Scientists Hope Cloning Will Save Endangered Animals – and Bring Back Extinct Species

Neat.

Japanese scientists are even trying to clone the woolly mammoth after viable cell nuclei were discovered frozen in the permafrost of Northeast Siberia for the past 15,000 years. Here, scientists inspect the carcass of a baby woolly mammoth.

Biotechnicians like Gómez are hoping for a new era of wildlife conservation. In a bid to save endangered species, they tear down biological barriers and create embryos that contain cell material from two different species of mammals. Iberian lynxes, tigers, Ethiopian wolves and panda bears could all soon be carried to term by related surrogate mothers, and thus saved for future generations.

“Interspecies cloning is an amazing tool to ensure that an endangered species carries on,” says Gómez. “We can’t wait until those species have disappeared.”

[...]

In addition to African wildcats, the researcher has created embryos for sand cats, black-footed cats and rusty-spotted cats. The surrogate mothers and egg cell donors are domestic house cats, which are both easy to keep and have a reproductive biology that has been thoroughly studied. The animals in Gómez’s research department come under the knife a number of times each week.

[...]

Japanese scientists are even trying to clone the woolly mammoth. Three years ago, cell nuclei from these hairy, tusked ice-age beasts were discovered in mammoth legs that have been frozen in the permafrost of Northeast Siberia for the past 15,000 years.

In the laboratory, a team led by geneticist Akira Iritani injected cell nuclei from the prehistoric animal into enucleated egg cells from mice. The cell constructs only survived for a few hours, but Iritani remains optimistic that an elephant surrogate mother will soon bring to term the first mammoth clone.

Now, will the French who discovered a woolly mammoth recently also do this?  Or will they just make designer handbags from it?

Italian Scientists Guilty of Manslaughter in 2009 Earthquake

“Experts sentenced to 6 years in prison for insufficiently warning victims”.

Seven scientists and experts on trial for manslaughter linked to an earthquake in Italy that killed more than 300 people have been convicted and sentenced to six years in prison, a court has ruled.

The victims of the earthquake in L’Aquila have also been awarded between €40,000 to €450,000 ($52,000 to $584,000 Cdn), said freelance journalist Megan Williams.

Italian prosecutors say that the scientists gave inaccurate and incomplete information about whether smaller tremors before the April 2009 quake should have been grounds for an official warning.

The 6.9 magnitude earthquake left 309 people dead and injured more than 1,500 others.

Judge Marco Billi took slightly more than four hours to reach the verdict, the BBC reported.

In Italy, convictions aren’t definitive until after an appeals trial, so it is unlikely any of the defendants would face jail immediately.

Among those convicted were some of Italy’s most prominent and internationally respected seismologists and geological experts, including Enzo Boschi, former head of the national Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology.

“I am dejected, desperate,” Boschi said after the verdict. “I thought I would have been acquitted. I still don’t understand what I was convicted of.”

Another convicted defendant, Bernardo De Bernardinis, a former official of the national Civil Protection agency, said “I consider myself innocent before God and men.”

During the trial, which began in September 2011, the defence had argued it is impossible to predict quakes. Seismologists have long concurred, saying the technology doesn’t exist to predict a quake and that no major temblor has ever been foretold.

The chief executive of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), a non-profit organization which publishes the journal Science, wrote a letter in 2010 to Italian President Giorgio Napolitano calling the charges against the experts’ “unfair and naive”.

“The basis for indictments brought by the local prosecutor in L’Aquila appears to be that the scientists failed to alert the population of L’Aquila of an impending earthquake,” wrote Alan I. Leshner, CEO of the AAAS and executive publisher of Science. “However, there is no way they could have done that credibly.”

Italy seems bent on reinforcing unflattering stereotypes, aren’t they?

Scientists Angry over Entrepreneur’s Ocean Experiment

As is the Canadian government.

A California businessman chartered a fishing boat in July, loaded it with 100 tons of iron dust and cruised through Pacific waters off western Canada, spewing his cargo into the sea in an ecological experiment that has outraged scientists and government officials.

The entrepreneur, whose foray came to light only this week, even duped the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the United States into lending him ocean-monitoring buoys for the project.

Canada’s environment ministry says it is investigating the experiment, which was carried out with no government or scientific oversight. A spokesman said the ministry had warned the venture in advance that its plan would violate international agreements.

