Science & TechnologyS


Beaker

New science says that DNA is not the all powerful molecule biologists make it out to be

Jonathan Latham, PhD
Independent Science News
Mon, 06 Feb 2017 14:01 UTC
DNA string
Test your understanding of the living world with this simple question. What kind of biomolecule is found in all living organisms? If your answer is "DNA", you are incorrect. The mistake is very forgiveable though. The standard English-language biology education casts DNA (DeoxyriboNucleic Acid) as the master molecule of life, coordinating and controlling most, if not all, living functions. This master molecule concept is popular. It is plausible. It is taught in every university and high school. But it is wrong. DNA is no master controller, nor is it even at the centre of biology. Instead, science overwhelmingly shows that life is self-organised and thus the pieces are in place for biology to undergo the ultimate paradigm shift.

The mythologising of DNA

Highly respected scientists make very strong claims for the powers of DNA. In his autobiography, Nobel Laureate Kary Mullis called it "The King of molecules" and "The big one". Maybe he read DNA: The Secret of Life, a popular science book that calls DNA the molecule that "holds the key to the very nature of living things". Its author should know. He is Nobel Laureate, James Watson, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA. Even institutions have strong opinions when it comes to DNA; the website of the US National Institutes of Health claims "Genes are at the center of everything that makes us human".

My edition of The Secret of Life features on its back cover Eric Lander. Lander is the celebrated brains behind modern human genetics. He is also the head of the Broad Institute at MIT. In his blurb, Lander endorses "The secret of life" trope. Just below him on the jacket is Professor of genetics Mary-Claire King. She writes: "This is the story of DNA and therefore the story of life, history, sex, money, drugs, and still-to-be-revealed secrets." According to Prof. King, DNA is life.

The Watson view of genetics dominates education too. The standard US high school biology textbook "Life", of which we own the 1997 edition, frames the entirety of biology around DNA, thereby giving it the biochemical status of life's centrepiece.
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Info

New Zealand may be part of a submerged continent

Anton Nilsson
New Zealand Herald
Thu, 16 Feb 2017 20:55 UTC
Zealandia
© GSA TodayZealandia, according to scientists, includes New Zealand and New Caledonia.
Scientists say they have identified a new continent, and called it Zealandia.

In a new paper, a team of 11 geologists have proposed that a region of the Pacific Ocean east of Australia and containing New Zealand and New Caledonia, be considered a continent.

Geographically speaking, six continents are recognised: Africa, Antarctica, Australia, Eurasia, North America, and South America. Eurasia is the geographical landmass that includes Europe and Asia.

At 4.9 million square kilometres, Zealandia would be Earth's smallest continent.

It is also the "youngest, thinnest and most submerged" of the continents, as 94 per cent of the landmass is submerged, the geologists wrote.

In the paper, titled Zealandia: Earth's Hidden Continent, the geologists argue that Zealandia has all four attributes necessary to be considered a continent.
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Fireball

Rare asteroid discovered along the orbit of Uranus

Ken Croswell
New Scientist
Thu, 16 Feb 2017 18:58 UTC
Asteroid orbiting Uranus
© NASA/Erich Karkoschka (Univ. Arizona)Now with added Trojans.
A rare Trojan asteroid of Uranus has been found, following the same orbit as the planet. Its existence implies there could be many more of these companion asteroids, and that they are more common than we thought.

A Trojan asteroid orbits the sun 60 degrees ahead of or behind a planet. Jupiter and Neptune have numerous Trojans, many of which have been in place for billions of years. These primordial rocks hold information about the solar system's birth, and NASA has just announced plans to visit several of them in the 2020s and 2030s.

But Saturn and Uranus live in a rougher neighbourhood: the giant planets on either side of them yank Trojans away through their gravitational pull. So Saturn has no known Trojan, and Uranus had only one.

In July, though, astronomers reported a new asteroid, named 2014 YX49, that shares Uranus's orbital period of 84 years. Now computer simulations of the solar system by brothers Carlos and Raul de la Fuente Marcos at the Complutense University of Madrid, Spain, indicate the asteroid is a Uranus Trojan. The simulations show that the asteroid has maintained its position ahead of Uranus for thousands of years.

