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Algal 'mutant' library lends insights into genes for photosynthesis

Catherine Zandonella
Princeton University
Mon, 18 Mar 2019 12:40 UTC
algae dna

To build the library, researchers grew tens of thousands of strains of algae in plastic plates. The project, which took nine years, allows researchers to explore genes involved in photosynthesis and other aspects of plant biology. Photo courtesy of the researchers
It isn't easy being green. It takes thousands of genes to build the photosynthetic machinery that plants need to harness sunlight for growth. And yet, researchers don't know exactly how these genes work.

Now a team led by Princeton University researchers has constructed a public "library" to help researchers to find out what each gene does. Using the library, the team identified 303 genes associated with photosynthesis including 21 newly discovered genes with high potential to provide new insights into this life-sustaining biological process. The study was published this week in Nature Genetics.

"The part of the plant responsible for photosynthesis is like a complex machine made up of many parts, and we want to understand what each part does," said Martin Jonikas, assistant professor of molecular biology at Princeton. "This library, we hope, will be one of the foundations that people will build on to make the next generation of discoveries."

Unlocking the role of each gene could allow researchers to engineer plants to grow more quickly, potentially meeting future world food needs. Plants could also potentially be altered to absorb more carbon dioxide, helping to address climate challenges.

Comment: Like the flagellum, it appears that a plant's mechanism for photosynthesis is also composed of many parts so crucial to its function that one could say that it is irreducibly complex. If that's the case, this lends even more weight to the theory of intelligent design and not 'happenstance by random chance', aka the Darwinian theory of evolution. See also:

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Gear

CNN spawns more faux news - neglects to fact-check report on meteor explosion over Bering Sea

Anthony Watts
Watts Up With That
Mon, 18 Mar 2019 00:00 UTC
You may have heard that NASA announced over the weekend at a conference that a large meteor exploded in the upper atmosphere over the Bering Sea on December 18th, 2018, which had gone unnoticed due to the location of entry. Quick to capitalize on that story, CNN rushed to report it, and like the meteor, bombed in the process.

Here's the headline:

CNN report Dec 2018 meteor bering sea
And here is the text of the report, note the highlight:

CNN report Bering Sea meteor December 2018

Comment: The Guardian managed to get it right the first time: HUGE meteor exploded over Russia's Far East in December last year - Blast was 10 times more powerful than Hiroshima

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Info

New AI turns crappy sketches into photorealistic masterworks

K.S. Anthony
Digital Journal
Tue, 19 Mar 2019 09:39 UTC
AI Photoshop
© Screenshot NVIDIA/YouTube
No matter how much time some people spend lulled into quiet artistic contemplation by syndicated episodes of The Joy of Painting with Bob Ross, their efforts will never be better than an acrylic on canvas nightmare you might find in a thrift shop hidden under a soiled rug. The ability to transfer onto a paper what one sees either in one's mind or with one's eyes is, after all, a skill that seems to require equal parts diligence, discipline, and DNA. Some people just take to it. Others... not so much.

As with so many other first world problems, however, technology has leveled the playing field. NVIDIA Research has developed GauGAN (yes, that's an intentional reference to the post-impressionist painter Paul Gauguin): a deep learning model that allows you to turn the most basic of sketches into photorealistic masterpieces that Ansel Adams would envy. We're talking WAY beyond Bob Ross (Rest In Paint, sir) here.
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Better Earth

People are able to sense Earth's magnetic field, brain waves suggest

Martha Temming
Science News
Mon, 18 Mar 2019 01:05 UTC
Earth magnet field
© VCHAL/Shutterstock
ANIMAL MAGNETISM Like birds, bacteria and other creatures with an ability known as magnetoreception, humans can sense Earth’s magnetic field (illustrated), a new study suggests.
A new analysis of people's brain waves when surrounded by different magnetic fields suggests that people have a "sixth sense" for magnetism.

Birds, fish and some other creatures can sense Earth's magnetic field and use it for navigation. Scientists have long wondered whether humans, too, boast this kind of magnetoreception. Now, by exposing people to an Earth-strength magnetic field pointed in different directions in the lab, researchers from the United States and Japan have discovered distinct brain wave patterns that occur in response to rotating the field in a certain way.

These findings, reported in a study published online March 18 in eNeuro, offer evidence that people do subconsciously respond to Earth's magnetic field - although it's not yet clear exactly why or how our brains use this information.

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Telescope

Russia-US ready to search for life traces on Venus


RT
Tue, 19 Mar 2019 09:18 UTC
Venus
© AFP PHOTO/NASA/HANDOUT
An image of Venus taken on February 5, 1974, by NASA's Mariner 10 mission.
There is a good chance that simple bacteria populate the atmosphere of Venus, a Russian scientist told local media. A joint US-Russian space mission planned for 2026 is expected to look for life traces in the planet's clouds.

Venus is the hottest planet in the solar system as temperatures on its surface can reach a staggering 465 degrees Celsius (870 degrees Fahrenheit). However, simple forms of life may still have survived in the atmosphere, according to Ludmila Zasova, co-chair of the joint Russian-US 'Venera-D' ("Venus-D") project.

Clouds on Venus are mostly made of sulfuric acid but there's also 15-20 percent of water in them, the scientist said, adding that temperature and atmospheric pressure in the lower layer of the cloud cover is similar to those on Earth.
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Rocket

Russia's Roscosmos says 'ready to help' NASA if construction of Soyuz alternative is delayed


RT
Tue, 19 Mar 2019 03:59 UTC
The Soyuz MS-12 spacecraft
© Reuters / Shamil Zhumatov
FILE PHOTO: The Soyuz MS-12 spacecraft
Soyuz rockets stand ready to deliver astronauts to space if US manned spacecraft development is delayed, Roscosmos said, after NASA announced plans to purchase additional seats onboard the Russian spacecraft.