Source: New York Times. Read full article. (link)

Conservatives and Science

The troubled relationship, and why.

So we have a scenario where science is allowing itself to be politicized and at the same time we have the rise of political interests that feel threatened by science. This produces a perfect storm of mistrust. To complicate matters further, Gauchat’s research indicates that distrust of science was most profound among two groups. The first was the religious right which isn’t surprising. The second group was less obvious. According to Gauchat, educated conservatives were the most likely to distrust science. He explains:

This implies that educated or high-information conservatives will hold hyper-opinions about science, because they have a more sophisticated grasp about what types of knowledge will conform with or contradict their ideological positions, and they will prefer to believe what supports their ideology.

On the surface this strikes me as a self-damaging process, but that assumes the science was always correct. I am not prepared to go that far, even with my deep respect for the scientific community as a whole. My hesitation comes at least in part from my own experiences with science and academia.  One of the challenges I found as an archaeologist was engaging in the speculative part of academia. I always believed in applying Occam’s Razor to my analysis but the criticsm I heard most often was that my conclusions were too simple and that I was thinking too small. Having spoken to some of the admittedly few conservatives in the field of anthropology this is a common complaint. It reminds me of a quote I once heard that some people have a tendency to pass up a good solution in search of a brilliant one.

It is important at this point to differentiate between science as an experimental pursuit grounded in the scientific method and science as an academic pursuit that engages in educated analysis and a certain amount of speculation. It is the latter that often draws the condemnation of some on the Right.  What is not in dispute among intelligent conservatives is the reliability of the scientific method.  The dispute comes from the interprative part of science and for good reason. It is that part that is most vulnerable to politicization. In recent years there has been some tension within the scientitifc community itself as members of the hard sciences fight with social scientists over the definition of science.

Curiosity Mars Rover Starts ‘To Eat Dirt’

On purpose!

Nasa’s Curiosity rover has ingested its first Martian soil sample.

The robot has taken a pinch of dust into the CheMin instrument, one of its two big onboard analytical tools.

It is a key moment for the $2.6bn mission – Curiosity’s internal apparatus will play a central role in its investigation of the Red Planet.

“The most important thing about our mobile laboratory is that it eats dirt – that’s what we live on,” chief scientist John Grotzinger told the BBC.

CheMin provides definitive mineralogy – it uses X-ray diffraction to identify and quantify the minerals present in the rocky material that has been swallowed.

Engineers received confirmation on Thursday that the sample was accepted by the instrument, and details of the analysis may be available as early as next week.

High-tech ‘Smart Bra’ Could Replace Mammograms

Interesting.

By 2014, women may be able to screen themselves for breast cancer painlessly, effectively, and constantly without even lifting a finger.

A high-tech “smart bra,” designed to help save lives by monitoring breast tissue for abnormalities, is in its final stages of testing after four years of development.

So far, the device has a 92.1 per cent level of accuracy when it comes to classifying tumors, according to the team of scientists behind it. Mammograms currently diagnose correctly at approximately 70 per cent.

Developed by a U.S. biotechnology company called First Warning Systems, the smart bra contains precise sensors that measure minute temperature changes which occur when blood vessels grow to feed tumors.

This data collected from the censors is processed by a piece of proprietary software. It uses a custom algorithm to look for changes and signs that a tumor may be present and growing over time.

These temperature changes are so small that it would normally take years before a woman could feel anything on her own by performing a self screening, or even before a mammogram could detect them.

In one a clinical trial performed by First Warning Systems with over 650 participants, the smart bra was able to detect rumblings of a tumor six years before a mammogram could.

Snake Venom May Have Potential to Cure Diabetes

Intriguing news.

The venom from snakes and other deadly lizards could be used to help treat or even cure diabetes, high blood pressure and cancer, scientists have revealed.

Snake venom contains a huge variety of lethal molecules called toxins which, due to the way they work, make useful targets for new drugs. Because toxins are harmful, drug developers have to modify them to retain their potency and make them safe for drug use.

However, a joint British-Australian study of venom and tissue gene sequences in snakes has now found that the toxins that make snake and lizard venom lethal can evolve back into completely harmless molecules, opening the door to new drug treatments for serious conditions such as diabetes and cancer.