"It is bigger, probably twice as big as the first one," says Carlos. The new asteroid is brighter than the first, but its exact size depends on how much light its surface reflects. If it reflects half the sunlight striking it, it's 40 kilometres across; if it reflects 5 per cent, its diameter is 120 kilometres.
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Brain

Brain scans could detect high-risk autism before the age of two


RT
Thu, 16 Feb 2017 13:12 UTC
Brain scan autism
© Rick Wilking/ Reuters
Scientists believe that there may be a correlation between brain growth visible on brain scans and the eventual development of autism spectrum disorder. These MRIs could potentially identify high-risk autism before the age of two.

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) affects approximately 3.5 million Americans and is most likely to be identified by the age of four. However, a study published Wednesday in Nature, claims to have possibly discovered a formula to identify children with a high-risk for autism before they start to seriously lag in their social development.

ASD is a blanket term for a wide range of social impairments, from slightly to seriously disabling. As a result, children with autism often fall behind in developmental milestones related to social, communication and language skills.

The study claims that the brain scans revealed "hyperexpansions" of the brain surface in the first 12 months were a common feature in babies who would go on to develop ASD. The expansion was often followed by an increase in brain volume overgrowth that, according to the study, "was linked to the emergence and severity of autistic social deficits."

Comment: While early identification and treatment will no doubt be beneficial, the bigger question scientists continue to dance around are the reasons for the explosion of autism:

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Hearts

Experiments suggest that monkeys and dogs have a human-like sense of morality

Bob Yirka
PhysOrg
Wed, 15 Feb 2017 00:00 UTC
doggie observation
A team of researchers from Kyoto University has found that dogs and capuchin monkeys watch how humans interact with one another and react less positively to those that are less willing to help or share. In their paper published in the journal Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, the team describes a series of experiments they carried out with several dogs and capuchin monkeys and what they discovered about both species social preferences.

Common sense suggests that most people prefer to deal with other people who are fair and in some cases, helpful. In this new effort, the researchers sought to learn if the same might be true of dogs and capuchin monkeys regarding human interactions. To that end, they set up three experiments designed to test how dogs and monkeys reacted to humans behaving rudely.
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Seismograph

Southern California's Ventura-Pitas Point fault line has potential to trigger earthquakes, tsunamis


RT
Wed, 15 Feb 2017 19:22 UTC
S. California
© Patrick T. Fallon / Reuters
New research has revealed that a fault in Southern California which was only identified as active in the 1980s has the potential to trigger devastating earthquakes and tsunamis along America's south west coast.

The Ventura-Pitas Point Fault runs under California from Ventura city through the Santa Barbara Channel and beneath Santa Barbara and Goleta. It also runs offshore, meaning it may be capable of generating tsunamis.

Since it was identified as a potentially dangerous fault in the late 1980s, there have been decades of debate about its exact location and its underground geometry. Initial theories assumed the fault was slightly dipping, or that it had two severe tilting sections with a flat section in between, similar to a staircase.

A new study published in Geophysical Research Letters states that the fault has the staircase-like geometry, meaning it is closer to the surface and would likely cause more damage during an earthquake than previously thought.
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Beaker

What could go wrong? U.S. National Academy of Sciences advocates use of gene editing tools to modify human DNA


Sputnik
Wed, 15 Feb 2017 00:00 UTC
designer babies, gene editing human DNA
A US National Academy of Sciences report has said gene-editing tools should eventually be used to modify human DNA - does their ruling open the door for future "designer babies"? Some may have reservations about that eventuality, but a bioethics professor has told Sputnik scientists have a moral duty to pursue that possibility.

In a report, the committee of scientists, entrepreneurs, ethicists and patient advocates said human genomes could in future be edited to replace faulty genetic information from a parent with a third person's healthy DNA. It stresses that the technique should only be used in the most serious cases, where no other options are available, and conducted under strict guidelines with stringent oversight.

Comment: God's red pencil? CRISPR and the myths of precise genome editing
For the benefit of those parts of the world where public acceptance of biotechnology is incomplete, a public relations blitz is at full tilt. It concerns an emerging set of methods for altering the DNA of living organisms. "Easy DNA Editing Will Remake the World. Buckle Up"; "We Have the Technology to Destroy All Zika Mosquitoes"; and "CRISPR: gene editing is just the beginning." (CRISPR is short for CRISPR/cas9, which is short for Clustered Regularly-Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats/CRISPR associated protein 9; Jinek et al., 2012. It is a combination of a guide RNA and a protein that can cut DNA.)

