org
Fri, 20 Jul 2018 06:36 UTC
Sound waves in water
© Hinrich Oltmanns, Pexels.com
Ordinary sound waves-small oscillations of density-can propagate through all fluids, causing the molecules in the fluid to compress at regular intervals. Now physicists have theoretically shown that in one-dimensional quantum fluids not one, but two types of sound waves can propagate. Both types of waves move at approximately the same speed, but are combinations of density waves and temperature waves.

The physicists, Konstantin Matveev at Argonne National Laboratory and Anton Andreev at the University of Washington, Seattle, have published a paper on the hybrid sound waves in quantum liquids in a recent issue of Physical Review Letters.

"One-dimensional liquids have fascinating quantum properties that have been studied by physicists for decades," Matveev told Phys.org. "Quite surprisingly, we have been able to show that even such an essentially classical phenomenon as sound is also very unusual in these liquids. Our work implies that even the simplest classical properties of a fluid can be strongly affected by its quantum nature."
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Bad Guys

Pentagon wants a 'neural interface' that brings mind-controlled tech to troops

Jack Corrigan
Nextgov
Sat, 21 Jul 2018 05:07 UTC
pentagono
The Defense Department's research arm is working on a project that connects human operators' brains to the systems they're controlling-and vice versa.

The idea of humans controlling machines with their minds has spun off sci-fi blockbusters like "Pacific Rim" and entire subgenres of foreign film, but while today skyscraper-sized fighting robots exist only on the big screen, the Pentagon is building technology that could one day make them a reality.

Today, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is selecting teams to develop a "neural interface" that would both allow troops to connect to military systems using their brainwaves and let those systems transmit back information directly to users' brains.

Comment: Further reading:

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Telescope

Earth-based telescope takes image of Neptune sharper than Hubble


RT
Wed, 18 Jul 2018 23:50 UTC
neptune high def
© ESO/P. Weilbacher (AIP)
An incredible super-sharp image of planet Neptune has shown just how far earthbound telescope technology has come, producing an image quality that rivals that of NASA's Hubble Space Telescope.

The crisp, clear photo was made possible because of a new system of lasers installed in the European Southern Observatory's (ESO) Very Large Telescope (VLT), located in Chile.

The MUSE/GALACSI adaptive optics system allows the telescope to correct the effects of atmospheric turbulence and create sharper spatial images.

The newly released photo of Neptune demonstrates the telescope's greater capabilities, showing that it is now possible to capture images from the ground at visible wavelengths that are sharper than those taken by Hubble, a telescope that orbits the earth.

Comment:

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