ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 367

Plant scientists plan massive effort to sequence 10,000 genomes

By Dennis Normile

SHENZEN, CHINA—Hopes of sequencing the DNA of every living thing on Earth are taking a step forward with the announcement of plans to sequence at least 10,000 genomes representing every major clade of plants and eukaryotic microbes. Chinese sequencing giant BGI and the China National GeneBank (CNGB) held a workshop yesterday on the sidelines of the International Botanical Congress, being held this week in BGI’s hometown of Shenzhen, to discuss what they are calling the 10KP plan. About 250 plant scientists participated in the discussions and “are raring to go,” says Gane Ka-Shu Wong, a genomicist and bioinformaticist at University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada.

The 10KP plan will be a key part of the Earth BioGenome Project (EBP), an ambitious and still evolving scheme to get at least rough sequence data on the 1.5 million eukaryotic species, starting with detailed sequences of one member of each of the 9000 eukaryotic families. The effort to sequence plants is moving ahead a bit faster than other aspects of EBP “because plant scientists are more collaborative,” Wong says jokingly.

The 10KP plan is also building on a previous 1000 plant (1KP) transcriptome project. That effort, launched in 2012 and now nearing completion, was also led by BGI, where Wong is an associate director. 

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400-Year-Old Physics Mystery Is Cracked

By Tia Ghose

The mystery of tiny teardrop-shaped glass confections that can survive a hammer blow, yet shatter to smithereens with the slightest touch to the stem, has finally been solved.

The strange shapes, called Prince Rupert’s drops, have posed a riddle that has stymied scientists for 400 years.

“On one hand, the head can withstand hammering, and on the other hand, the tail can be broken with just the slightest finger pressure, and within a few microseconds the entire thing shatters into fine powder with an accompanying sharp popping noise,” study co-author Srinivasan Chandrasekar, a professor of industrial engineering and director of the Center for Materials Processing and Tribology at Purdue University in Indiana, said in a statement.

Now, a new study reveals that the head of these little glass tadpoles has such indomitable strength because of the compressive forces acting on the outside of the drops. These forces rival the compressive forces withstood by some forms of steel, the study found.

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Inside Trump’s snap decision to ban transgender troops

By Rachael Bade and Josh Dawsey

After a week sparring with his attorney general and steaming over the Russia investigation consuming his agenda, President Donald Trump was closing in on an important win.

House Republicans were planning to pass a spending bill stacked with his campaign promises, including money to build his border wall with Mexico.

But an internal House Republican fight over transgender troops was threatening to blow up the bill. And House GOP insiders feared they might not have the votes to pass the legislation because defense hawks wanted a ban on Pentagon-funded sex reassignment operations — something GOP leaders wouldn’t give them.

They turned to Trump, who didn’t hesitate. In the flash of a tweet, he announced that transgender troops would be banned altogether.

Trump’s sudden decision was, in part, a last-ditch attempt to save a House proposal full of his campaign promises that was on the verge of defeat, numerous congressional and White House sources said.

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Republicans are using an obscure bill to quietly erode the separation of church and state

By Jack Kenkins

With media attention focused on the national debate raging over health care, it would be easy to ignore the spending bill quietly making its way through the House of Representatives. Such proposals often dwell in the largely mundane machinations of the federal government, and technical disputes over its complicated provisions can fly under the radar.

But if you care about the separation of church and state, this year’s bill might be worth paying attention to.

Tucked deep inside more than 200 pages of text is a tiny provision, recently added by the House Appropriations Committee, designed to defang the so-called Johnson Amendment — a section of the tax code that bars churches (a broad legal term that includes most faith groups) and other tax-exempt nonprofits from explicitly endorsing political candidates.

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Ding, ding, ding! CRISPR patent fight enters next round

By Jon Cohen

The University of California (UC) has fired another legal salvo in the prolonged patent battle over CRISPR, the revolutionary gene-editing technology that has spawned a billion-dollar industry.

UC leads a group of litigants who contend that the U.S. Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) wrongly sided with the Broad Institute in Camrbidge, Massachusetts, and two partners—Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge—in February when it ruled that the Broad group invented the use of CRISPR in eukaryotic cells. After that ruling, UC moved the battleground to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. In a 25 July brief to the Federal Circuit, the UC group contends that PTAB “ignored key evidence” and “made multiple errors.”

The UC litigants indisputably first showed in 2012 that CRISPR could work in DNA of simpler organisms, and soon after filed a patent application on the gene-editing technique. They claim the Broad group learned from that disclosed invention and applied CRISPR to eukaryotic cells. The essential legal question is whether the Broad’s patent application is a novel, patentable invention, or whether it was “obvious” in the sense that “anyone skilled in the art”—in other words, any trained molecular biologist—would have a “reasonable expectation of success” of using the CRISPR system to edit genes in eukaryotic cells. 

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Oldest mass animal stranding revealed in Death Valley fossils

By Agnese Abrusci

How apt. In Death Valley, a region extraordinarily hostile to animal life today lie fossils of the oldest mass death so far discovered.

