Science & Technology

DNA test solves 40-year-old mystery of 2 babies switched at birth

RT
Fri, 09 Mar 2018 12:15 UTC

Heartache, hereditary disease, broken families and even attempted murder. It may sound like the plot of a soap opera, but it is the true story of two Russian women who discovered that they were switched at birth, 40 years ago.

The drama of the baby swap began on March 7 1978 when two pregnant women, Rimma Shvetsova and Yulia Savelieva, rushed to their local maternity hospital in Russia's Perm Region. All in all, there were four women giving birth that day - unusual for a small rural hospital. Apparently, the medics forgot to put name tags on the newborns.

The women can't recall the exact moment their children were switched, but they left the hospital with the wrong babies. It took them almost 40 years to understand that they had not raised their biological daughters.

As the girls got older, the women started to notice that they didn't exhibit family traits. Rimma's daughter Veronika had blonde hair and blue eyes, which raised the suspicions of husband Anatoly. He thought his wife had cheated on him, an assumption which had terrifying consequences.

Dark DNA: The missing matter at the heart of nature

Adam Hargreaves
New Scientist
Fri, 09 Mar 2018 11:50 UTC

The discovery that some animals thrive despite hugely mutated DNA hidden in their genome is forcing us to rethink some basics of evolution

The fat sand rat is a strange creature. It lives in burrows, eats around 80 per cent of its body mass in leaves each day and doesn't drink water. But the really odd thing about this gerbil is that some of its DNA appears to be missing.

No doubt you have heard of dark matter, which is thought to make up over a quarter of the universe. We know it's there; we just haven't been able to detect it. Well, something similar is afoot in the genome. My colleagues and I have dubbed this elusive genetic matter "dark DNA". And our investigations into the sand rat are starting to reveal its nature.

The discovery of dark DNA is so recent that we are still trying to work out how widespread it is and whether it benefits those species that possess it. However, its very existence raises some fundamental questions about genetics and evolution. We may need to look again at how adaptation occurs at the molecular level. Controversially, dark DNA might even be a driving force of evolution.

Volcanologists warn world is unprepared for next major eruption

Alexandra Witze
Nature
Tue, 06 Mar 2018 11:41 UTC

The eruption of Mount St Helens in 1980 caused the deaths of 57 people

The world needs to do more to prepare for the next huge volcanic eruption, a team of leading scientists says.

The devastating Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 and the Tōhoku earthquake in Japan in 2011 highlighted some of the worst-case scenarios for natural disasters. But humanity has not had to deal with a cataclysmic volcanic disaster since at least 1815, when the eruption of Tambora in Indonesia killed tens of thousands of people and led to a 'year without a summer' in Europe and North America. Such world-altering blasts rank at 7 or more on the Volcanic Explosivity Index (VEI) scale of eruptions, which goes to 8.

"The next VEI-7 eruption could occur within our lifetimes, or it could be hundreds of years down the road," says Chris Newhall, a volcanologist with the Mirisbiris Garden and Nature Center in Santo Domingo, Philippines. But the time to have this discussion is now, he says, so that researchers and government officials can plan and prepare before an emergency strikes.

Comment: Or it could be just around the corner:

Comment: See Also:

Scientists don't know why male fertility is in crisis

Tom Bawen
iNews
Tue, 06 Mar 2018 00:00 UTC

Health experts are warning of a crisis in male fertility that they fear is making it harder for couples to conceive - a problem they say is compounded by a lack of scientific understanding.

The average sperm count has dived by 52 percent in the past four decades - while men are leaving it later and later before trying to have a child.

Yet scientists don't know why the sperm count is falling or even whether the decline is reducing fertility - although logic suggests that it is, leading academics said today.

Comment: Recent social phenomenons like rainbow gender identifications, #MeToo witch-hunt and anti-male propaganda are aggravating the situation.

Russian Presidential Candidate, Zhirinovsky: Movements like #MeToo may lead to "humans disappearing as species"

The human brain stops creating new neurons in adulthood

Matthew Loffhagen
Outer Places
Wed, 07 Mar 2018 19:58 UTC

You can forget your plans to live forever by transplanting your brain into a giant mech suit.It turns out that human grey matter has an unfortunately short shelf life. A new study published in Nature has attempted to locate genuine proof that the human brain is capable of neurogenesis - the process of creating new neurons - beyond puberty, and the results are disappointing.

To even the lead scientist's surprise, the study found zero evidence of such a phenomenon. Of all 59 human brains that were sliced up and analyzed, not a single sample from a person older than thirteen displayed any evidence of newly formed neurons.

The study involved a collection of human brains that were all different ages, although they (obviously) belonged to people that were recently deceased. The large scale international study used both traditional methods of analyzing brain slices, and more modern techniques using the newest possible technology.

Over 31K scientists sign a petition against the global warming agenda

Lance D Johnson
Natural News
Thu, 21 Sep 2017 16:23 UTC

Over 31,000 scientists have united against the political agenda of global warming. The scientific consensus, which includes over 9,000 scientists with Ph.D.s, supports the necessity of carbon dioxide and sheds light on the agenda of global warming, which includes industrial energy rationing, central economic planning, and global taxation schemes. These scientists are now speaking out against the hoax of global warming and how global agreements to limit greenhouse gases are actually destructive to all plant and animal life on the planet.

