Science & TechnologyS


Biohazard

'World-first' experimental mRNA herpes vaccine to be trialed on Asian elephants

Rachael Funnell
IFL Science
Thu, 11 Jul 2024 14:27 UTC
asian elephant
© Mogens Trolle / Shutterstock.comThe vaccine's development and funding got a helping hand from the company trying to de-extinct mammoths.
A deadly disease for baby Asian elephants is the target for an mRNA vaccine that has been administered to an elephant for the first time. Elephant endotheliotropic herpesvirus (EEHV) is the number one killer for Asian elephant calves living under managed care in North America and Europe, and is a significant threat for free-ranging populations. It has also been connected to a number of African elephant deaths in the United States.

EEHV is so deadly because it can cause hemorrhagic disease characterized by damaged blood vessels, bleeding, and organ failure. To prevent this, the EEHV mRNA vaccine exposes elephants to the viral proteins that enable the virus to enter the host's cells, effectively preparing them so that they can launch an immune attack should the same viral proteins come knocking again. This means their bodies can fight off EEHV before it's had a chance to take hold.

The world-first vaccine was developed by Dr Paul Ling of the Baylor College of Medicine in partnership with Houston Zoo, with a helping hand from a few unexpected places. There's Colossal Biosciences, the de-extinction giants trying to bring back mammoths and save a few endangered species along the way, and the COVID-19 vaccine.

Comment: Let's see how the animal recipients of the (non-mRNA) covid jab are doing:
Famous gorilla "Little Joe" has died suddenly from a heart attack in the Saint Louis Zoo. In September 2021, the Director of Animal Health, Sathya Chinnadurai, bragged about how all the zoo animals had been conditioned into 'voluntarily' accepting the experimental Zoetis COVID-19 shot without resistance, even though no animals contracted COVID-19 during the pandemic. Zoetis got its start as a subsidiary of Pfizer
And the mRNA jabs have been shown to be much worse than the non-mRNA.

It's perhaps not too much of a stretch to be concerned as to how this experiment will turn out. More so when one considers the 'success' that is being had with bird flu: EU orders 40 million bird flu vaccines for 15 countries, Finland to start injecting 'select groups'

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Blue Planet

Ancient crystals point to a surprisingly early start for plate tectonics

Paul Voosen
Science
Wed, 10 Jul 2024 20:31 UTC
ancient zircon date earth crust tectonics
© John W. ValleyTiny crystals called zircons, harvested from the Australian outback, suggest plate tectonics may have begun more than 4 billion years ago.
Hardy zircons suggest subduction of ocean crust began 4 billion years ago

After using a form of artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze some of the most ancient crystals on the planet, researchers have concluded that plate tectonics — Earth's geological machinery that floats giant slabs of crust across and sometimes into the mantle — began much earlier than many scientists had assumed.

The group's study finds evidence for its start more than 4 billion years ago, during the Hadean eon — just a few hundred million years after the planet's formation. The work suggests tectonics might have had an early hand in creating the first land and helping life begin, says Ross Mitchell, a geophysicist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences who co-authored the new study, which was published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "Hadean Earth would have been habitable," he contends.

Plate tectonics is generally accepted to have begun more than 3 billion years ago, after Earth had cooled enough to form a stagnant lid of crust capping an ultrahot mantle. As slabs of ocean crust began to fall into the mantle, they triggered volcanic eruptions, which created chains of islands that eventually bunched up into the first continents. Evidence for this picture comes from the oldest surviving continental interiors, which date to about 3.5 billion years ago. But modeling suggests the crustal movement could have started earlier, says Qian Yuan, a geodynamicist at the California Institute of Technology. "More and more [scientists] are proposing that there could have been Hadean plate tectonics," he says.

Comment: Zircons have proved to be mineral repositories useful in many lines of research, though they aren't without their issues.