On a rocky surface covering about one square metre, and in loose rocks nearby that were once part of the surface, Aaron Sappenfield of the University of California, Riverside, and his colleagues found the remains of 13 jellyfish. The discovery suggests the marine animals behaved in a comparable way to their modern counterparts. But the fossils also hint that environmental conditions at the time were very different from today.

About 540 million years ago, in the Cambrian period, Death Valley lay on the edge of an ancient continent, with sandy beaches along its margin.

The jellyfish in the Cambrian seas seemed to have looked and behaved a lot like they do today. Sappenfield and his colleagues believe that the ancient jellyfish also lived near the shore, until tides or waves pushed them closer to the beach. When the tide receded the animals got stranded, just as modern jellyfish do.

But jellyfish washing up on today’s beaches have a poor chance of becoming fossils. Most are quickly torn to pieces by scavengers or curious children.

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Upcoming Solar Eclipse Is a Chance to Prove Einstein Right (Again)

By Jesse Emspak

For some skywatchers, the upcoming total solar eclipse on Aug. 21 is more than just a chance to catch a rare sight of the phenomenon in the United States. It’s also an opportunity to duplicate one of the most famous experiments of the 20th century, which astrophysicist Arthur Eddington performed in an attempt to prove that light could be bent by gravity, a central tenet of Albert Einstein’s theory of general theory.

Amateur astronomer Don Bruns is among those hoping to re-do the experiment. “I thought of it about two years ago. I thought, surely, other people have done it,” he told Live Science. “But no one had done it since 1973,” Bruns said, when a team from the University of Texas went to Mauritania for the solar eclipse on June 30 of that year.

The group ran into technical problems, though, and could not confirm Eddington’s results with much accuracy. Other attempts — such as one made for an eclipse on Feb. 25, 1952, in Khartoum by the National Geographic Society — fared somewhat better.

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Trump says it’s too expensive to care for transgender service members. Here’s the truth

By Andrew Joseph

President Trump on Wednesday announced that the military would no longer allow transgender people to serve, citing both “the tremendous medical costs and disruption” that would be caused by their integration into U.S. forces.

But at least two studies in recent years have found that the cost of medical care for transgender service members would be minimal.

A June 2016 study from the RAND Corporation estimated that there were between 1,320 and 6,630 transgender active-duty service members — out of 1.3 million service members in total — and noted that not all of them would seek treatment related to gender transitioning. The study also estimated that the cost associated with medical care for gender transition would only increase military health care expenditures by between $2.4 million and $8.4 million each year — an increase of between 0.04 and 0.13 percent.

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With unusual candor, Senate appropriators ‘reject’ cuts to energy research

By Adrian Cho

Many observers hoped Senate budgetmakers would oppose cuts to the Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) basic and applied research programs proposed by the White House in May. But they may not have expected them to be quite so blunt about it. The detailed report that accompanies the Senate version of the so-called energy and water bill, which funds DOE, contains several passages in which Senate appropriators express their objections to cuts in unusually frank language.

For example, in its budget request for fiscal year 2018, which begins 1 October, the White House seeks to eliminate the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), the 8-year-old agency that aims to quickly transform the best ideas from basic research into budding energy technologies. House of Representatives appropriators have voted to go along with that elimination, but Senate appropriators are having none of it. “The Committee definitively rejects this short-sighted proposal,” the report says. Instead, Senate appropriators would increase ARPA-E’s budget by 8% to $330 million. Their report expressly forbids DOE from using money to shut down ARPA-E.

Similarly, within DOE’s Office of Science, the White House has called for cutting spending on biological and environmental research (BER) by 43% to $349 million. But the Senate appropriations committee “rejects the short-sighted reductions proposed in the budget request.” Instead, Senate budgetmakers would boost BER research by 3% to $630 million. Senate appropriators also would give DOE’s applied research in its Office of Energy Efficiency & Renewable Energy $1.937 billion, a 7% cut from last year, but far above the $636 million proposed by the White House.

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Federal Judge Nominee Claims Bible Precedes Constitution

By Michael Stone

Theocracy alert: Federal judge nominee Amy Coney Barrett says religious faith comes before law, and claims the Bible takes precedent over the U.S. Constitution.

A legal watchdog group is warning that Amy Coney Barrett, Trump’s nominee for a vacancy on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, is a dangerous religious extremist that is not qualified to serve on the bench.

Recently the Alliance for Justice (AFJ) released a scathing report on Barrett, a professor at the Notre Dame Law School. According to the report, Barrett believes that “judges should be bound by their religious faith, not the law.”

The report notes:

As a judge, Barrett could be expected to put her personal beliefs ahead of the law. She wrote specifically about the duty of judges to put their faith above the law in an article entitled “Catholic Judges in Capital Cases.” Among other things, she strongly criticized Justice William Brennan’s statement about faith, in which he said that he took an oath to uphold the law, and that “there isn’t any obligation of our faith superior” to that oath. In response, Barrett wrote: “We do not defend this position as the proper response for a Catholic judge to take with respect to abortion or the death penalty.”

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