"We are ready to help American partners in case trials of their new manned spacecraft are delayed," chief of the Russian Space Agency Roscosmos Dmitry Rogozin said on Twitter. "We agree with NASA's proposal to use both US and Russian spacecraft for delivering mixed international crews to the [International Space Station] ISS in the future."
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Galaxy

Guess who Earth's closest neighbor is? Hint: It's not Venus

Tom Stockman, Gabriel Monroe and Samuel Cordner
Physics Today
Tue, 19 Mar 2019 15:29 UTC
solar system
© NASA
An illustration of the solar system.
Calculations and simulations confirm that on average, Mercury is the nearest planet to Earth-and to every other planet in the solar system.

Quick: Which planet is closest to Earth? Ask an astronomer or a search engine, and you'll probably hear that though the situation changes frequently, Venus is the closest when averaged over time. Several educational websites, such as The Planets and Space Dictionary, publish the distance between each pair of planets, and they all show that Venus is nearest to Earth on average. They're all wrong. NASA literature even tells us Venus is "our closest planetary neighbor," which is true if we are talking about which planet has the closest approach to Earth but not if we want to know which planet is closest on average.

As it turns out, by some phenomenon of carelessness, ambiguity, or groupthink, science popularizers have disseminated information based on a flawed assumption about the average distance between planets. Using a mathematical method that we devised, we determine that when averaged over time, Earth's nearest neighbor is in fact Mercury.
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Fireball 5

Debris from increased asteroids and comets? Dust ring discovered 'where it should not be' - in Mercury's orbit

Mike Wall
Space.com
Tue, 12 Mar 2019 00:15 UTC
Dust Ring around Mercury
© Mary Pat Hrybyk-Keith/NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
Artist's illustration showing several dust rings circling the sun, formed by the gravitational tugs of orbiting planets. Recently, scientists discovered a dust ring at Mercury's orbit and concluded that Venus' ring likely originates from a group of as-yet-undiscovered co-orbital asteroids.
Two dusty discoveries may shake up our understanding of the inner solar system.

Mercury shares its supertight orbit with a big ring of wandering dust, a recent study suggests. And a cloud of as-yet-undiscovered asteroids likely gave rise to a similar halo in Venus' neighborhood, another new paper concludes.

"It's not every day you get to discover something new in the inner solar system," Marc Kuchner, a co-author of the Venus study and an astrophysicist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, said in a statement. "This is right in our neighborhood."

Comment: Do you see what they did there?

They discovered something that 'shouldn't' have been there.

So they 'made up a source for it', and backdated it to the 'beginning of time'.

Why?

To remove all 'shock' from the discovery of a freaking ring of asteroid/comet debris around the innermost planet in the solar system, thus maintaining the illusion that 'everything is as it is supposed to be, and all is fine.'

Repeat after us:

"We live in a stable universe where nothing ever changes..."

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Fire

Heat can act like a sound wave when moving through graphite

Jennifer Ouellette
Ars Technica
Sat, 16 Mar 2019 20:41 UTC
pencil graphite
© Jean-Christophe Verhaegen/AFP/Getty Images
Graphite rods ready to be encased in wood to make pencils. MIT scientists have shown that heat behaves like sound when moving through graphite.
A boiling tea kettle diffuses its heat to gradually warm surrounding air, yet it will still be the warmest region even as it, too, slowly cools. But what if the kettle cooled down to room temperature almost instantly, losing its heat in a wave traveling through the material close to the speed of sound? MIT researchers have observed this rare, counterintuitive phenomenon-known as "second sound"-in graphite, the stuff of pencil lead. They described their results in a paper published earlier this week in Science.

Chances are you've never heard of the concept of "second sound," even though the phenomenon has been known for decades. "It's been confined to only a handful of materials that are really very low temperature," said co-author Keith Nelson, severely limiting its potential usefulness. There might be a paragraph or two on the topic in your average solid-state textbook, but the field "has been kind of a backwater."

Comment: More news on the science and power of waves:

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Brain

Lab-grown from human stem cells, these 'mini-brains' learned to control muscles of their own free will


RT
Tue, 19 Mar 2019 08:25 UTC
brain connections
© Pixabay / geralt
A miniature brain grown in a lab from human stem cells has developed a mind of its own - or at least enough awareness to send out neural 'tendrils' to connect to the spinal cord and muscle tissue of a mouse, then flex that muscle.

"We like to think of them as mini-brains on the move," said Madeline Lancaster of Cambridge University, who led the experiment with the Medical Research Council's Laboratory of Molecular Biology and published the results in Nature: Neuroscience.

The mini-brain is their most sophisticated "organoid" yet, approaching the complexity of a 12-16 week old fetus' brain. While the researchers claim it's "too small and primitive to have anything approaching thoughts, feelings or consciousness," there's no accurate way to measure consciousness, and the "organoid" has a couple million neurons - meaning it's operating with the same grey matter equipment as the average cockroach.

After placing a tiny 1mm-long piece of spinal cord and back muscle from a mouse next to the germinating brain-blob, the researchers watched (presumably in awe) as the brain shot out neuronal connections to intertwine with the spine, eventually sending out electrical impulses and causing the mouse muscle to twitch.

Comment: See also:

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