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Info

A time crystal made of giant atoms


TU Wien
Mon, 08 Jul 2024 18:37 UTC
Researchers from TU Wien (Vienna, Austria) and Tsinghua University (Beijing, China) have created an extremely exotic state of matter. Its atoms have a diameter a hundred times larger than usual.
Large Atom
© TU Wien
A crystal is an arrangement of atoms that repeats itself in space, in regular intervals: At every point, the crystal looks exactly the same. In 2012, Nobel Prize winner Frank Wilczek raised the question: Could there also be a time crystal - an object that repeats itself not in space but in time? And could it be possible that a periodic rhythm emerges, even though no specific rhythm is imposed on the system and the interaction between the particles is completely independent of time?

For years, Frank Wilczek's idea has caused much controversy. Some considered time crystals to be impossible in principle, while others tried to find loopholes and realise time crystals under certain special conditions. Now, a particularly spectacular kind of time crystal has successfully been created at Tsinghua University in China, with the support from TU Wien in Austria. The team used laser light and very special types of atoms, namely Rydberg atoms, with a diameter that is several hundred times larger than normal. The results have now been published in the journal Nature Physics.
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Blue Planet

Starlings' migratory behavior found to be inherited, not learned

Froukje Rienks, Netherlands Institute of Ecology
Phys.org
Fri, 05 Jul 2024 23:14 UTC
starling migration
© Biology Letters (2024). DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2024.0217To find out how migrating birds find their way, sparrows were relocated from autumn stopovers along the Dutch North Sea coast to Switzerland (red, 1948–1957) and Spain (blue, 1959–1962).
Young, naïve starlings are looking for their wintering grounds independently of experienced conspecifics. Starlings are highly social birds throughout the year, but this does not mean that they copy the migration route from each other.

By revisiting a classic "displacement" experiment and by adding new data, a team of researchers at the Netherlands Institute of Ecology (NIOO-KNAW) and the Swiss Ornithological Institute (Vogelwarte Sempach) have settled a long-standing debate. Their findings are now published in the journal Biology Letters.

The question of how migratory birds locate their migration routes has intrigued mankind for centuries. Biologist Albert Perdeck from the Netherlands aimed to find answers when he displaced thousands of migrating starlings by plane from the Netherlands to Switzerland and Spain in the 1950s and 1960s.

Comment: For more on migration and how animals navigate the world, see: See also: Orangutan observed treating its own wound with medicinal plant for the first time

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Shoe

Hippos can actually become airborne when they run at full speed

Sanjana Gajbhiye
earth.com
Sat, 06 Jul 2024 18:00 UTC
hippo
You've seen them in zoos, maybe read about them, or have even watched Nat Geo documentaries, but how much do you really know about hippopotamuses? They're hefty, they're dangerous, and they wallow in water every chance they get. But did you know that hippos can run surprisingly fast? And when they do, all four of their feet are in the air.

Two evolutionary biomechanics specialists from the University of London's Royal Veterinary College, John Hutchinson and Emily Pringle, took to the hippo world to uncover some astonishing facts. With the aid of high-speed cameras, they filmed these colossal creatures running at full throttle.

Running speed of hippos

When you think of hippos, you probably envision a substantial, mostly inoffensive-looking creature, spending most of its time submerged in water.

However, these mammals, weighing up to 1,500 kg (3,307 lbs) for males and 1,300 kg (2,866 lbs) for females, are notoriously aggressive and can be deadly towards humans.

Their surprising agility for such massy beings has long been a source of intrigue. Some have even clocked speeds of up to 30 km/hr (18.6 mph).
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Muffin

Scientists discover new plants that could lead to 'climate-proof' chocolate


University College Cork
Wed, 03 Jul 2024 21:19 UTC
Chocolate
Scientists have found three new species that are close relatives to the plant from which chocolate is produced - a discovery that could pave the way for climate-proof chocolate.

The new species, discovered in the rain forests of South America, are closely related to Theobroma cacao, the tree that bears cocoa beans which are of tremendous economic importance.

The research team comprising scientists from University College Cork (UCC), the University of São Paulo and New York Botanical Garden say their finding is significant as it indicates that there is much work still to be done in characterising Earth's biodiversity.
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Cassiopaea

JWST detects carbon in ancient galaxy: Hints life emerged much earlier than thought

Amal Jos Chacko
Interesting Engineering
Sat, 08 Jun 2024 21:01 UTC
deep space image james webb space telescope JWST
© Webb Space TelescopeInfrared image from JWST taken by NIRCam for the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey program.
Using James Webb Space Telescope's powerful Near Infrared Spectrograph, a team detected carbon in an ancient galaxy.