The petition, which includes important peer-reviewed research, is backed by various scientists with a wide spectrum of expertise. The petition warns the United States about signing international treaties that only put a financial burden on the citizens of the country, steal national sovereignty, and restrict its energy production. The global warming alarmism, in other words, is pseudo-warfare designed to take down a country.

A letter from Frederick Seitz, President of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, is also being circulated with the petition. The letter warns about the flawed science against carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide is essentially a miracle molecule of life, not a dangerous pollutant that needs to be eradicated from the atmosphere. His letter also shines a light on the dangers of the U.S. entering global treaties which will ration energy and confiscate the Nation's wealth.

Comment: See also: 32,000 Global Warming Deniers

Google testing 72-qubit computer in plans to demonstrate quantum supremacy for the first time

Emily Conover
Science News
Mon, 05 Mar 2018 22:17 UTC

QUANTUM UPGRADE Google’s 72-qubit quantum chip (shown) could become the first to perform a calculation impossible for traditional computers.

Quantum computers are bulking up.

Researchers from Google are testing a quantum computer with 72 quantum bits, or qubits, scientists reported March 5 at a meeting of the American Physical Society - a big step up from the company's previous nine-qubit chip.

The team hopes to use the larger quantum chip to demonstrate quantum supremacy for the first time, performing a calculation that is impossible with traditional computers (SN: 7/8/17, p. 28), Google physicist Julian Kelly reported.

Achieving quantum supremacy requires a computer of more than 50 qubits, but scientists are still struggling to control so many finicky quantum entities at once. Unlike standard bits that take on a value of 0 or 1, a qubit can be 0, 1 or a mashup of the two, thanks to a quantum quirk known as superposition.

Comment: See also:

Galactic cosmic rays hitting Earth are 'bad and getting worse'

Anthony Watts
Watts Up With That?
Mon, 05 Mar 2018 07:36 UTC

A Cosmic Ray Shower in Earth’s atmosphere

Astronauts on the International Space Station may be at risk during long missions

Cosmic rays are bad-and they're getting worse. That's the conclusion of a new paper just published in the research journal Space Weather. The authors, led by Prof. Nathan Schwadron of the University of New Hampshire, show that radiation from deep space is dangerous and intensifying faster than previously predicted.

The story begins four years ago when Schwadron and colleagues first sounded the alarm about cosmic rays. Analyzing data from the Cosmic Ray Telescope for the Effects of Radiation (CRaTER) instrument onboard NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), they found that cosmic rays in the Earth-Moon system were peaking at levels never before seen in the Space Age. The worsening radiation environment, they pointed out, was a potential peril to astronauts, curtailing how long they could safely travel through space.

This figure from their original 2014 paper shows the number of days a 30-year old male astronaut flying in a spaceship with 10 g/cm2 of aluminum shielding could go before hitting NASA-mandated radiation limits:

Comment: For related articles on cosmic rays and how they are affecting us see also:

For further information read Earth Changes and the Human Cosmic Connection by Pierre Lescaudron and Laura Knight Jadczyk.

Scientists identify marker of biological age in human urine

April McCarthy
Prevent Disease
Tue, 06 Mar 2018 21:17 UTC

Researchers find that a substance indicating oxidative damage increases in urine as people get older. The study, published today in open-access journal in Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience, also describes a way to easily measure levels of this marker in human urine samples.

Just take a look around: we all know people who look young for their age, or folks who seem prematurely wizened. Even in an individual, different parts of the body can age at different speeds. By examining how chronological age lines up with biological age across the population, researchers are starting to pin down how these two measures should sync up -- and what it means for how long we have left when they don't.

The new marker potentially provides a method to measure how much our body has aged -- our biological rather than chronological age. This could help predict our risk of developing age-related disease, and even our risk of death.

Scientists observe a new quantum particle with properties of ball lightning

Science Daily
Fri, 02 Mar 2018 21:03 UTC

Scientists at Amherst College and Aalto University have created, for the first time a three-dimensional skyrmion in a quantum gas. The skyrmion was predicted theoretically over 40 years ago, but only now has it been observed experimentally.

In an extremely sparse and cold quantum gas, the physicists have created knots made of the magnetic moments, or spins, of the constituent atoms. The knots exhibit many of the characteristics of ball lightning, which some scientists believe to consist of tangled streams of electric currents. The persistence of such knots could be the reason why ball lightning, a ball of plasma, lives for a surprisingly long time in comparison to a lightning strike. The new results could inspire new ways of keeping plasma intact in a stable ball in fusion reactors.

'It is remarkable that we could create the synthetic electromagnetic knot, that is, quantum ball lightning, essentially with just two counter-circulating electric currents. Thus, it may be possible that a natural ball lighting could arise in a normal lightning strike,' says Dr Mikko Möttönen, leader of the theoretical effort at Aalto University.

Comment: Mystery of ball lightning solved?

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Science & Technology

DNA test solves 40-year-old mystery of 2 babies switched at birth

Dark DNA: The missing matter at the heart of nature

Volcanologists warn world is unprepared for next major eruption

Scientists don't know why male fertility is in crisis

The human brain stops creating new neurons in adulthood

Over 31K scientists sign a petition against the global warming agenda

Google testing 72-qubit computer in plans to demonstrate quantum supremacy for the first time

Galactic cosmic rays hitting Earth are 'bad and getting worse'

Scientists identify marker of biological age in human urine

Scientists observe a new quantum particle with properties of ball lightning

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