Dr Wolfgang Wüster from Bangor University, a co-author of the study, explained: “Many snake venom toxins target the same physiological pathways that doctors would like to target to treat a variety of medical conditions. Understanding how toxins can be tamed into harmless physiological proteins may aid development of cures.”

Japanese Scientists Claim First Synthesis of Element 113

The Periodic Table just keeps getting bigger.

A group of Japanese scientists announced Wednesday that they have finally synthesized the elusive element 113, which has been called ununtrium.

If confirmed, the feat would mark the first time Japanese researchers have been first to synthesize an element of the periodic table. It would also be the first time an Asian research team has had the honor of naming an element.

Ununtrium — meaning one-one-three — is the temporary name given to element 113, which can only be created in a laboratory and is extremely unstable. According to the research team, they have been attempting to create the element for more than nine years before finally hitting on the right approach last month.

The team, led by Kosuke Morita of the RIKEN Nishina Center for Accelerator-based Science, had been conducting studies at the RIKEN Linear Accelerator, in a suburb of Tokyo called Wako, when they discovered the formula to create the element. The researchers collided zinc, which has 30 protons, with bismuth, which has 83. The result was an atom with 113 protons in its nucleus, the researchers say.

But the new element quickly decayed. Observing the nature of the decay is crucial to proving the identity of the new element. Morita says the decay data indicate that the collision did indeed create a 113-proton element, though the evidence has not yet been peer-reviewed.

Hubble Captures Extraordinary View of Universe

Awesome.

The Hubble Space Telescope (HST) has produced one of its most extraordinary views of the Universe to date.

Called the eXtreme Deep Field, the picture captures a mass of galaxies stretching back almost to the time when the first stars began to shine.

But this was no simple point and snap – some of the objects in this image are too distant and too faint for that.

Rather, this view required Hubble to stare at a tiny patch of sky for more than 500 hours to detect all the light.

“It’s a really spectacular image,” said Dr Michele Trenti, a science team member from the University of Cambridge, UK.

“We stared at this patch of sky for about 22 days, and have obtained a very deep view of the distant Universe, and therefore we see how galaxies were looking in its infancy.”

The XDF will become a tool for astronomy. The objects embedded in it can be followed up by other telescopes. It should keep scientists busy for years, enabling them to study the full history of galaxy formation and evolution.

A First: Organs Tailor-Made With Body’s Own Cells

Adult stem cells, not embryonic ones.

Two and a half years ago doctors in Iceland, where Mr. Beyene was studying to be an engineer, discovered a golf-ball-size tumor growing into his windpipe. Despite surgery and radiation, it kept growing. In the spring of 2011, when Mr. Beyene came to Sweden to see another doctor, he was practically out of options. “I was almost dead,” he said. “There was suffering. A lot of suffering.”

But the doctor, Paolo Macchiarini, at the Karolinska Institute here, had a radical idea. He wanted to make Mr. Beyene a new windpipe, out of plastic and his own cells.

Implanting such a “bioartificial” organ would be a first-of-its-kind procedure for the field of regenerative medicine, which for decades has been promising a future of ready-made replacement organs — livers, kidneys, even hearts — built in the laboratory.

For the most part that future has remained a science-fiction fantasy. Now, however, researchers like Dr. Macchiarini are building organs with a different approach, using the body’s cells and letting the body itself do most of the work.

“The human body is so beautiful, I’m convinced we must use it in the most proper way,” said Dr. Macchiarini, a surgeon who runs a laboratory that is a leader in the field, also called tissue engineering.

So far, only a few organs have been made and transplanted, and they are relatively simple, hollow ones — like bladders and Mr. Beyene’s windpipe, which was implanted in June 2011. But scientists around the world are using similar techniques with the goal of building more complex organs. At Wake Forest University in North Carolina, for example, where the bladders were developed, researchers are working on kidneys, livers and more. Labs in China and the Netherlands are among many working on blood vessels.

The work of these new body builders is far different from the efforts that produced artificial hearts decades ago. Those devices, which are still used temporarily by some patients awaiting transplants, are sophisticated machines, but in the end they are only that: machines.

Tissue engineers aim to produce something that is more human. They want to make organs with the cells, blood vessels and nerves to become a living, functioning part of the body. Some, like Dr. Macchiarini, want to go even further — to harness the body’s repair mechanisms so that it can remake a damaged organ on its own.

