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January 17, 2016
Searching for Cancer Maps in Free-Floating DNA
Photo credit: Systems Bio
By Carl Zimmer
Loose pieces of DNA course through our veins. As cells in our body die, they cast off fragments of genes, some of which end up in the bloodstream, saliva and urine.
Cell-free DNA is like a message in a bottle, delivering secrets about what’s happening inside our bodies. Pregnant women, for example, carry cell-free DNA from their fetuses. A test that analyzes fetal DNA has proved to be more accurate in screening for Down syndrome than standard blood tests.
In 2012, Jay Shendure, a geneticist at the University of Washington, and his colleagues were able to reconstruct the entire genome of a fetus from cell-free DNA in a pregnant woman’s saliva. A team of Stanford University researchers collected DNA fragments from the blood of patients who had received heart transplants and managed to find DNA from their donated hearts. (Tellingly, levels were highest in patients who were rejecting their hearts.)
These days, scientists are especially excited by the prospect of using cell-free DNA to test for cancer. Instead of relying on invasive biopsies, they hope to find blood-borne fragments that carry distinctive cancer mutations.
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Sociable Chimps Have Richer Diversity of Gut Microbes
Photo credit:
Grooming session between two adult male chimpanzees at Gombe National Park, Tanzania. Steffen Foerster
Chimpanzees who join in on more social activities have a higher diversity of microbes in their gut, and this microscopic species diversity might help fight diseases. The findings, published in Science Advances this week, suggests that social behavior shapes the microbiome and preserves diversity across evolutionary timescales.
Suffering For Science: Why I Have Insects Sting Me To Create A Pain Index
Photo credit:
Smoky, almost irreverent. Justin Schmidt
Over the past 40 years (but in reality since I was five years old), I’ve been fascinated with insects and their ability to sting and cause pain. In graduate school, I became interested in why they sting and why stings from such tiny animals hurt so much.
To answer these questions, we first needed a way to measure pain – so, I invented the insect pain scale. The scale is based on a thousand or so personal stings from over 80 insect groups, plus ratings by various colleagues.
Food Allergies Linked To Overactive Immune System At Birth
Photo credit:
Babies more likely to have allergies later were born with hyperactive immunity. Steven Depolo/Flickr, CC BY-SA
One in every ten babies in Melbourne develops a food allergy during their first year of life. New research has found children who are born with overly active immune cells are more likely to develop allergies to milk, eggs, peanuts, wheat and other common foods. This finding could lead to future treatments for babies to prevent childhood food allergies.
January 16, 2016
Researchers investigate how light behaves in curved space
To investigate the influence of gravity on the propagation of light, researchers usually have to examine astronomical length scales and huge masses. However, physicists at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU) and Friedrich Schiller University Jena have shown that there is another way. In a recent issue of the journal Nature Photonics they find the answers to astronomical questions in the laboratory, shifting the focus to a previously underappreciated material property – surface curvature.
According to Einstein’s general theory of relativity, gravity can be described as the curvature of four-dimensional spacetime. In this curved space, celestial bodies and light move along geodesics, the shortest paths between two points, which often look anything but straight when viewed from the outside.
The team of researchers led by Prof. Dr. Ulf Peschel from Friedrich Schiller University Jena used a special trick to examine the propagation of light in such curved spaces in the laboratory. Instead of changing all four dimensions of spacetime, they reduced the problem to two dimensions and studied the propagation of light along curved surfaces. However, not all curved surfaces are the same. ‘For example, while you can easily unfold a cylinder or a cone into a flat sheet of paper, it is impossible to lay the surface of a sphere out flat on a table without tearing or at least distorting it,’ says Vincent Schultheiß, a doctoral candidate at FAU and lead author of the study. ‘A well known example of this is world maps that always show the surface in a distorted way. The curvature of the surface of a sphere is an intrinsic property that can’t be changed and has an effect on geometry and physics inside this two-dimensional surface.’
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Taiwan Now Has A Giant, Shiny, Shoe-Shaped Church
Photo credit: AFP/Getty Images
By Laura Wagner
Imagine Cinderella’s glass slipper scaled to about 100 times its original size and dropped on the coast of Taiwan.
That’s the new church in Ocean View Park in Budai township.
Looking like it was plucked from a distorted fairy tale, the glittering, shoe-shaped building is made up of about 320 tinted glass panels and stands 55 feet tall by 36 feet wide. It was reportedly constructed by the Southwest Coast National Scenic Area in an effort to attract female worshippers and tourists to the site.
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Stories Spill Out as Spotlight Is Shined on Sexism in Astronomy
Photo credit: Chris Usher/CBS, via Associated Press
By Karen Workman
Jessica Kirkpatrick, an undergrad student, was wearing dishwashing gloves to clean part of her research experiment when a senior member of her team walked by.
“That’s what women are good for, washing dishes in the kitchen,” he said, she recalled of the incident 15 or so years ago.
That’s among the less threatening stories of harassment shared by Dr. Kirkpatrick, 35, a former physics and astrophysics student at the University of California, Berkeley, who went on to get her doctorate.
She and many other women in astronomy have been tweeting about similar experiences using the hashtag #astroSH. The outpouring has surged since Tuesday, when Representative Jackie Speier, Democrat of California, announced a push for legislation to address sexism at universities.
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How To Defrost Your Windscreen With Science
Photo credit:
Or else you could end up like this... Matthew Bové/WKBW via Twitter
Leaving a car parked outside during the cold winter nights could lead to a frosty windscreen, if not worse, like this poor guy found out.
So, if you don’t want to waste energy using a scraper or waste time with that defroster heating up your windscreen, then science has got a quick and cheap solution for you.
Lawsuit demands US remove ‘In God We Trust’ from money
Photo credit: AP Photo/Rich Pedroncelli
By FoxNews.com
A new lawsuit filed on behalf of several Atheist plaintiffs argues the phrase “In God We Trust” on U.S. money is unconstitutional, and calls for the government to get rid of it.
Sacramento attorney Michael Newdow filed the lawsuit Monday in Akron, Ohio. He’d unsuccessfully sued the government at least twice challenging the use of the phrase “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance.
Throughout much of his lawsuit, the word appears as “G-d.”
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Why boredom is anything but boring
Illustration by Patrycja Podkościelny
By Maggie Koerth-Baker
In 1990, when James Danckert was 18, his older brother Paul crashed his car into a tree. He was pulled from the wreckage with multiple injuries, including head trauma.
The recovery proved difficult. Paul had been a drummer, but even after a broken wrist had healed, drumming no longer made him happy. Over and over, Danckert remembers, Paul complained bitterly that he was just — bored. “There was no hint of apathy about it at all,” says Danckert. “It was deeply frustrating and unsatisfying for him to be deeply bored by things he used to love.”
A few years later, when Danckert was training to become a clinical neuropsychologist, he found himself working with about 20 young men who had also suffered traumatic brain injury. Thinking of his brother, he asked them whether they, too, got bored more easily than they had before. “And every single one of them,” he says, “said yes.”
Those experiences helped to launch Danckert on his current research path. Now a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Waterloo in Canada, he is one of a small but growing number of investigators engaged in a serious scientific study of boredom.
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