The hubris is alarming; but the more subtle element of the propaganda campaign is the biggest and most dangerous improbability of them all: that CRISPR and related technologies are "genome editing" (Fichtner et al., 2014). That is, they are capable of creating precise, accurate and specific alterations to DNA.

[...]

Why is this discussion of precision important? Because for the last seventy years all chemical and biological technologies, from genetic engineering to pesticides, have been built on a myth of precision and specificity. They have all been adopted under the pretense that they would function without side effects or unexpected complications. Yet the extraordinary disasters and repercussions of DDT, leaded paint, agent orange, atrazine, C8, asbestos, chlordane, PCBs, and so on, when all is said and done, have been stories of the steady unraveling of a founding myth of precision and specificity.


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Bizarro Earth

The world's deepest ocean trenches are loaded with pollution


The Economist
Mon, 13 Feb 2017 17:04 UTC
organism
NOT far off the coast of Guam lies the deepest point on Earth's surface, the Mariana trench. Its floor is 10,994 metres below sea level. If Mount Everest were flipped upside down into it, there would still be more than 2km of clear water between the mountain's base and the top of the ocean. Such isolation has led many to assume that it and similar seabed trenches will be among the few remaining pristine places on the planet. However, a study led by Alan Jamieson of Newcastle University in England, has shown that nothing could be further from the truth. As Dr Jamieson and his colleagues report this week in Nature Ecology and Evolution, trenches actually are loaded with pollutants.

Despite the cold, the darkness and the high pressure, ocean trenches are home to ecosystems similar in many ways to those found on other parts of the planet. In one important respect, though, they are different. This is where the energy that powers them comes from. In most ecosystems, sunlight fuels the growth of plants which are then consumed by animals. In a few shallower parts of the ocean, hydrothermal vents provide energy-rich chemicals that form the basis of local food chains. No vents are known to exist below 5,000 metres, though, and no sunlight penetrates a trench. The organisms found in them thus depend entirely on dead organic material raining down upon them from far above.
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Bulb

Tiny, soft, transparent nanofabricated devices turned into ultrasensitive microphones

Julianne Hill
Phys.org
Mon, 13 Feb 2017 00:00 UTC
Micro-ring resonator detector
© Cheng SunThe tiny, transparent Micro-ring device can fit into a contact lens.
A tiny, transparent device that can fit into a contact lens has a bright future, potentially helping a range of scientific endeavors from biomedicine to geology.

Developed by Northwestern University scientists, the device, called the Micro-ring resonator detector, can determine the speed of the blood flow and the oxygen metabolic rate at the back of the eye. This information could help diagnose such common and debilitating diseases as macular degeneration and diabetes.

The Micro-ring device builds upon Professor Hao F. Zhang's groundbreaking work in 2006 to develop photoacoustic imaging, which combines sound and light waves to create images of biological materials. The imaging technique is being widely explored for both fundamental biological investigations and clinical diagnosis, from nanoscopic cellular imaging to human breast cancer screening.
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Info

Earth's magnetic field strength recorded in ancient clay jars

Amy Middleton
Cosmos Magazine
Tue, 14 Feb 2017 18:41 UTC
Ancient Pottery
© Oded LipschitsA stamped handle from Ramat Rahel. Such fragments are an archive of the strength of the Earth's magnetic field at the time they were made.
A collection of clay storage jar handles from ancient Judah - modern-day Jerusalem - is providing fresh insight into fluctuations in the Earth's magnetic field.

It's long been known that the magnetic field - extending from the centre of the planet out to about 65,000 kilometres above the surface - changes over time. The north and south poles shift to and fro over centuries, and every few hundred thousand years they even swap places.

Since the development of pottery, these movements have been inadvertently encoded in human artefacts. Clay contains small amounts of a mineral known as magnetite. When fired in a kiln, the magnetite transforms into a permanent record of the intensity and alignment of the magnetic field at that moment.

Today, movement in the magnetic fields are made accurately and easily, but recreating past shifts - a field known as archaeomagnetism - is confounded by, among other things, difficulties in accurately estimating the age of artefacts used in the dating process.

But now a research team led by Erez Ben-Yosef of Tel Aviv University in Israel has used samples from clay jars dating from between the eighth and second centuries BCE to produce extremely accurate measurements of field activity in the Levant.

The key to the team's precision lies in the welcome habit of the ancient Judeans of marking their jars with stamps specific to the ruling entities of the area. As rulers came and went, so too did the inscriptions.
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