Japan Tooth Patch Could Be End of Decay

Goodbye, trips to the dentist! (HT: DG)

Handout picture released from Japan’s Kinki University professor Shigeki Hontsu shows a tooth-patch, an ultra thin biocompatible film made from hydroxyapatitte. Scientists in Japan have created a microscopically thin film that can coat individual teeth to prevent decay or to make them appear whiter, the chief researcher said.

Scientists in Japan have created a microscopically thin film that can coat individual teeth to prevent decay or to make them appear whiter, the chief researcher said.

The “tooth patch” is a hard-wearing and ultra-flexible material made from hydroxyapatite, the main mineral in tooth enamel, that could also mean an end to sensitive teeth.

“This is the world’s first flexible apatite sheet, which we hope to use to protect teeth or repair damaged enamel,” said Shigeki Hontsu, professor at Kinki University’s Faculty of Biology-Oriented Science and Technology in western Japan.

“Dentists used to think an all-apatite sheet was just a dream, but we are aiming to create artificial enamel,” the outermost layer of a tooth, he said earlier this month.

Atomic Bond Types Discernible in Single-Molecule Images

Great breakthrough.

Look closely: the bonds at centre are shorter than those at the edges, as they involve more electrons

A pioneering team from IBM in Zurich has published single-molecule images so detailed that the type of atomic bonds between their atoms can be discerned.

The same team took the first-ever single-molecule image in 2009 and more recently published images of a molecule shaped like the Olympic rings.

The new work opens up the prospect of studying imperfections in the “wonder material” graphene or plotting where electrons go during chemical reactions.

The images are published in Science.

 

Van Gogh’s Flowers In A Blue Vase Damage Seen in X-rays

Using science to save art, by recognizing chemical damage.

Microscopic samples of the work were carefully extracted in two places

Researchers have spotted a never-before-seen chemical effect in Vincent Van Gogh’s Flowers In A Blue Vase that is dulling the work’s vibrant yellows.

It seems a layer of varnish added later to protect the work is in fact turning the yellow to a greyish-orange colour.

High-intensity X-ray studies described in Analytical Chemistry found compounds called oxalates were responsible.

But atoms from the original paint were also found in the varnish, which may therefore be left in place.

[...]

“This type of information for conservators is very valuable because it helps us understand the condition of the paintings and make the right choices about how we can best conserve them.”

Bacon Sandwich Really Does Cure a Hangover

By boosting the level of amines which clear the head, scientists have found.

The reaction between amino acids in the bacon and reducing sugars in the fat is what provides the bacon sandwich with its appeal  Photo: GETTY

Researchers claim food also speeds up the metabolism helping the body get rid of the booze more quickly.

Elin Roberts, of Newcastle University’s Centre for Life said: “Food doesn’t soak up the alcohol but it does increase your metabolism helping you deal with the after-effects of over indulgence. So food will often help you feel better.

“Bread is high in carbohydrates and bacon is full of protein, which breaks down into amino acids. Your body needs these amino acids, so eating them will make you feel good.”

Ms Roberts told The Mirror: “Bingeing on alcohol depletes neurotransmitters too, but bacon contains a high level of aminos which tops these up, giving you a clearer head.”

Researchers also found a complex chemical interaction in the cooking of bacon produces the winning combination of taste and smell which is almost irresistible.

The reaction between amino acids in the bacon and reducing sugars in the fat is what provides the sandwich with its appeal.

Ms Roberts said: “The smell of sizzling bacon in a pan is enough to tempt even the staunchest of vegetarians. There’s something deeper going on inside. It’s not just the idea of a tasty snack. There is some complex chemistry going on.

“Meat is made of mostly protein and water. Inside the protein, it’s made up of building blocks we call amino acids. But also, you need some fat. Anyone who’s been on a diet knows if you take all the fat from the meat, it just doesn’t taste the same. We need some of the fat to give it the flavour.”

She explained that the reaction released hundreds of smells and flavours but it is the smell which reels in the eater. “Smell and taste are really closely linked,” she said. “If we couldn’t smell then taste wouldn’t be the same.”

