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Better method to find the age of dogs in 'human years'

Heather Buschman
University of San Diego
Thu, 02 Jul 2020 19:54 UTC
By mapping molecular changes in the genome over time, UC San Diego researchers developed a formula to more accurately compare dog age to human age — a tool that could also help them evaluate how well anti-aging products work.

If there's one myth that has persisted through the years without much evidence, it's this: multiply your dog's age by seven to calculate how old they are in "human years." In other words, the old adage says, a four-year-old dog is similar in physiological age to a 28-year-old person.

But a new study by researchers at University of California San Diego School of Medicine throws that idea out the window. Instead, they created a formula that more accurately compares the ages of humans and dogs. The formula is based on the changing patterns of methyl groups in dog and human genomes — how many of these chemical tags and where they're located — as they age. Since the two species don't age at the same rate over their lifespans, it turns out it's not a perfectly linear comparison, as the 1:7 years rule-of-thumb would suggest.
Dog to Human Years
© Cell Press
To calculate your dog’s age in “human years” based on epigenetics, find the dog’s age along the bottom axis and trace your finger straight up until you reach the red curve. Then trace your finger straight over to the left to find the corresponding human age.
The new methylation-based formula, published July 2 in Cell Systems, is the first that is transferrable across species. More than just a parlor trick, the researchers say it may provide a useful tool for veterinarians, and for evaluating anti-aging interventions.
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Music

The western white-throated sparrow song that swept North America

Sarah Zhang
The Atlantic
Thu, 02 Jul 2020 17:01 UTC
white throated sparrow

The white-throated sparrow
Since 2000, a strange new type of song in white-throated sparrows has spread across the continent at stunning speed.

The birds were singing something strange.

Ken Otter and Scott Ramsay first noticed it in the early 2000s, when they were recording white-throated sparrows in Prince George, a city in western Canada. The birds are so ubiquitous across the country, and the male's song so distinct, that bird-watchers have put words to it: Oh sweet Canada, Canada, Canada. But the white-throated sparrows in Prince George were singing something different. They had lopped a note off Canada, so the song sounded more like Oh sweet Cana, Cana, Cana.

At first, Otter and Ramsay, biologists at the University of Northern British Columbia and Wilfrid Laurier University, respectively, thought they had simply discovered a new song dialect unique to sparrows in Prince George. But an even stranger pattern emerged when they and a small team of researchers spent the next two decades gathering archival recordings, crowdsourcing bird songs, and driving hundreds of miles through Canada to record white-throated sparrows. According to a new study out today, the song they first heard in Prince George had spread east across the country — at remarkable speed. By 2017, all white-throated sparrows in western Canada were singing the new song variant and half were singing it as far east as Ontario. Oh sweet Cana, Cana, Cana is taking over Canada.
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Nebula

Light flows like a river when shone through a soap bubble

Leah Crane
New Scientist
Wed, 01 Jul 2020 12:00 UTC
bubble light lazer
© Anatoly Patsyk, Uri Sivan, Mordechai Segev & Miguel A. Bandres
Light behaving strangely
Shine a beam of light through a soap bubble and it could behave in an unexpected way. The light may split into branches like a tree, creating many narrower beams in a phenomenon that could be used to study the curvature of space-time.

This strange branching behaviour has been observed in several different types of waves, but never before in visible light. Mordechai Segev at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa and his colleagues fired a laser across a membrane made of soap, similar to a normal soap bubble you would see when washing your dishes, to observe visible light branching for the first time.

"No one predicted this to happen," says Segev. "It was a complete surprise in the lab." The soap membrane had random variations in its thickness, so the researchers expected the laser beam to separate out into disordered speckles.

Comment: Check out the following short videos below to see the awesome visuals and for more on the experiments findings:





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Chalkboard

Mistakes ID critics make: Protein rarity

Brian Miller
Evolution News
Thu, 02 Jul 2020 20:31 UTC
Pushing a loaded wheelbarrow
© Matteo / CC BY
Pushing a loaded wheelbarrow across a flat driveway.
In previous articles, I demonstrated how substantial quantities of biological information cannot emerge through any natural process (see here and here), and I described how such information points to intelligent design. Now, I am addressing the mistakes typically made by critics who challenge these claims (see here, here, here, and here). See my post yesterday, here, on misapplying information theory.