The James Webb Space Telescope has detected traces of carbon in one of the earliest galaxies ever observed.

This discovery suggests that a key ingredient for life emerged much sooner than we previously thought — a mere 350 million years after the Big Bang.

The galaxy in question, GS-z12, is a very distant, high-redshift galaxy that existed when the universe was just a toddler. Using JWST's powerful Near Infrared Spectrograph (NIRSpec), an international team of astronomers analyzed the light from this ancient galaxy. They broke it down into a spectrum that revealed the unmistakable chemical fingerprint of carbon.
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Brain

Mouse research sheds new light on migraines: Study of 'brain blackout' offers clues

Miryam Naddaf
Nature
Fri, 05 Jul 2024 18:54 UTC
blackout migraines aura
© Tunatura/GettyAbout one-third of people who suffer from migraines experience a phenomenon known as aura before the headache.
The blinding headaches are poorly understood — a mouse study suggests that the content of spinal fluid is a trigger for pain.

For a billion people worldwide, the symptoms can be debilitating: throbbing head pain, nausea, blurred vision and fatigue that can last for days. But how brain activity triggers these severest of headaches — migraines — has long puzzled scientists.

A study in mice, published in Science on 4 July, now offers clues about the neurological events that spark migraines. It suggests that a brief brain 'blackout' — when neuronal activity shuts down — temporarily changes the content of the cerebrospinal fluid, the clear liquid that surrounds the brain and spinal cord. This altered fluid, researchers suggest, travels through a previously unknown gap in anatomy to nerves in the skull where it activates pain and inflammatory receptors, causing headaches.

Comment: More on migraine research:

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Moon

Americans really landed on the Moon - Roscosmos


RT
Thu, 04 Jul 2024 01:18 UTC
Moonguy
© HUM Images/Universal Images Group/Getty ImagesAstronaut Neil A. Armstrong, Apollo 11 mission commander, at the modular equipment storage assembly (MESA) of the Lunar Module Eagle on the historic first extravehicular activity (EVA) on the moon, July 20, 1969
Lunar soil samples shared with Soviet scientists are key evidence, according to the chief of the Russian space agency.

The head of Russia's Roscosmos space agency has weighed in on conspiracy theories surrounding the US Moon landings, insisting that there is no doubt that soil samples retrieved by the Americans during their Apollo missions actually came from the lunar surface.

Roscosmos chief Yury Borisov was questioned about whether American astronauts had actually landed on the Moon during a parliamentary session on Wednesday. The key piece of evidence that the Apollo missions were real, according to Borisov, is the fact that NASA shared soil samples from several manned flights with its Soviet colleagues.

"According to the expertise of our Academy of Sciences, the lunar soil turned out to be lunar indeed," Borisov reassured lawmakers, insisting that the samples were analyzed in numerous countries, not just the USSR.
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Bandaid

Ants in Florida perform life saving operations — the only animal other than humans known to do so

Jacklin Kwan
Live Science
Wed, 03 Jul 2024 14:00 UTC
Ant surgery
© Bart ZijlstraFlorida carpenter ants perform amuptations on nestmates when their legs are injured.
Ants in Florida perform life-saving surgery on their peers, scientists have discovered. They are only the second animal in the world known to do this — along with humans.

The researchers found that Florida carpenter ants (Camponotus floridanus) identify limb wounds on their nestmates, then treat them with either cleaning or amputation.

The team published its findings Tuesday (July 2) in the journal Current Biology.

"When we're talking about amputation behavior, this is literally the only case in which a sophisticated and systematic amputation of an individual by another member of its species occurs in the animal kingdom," study first author Erik Frank, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Würzburg in Germany, said in a statement.

In 2023, Frank's team discovered that an African ant species, Megaponera analis, can treat infected wounds in their nestmates with an antimicrobial substance produced in their glands. Florida carpenter ants do not have any equivalent glands, so the team wanted to find out how this species handles wounds in members of the colony.
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