Hey, vegetarians out there – remember the taste of bacon?  Mmmm.  Remember that smell, of bacon frying, waking you up on a Saturday or Sunday morning, without needing an alarm clock, just waking up naturally and suddenly being wide awake what with that lovely smell hitting your nostrils?

Mmmm, you know you miss bacon, real bacon, not that flavoured tofu crap.  Why don’t you indulge in some bacon today?  Nobody will know; just sneak some!  Your taste buds and stomach will thank you.

Curved Glasses Make You Drink Quickly

Who knew?

You’re not an overdrinker; it’s the fault of your drinking glass!

Coping with stress. Happy hour with co-workers. Friends who egg you on. If all your usual excuses for drinking too much are starting to wear thin, here’s a new one: the shape of your glass might be causing you to drink in excess without even knowing it. Researchers led by Dr. Angela Attwood at the University of Bristol constructed maybe the most awesome study ever, enlisting 160 moderate drinkers under 40 to participate in an experiment involving much drinking. Attwood and her colleagues discovered that people drink almost twice as quickly when drinking from curved glasses rather than straight-sided glasses. “People often talk of ‘pacing themselves’ when drinking alcohol as a means of controlling levels of drunkenness,” says Attwood. “I think the important point to take from our research is that the ability to pace effectively may be compromised when drinking from certain types of glasses.” [University of Bristol]

Assuming We Develop the Capability, Should We Bring Back Extinct Species?

What could possibly go wrong…

One question is: If you could actually bring back anything, would you bring back the California grizzly bear? A species that could eat people? Well, we recently were at the California Academy of Sciences, up front and personal with “Monarch”, the last California grizzly, a beautiful specimen there, and we were joking, and not really joking, saying, “Well, what if you could genome edit the California grizzly so that it didn’t like the taste of people?” That would be kind of interesting! Big megafauna, good for the land, but take the fear of it out for people. The truth is all of this could someday be possible.

Even better: bring them back, genetically modified.

No, I can’t possibly see anything that could go wrong, whatsoever, with such a scheme…

The Fastest Camera in the World: One TRILLION Pics a Second and Capable of Seeing Light Move

Awesome!  (HT: DW)

MIT researchers have created a camera which  can take images so fast – one trillion of them in just a second – that it can  capture light as it travels across objects.

Nothing can go faster than the speed of  light, which thanks to the work of scientific legends such as Leon Foucault and  Einstein, we know to be 299,792,458 metres per second in a vacuum.

But developers at MIT have managed to catch  up, with their camera taking so many images that, when you play them in sequence  at super-low-speed, you can see a light beam as it travels from A to  B.

The fascinating video below was demonstrated  at a TED technology conference in Edinburgh.

It shows a burst of light traveling the  length of a one-litre Coke bottle, bouncing off the cap, before then reflecting  back to the bottle’s bottom.

Go to 2:00 in this video to see it:

Severe Diet Doesn’t Prolong Life, at Least in Monkeys

Fancy that.  (HT: DG and Strange Herring)

The results of this major, long-awaited study, which began in 1987, are finally in. But it did not bring the vindication calorie restriction enthusiasts had anticipated. It turns out the skinny monkeys did not live any longer than those kept at more normal weights. Some lab test results improved, but only in monkeys put on the diet when they were old. The causes of death — cancer, heart disease — were the same in both the underfed and the normally fed monkeys.

Of course, extremely severe diets will always kill, unless of course you have the misfortune to die in a house fire first.

Lesson in Sleep Learning: Associations Formed in Brains of Sleeping Volunteers Remained Intact When Subjects Were Awake

Interesting findings!

Is sleep learning possible? A new Weizmann Institute study appearing today in Nature Neuroscience has found that if certain odors are presented after tones during sleep, people will start sniffing when they hear the tones alone – even when no odor is present – both during sleep and, later, when awake. In other words, people can learn new information while they sleep, and this can unconsciously modify their waking behavior.

Cuckolded Males Sing Louder

Rock sparrows, that is; you didn’t think I was talking about humans, did you?

Researchers have now found out that males whose female companion plays away from home sing louder: Probably in a desperate attempt to tighten the pair bond to the unfaithful partner with particularly impressive sound volume.

[...]

Cuckolded males regardless of whether they were young or old, sang louder – perhaps as a response to the absence of their unfaithful mate.