A second category of errors relates to arguments against the conclusion that the information content of many proteins is vastly greater than what any undirected process could generate. Most of the critiques are aimed at the research of Douglas Axe that estimated the rarity of amino acid sequences corresponding to a section of a functional β-lactamase enzyme. Many of the attacks result from the skeptics' failure to properly understand Axe's 2004 article in the Journal of Molecular Biology or the underlying science.

Random Processes

The most common mistake is to appeal to studies that demonstrate that random processes can generate structures that perform very simple functions. For instance, our immunity system can manufacture at least a trillion unique antibodies, and at least one will typically bind to any invading germ. This achievement is possible since the probability is relatively high for a random search to locate an amino acid sequence that sticks to some molecule, so the required amount of new information is relatively small. For instance, only a few billion trials are needed to find an antibody that can bind to an antibiotic molecule and break it apart. The problem is that this task is much easier than randomly generating an entirely new amino acid sequence that folds into an enzyme's three-dimensional structure and performs the required complex structural (conformational) changes. Highly specified dynamic structures are required to support an enzyme's often very complex chemical activities.
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Info

New evidence of a giant 'lava lamp' beneath the ancient Pacific

Kate Evans
EOS Org
Wed, 01 Jul 2020 19:17 UTC
Seismic surveys find evidence of a superplume in Earth's mantle that fueled ancient megaeruptions in the Pacific.
Akatarawa Forest
© Pseudopanax, CC BY-SA 4.0
One of the seismic lines that collected evidence of an ancient superplume ran through the Akatarawa Forest of New Zealand’s North Island.
Around 120 million years ago, in what's now the southwest Pacific Ocean, massive volcanic eruptions spewed out enough basalt to form a vast underwater plateau that could have covered around 1% of Earth's surface. In the aftermath, worldwide temperatures rose dramatically, contributing to the "greenhouse Earth" of the Cretaceous period — a time when dinosaurs thrived and forests carpeted Antarctica.

The source of such extreme volcanism could have been a giant mantle plume, or superplume, according to new evidence published in Science Advances in May. First proposed in the 1970s, the plume hypothesis has become the mainstream explanation for volcanism that occurs far from plate boundaries — though a vocal minority has pointed out that physical evidence for plumes' existence remains thin.

According to plume theory, a plume is born where Earth's core meets its mantle, forming an expanding blob that gradually travels toward the crust. Heat from the head of the plume is thought to melt the crust above it and cause hot spot volcanoes, like those making up the island chain of Hawaii.

Picture a lava lamp, said Simon Lamb, a geophysicist at Te Herenga Waka-Victoria University of Wellington (VUW) in New Zealand and coauthor of the new research. "Once in a while, one of these blobs is just unusually large" — a superplume, Lamb said. He and his colleague Tim Stern, also a geophysicist at VUW, said they've found some rare evidence for one.
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Info

Star's mysterious disappearance hints at new type of stellar death

Brandon Specktor
Live Science
Wed, 01 Jul 2020 19:30 UTC
Luminous Star
© ESO/L. Calçada
An artist's impression of the the luminous blue variable star that mysteriously vanished. Image caption
In 2019, scientists witnessed a massive star 2.5 million times brighter than the sun disappear without a trace.

Now, in a new paper published today (June 30) in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, a team of space detectives (see: astrophysicists) attempt to solve the case of the disappearing star by providing several possible explanations. Of these, one twist ending stands out: Perhaps, the researchers wrote, the massive star died and collapsed into a black hole without undergoing a supernova explosion first — a truly "unprecedented" act of stellar suicide.

"We may have detected one of the most massive stars of the local universe going gently into the night," Jose Groh, an astronomer at Trinity College Dublin and a co-author of a new paper on the star, said in a statement.

"If true, this would be the first direct detection of such a monster star ending its life in this manner," study lead-author Andrew Allan, also of Trinity College, said in the statement.

The star in question, located about 75 million light-years away in the constellation Aquarius, was well studied between 2001 and 2011. The bloated orb was a superb example of a luminous blue variable (LBV) — a massive star approaching the end of its life and prone to unpredictable variations in brightness. Stars like this are rare, with only a handful confirmed in the universe so far. In 2019, Allan and colleagues hoped to use the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope to learn more about the distant LBV's mysterious evolution, only to discover that the star had seemingly completely vanished from its host galaxy.
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Fireball 2

Two asteroids to race past Earth as NASA pens deal with Space Force to bolster planetary defenses


RT
Wed, 01 Jul 2020 18:47 UTC
asteroid
© NASA
Just one day after World Asteroid Day, NASA's Center for Near-Earth Object Studies (CNEOS) has warned of two space rocks due to soar through the Earth's backyard, as planetary defense preparations start to ramp up.

The first of the incoming objects is the 69-foot wide 2019 AC3, an Apollo-class asteroid travelling at roughly 8,000 miles per hour and due to fly past at a safe distance of 2.5 million miles away.

Later on Wednesday, at almost double the size and over twice the speed of its predecessor, the 135-foot, Aten-class asteroid 2020 MK3 will shoot past at 19,000 miles an hour. The asteroid will come much closer to us, passing within 440,000 miles of our planet. While this is a close shave in space rock terms, it's still over 1.5 times the distance between us and the moon, so there's nothing to worry about.
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Info

Life's bias for right-handed DNA maybe explained by cosmic rays

Chris Wood
Quanta Magazine
Mon, 29 Jun 2020 18:47 UTC
Cosmic Rays and DNA
© Samuel Velasco/Quanta Magazine
Lopsided interactions between cosmic-ray particles and chiral biomolecules may explain why all life on Earth relies exclusively on right-handed DNA and RNA helixes.
If you could shrink small enough to descend the genetic helix of any animal, plant, fungus, bacterium or virus on Earth as though it were a spiral staircase, you would always find yourself turning right — never left. It's a universal trait in want of an explanation.

Chemists and biologists see no obvious reason why all known life prefers this structure. "Chiral" molecules exist in paired forms that mirror each other the way a right-handed glove matches a left-handed one. Essentially all known chemical reactions produce even mixtures of both. In principle, a DNA or RNA strand made from left-handed nucleotide bricks should work just as well as one made of right-handed bricks (although a chimera combining left and right subunits probably wouldn't fare so well).

Yet life today uses just one of chemistry's two available Lego sets. Many researchers believe the selection to be random: Those right-handed genetic strands just happened to pop up first, or in slightly greater numbers. But for more than a century, some have pondered whether biology's innate handedness has deeper roots.

"This is one of the links between life on Earth and the cosmos," wrote Louis Pasteur, one of the first scientists to recognize the asymmetry in life's molecules, in 1860.

Now two physicists may have validated Pasteur's instincts by connecting the unvarying twist in natural DNA with the behavior of fundamental particles. The theory, which appeared in May in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, doesn't explain every step of how life acquired its current handedness, but it does assert that the shape of terrestrial DNA and RNA is no accident. Our spirals might all trace back to an unexpected influence from cosmic rays.
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Microscope 2

Leading Russian scientist says genetics & blood type can determine risk of death from Covid-19 infection


RT
Tue, 30 Jun 2020 17:16 UTC
lab worker
© Sputnik / Timur Batyrshin
Genetic predisposition, as well as the blood group to which the patient belongs, determines the risk a person has of dying from coronavirus, that's according to a top Russian expert.

Mikhail Churnosov says that about 90 percent of human diseases are of a genetic nature and Covid-19 is no exception in this regard. Almost anyone can get the coronavirus, but some people have a sensitivity to this disease due to factors in their genome.

"Why do some get infected and get seriously ill, while others don't? One of the explanations is the individual genetic characteristics of a person, including those that determine the functioning of certain enzymes, in particular the angiotensin-converting enzyme," Churnosov told news agency TASS. He is the head of the laboratory of human molecular genetics and a professor at the Belgorod State National Research University.
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Comet 2

The rapid brightening of comet NEOWISE, plus noctilucent clouds in 3D


Space Weather
Tue, 30 Jun 2020 16:42 UTC
Neowise
Comet NEOWISE (C/2020 F3) is passing by the sun this week-and it's looking good. The comet just experienced a sharp increase in brightness recorded by coronagraphs onboard the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO). Click to play a 4-day movie of the surge:

"During the transit, Comet NEOWISE increased in brightness from magnitude +4 to +1.8-an almost 8-fold jump," says planetary scientist Qicheng Zhang of Caltech, who analyzed the images. "If the comet maintains this brightness, it will be visible to the naked eye when it emerges from the sun's glare in July."

Zhang is a bit concerned, however, that the rapid brightening might be too much of a good thing. "When a comet brightens this quickly (2.2 magnitudes in only ~4 days) it could be a sign that the nucleus is unstable. Comet NEOWISE might yet disintegrate," he cautions.

Comment: See also: And check out SOTT radio's: Behind the Headlines: Earth changes in an electric universe: Is climate change really man-made?

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