ريتشارد دوكنز's Blog, page 670
October 8, 2015
Neil deGrasse Explains How Batman Defeat Superman
Photo credit:
Video screenshot / Tech Insider
What do you ask one of most recognizable scientists of our generation? Obviously, you ask the greatest question of our time: Who would win in a fight between Batman and Superman?
In this short video by Tech Insider, Neil deGrasse Tyson applies his great mind to discuss superhero battles, all in anticipation of the Batman vs. Superman film coming out in March next year.
Incredible New Photos Of Pluto Show Blue Skies And Water Ice
Photo credit:
Pluto's blue haze. The image was taken with the New Horizons Ralph/Multispectral Visible Imaging Camera. NASA/JHUAPL/SwRI
NASA’s New Horizons continues to amaze as it reveals more and more about Pluto and its family of moons. Recently, New Horizons dazzled us as it beamed back the first color images of Pluto, revealing a scaly, snakeskin-like surface. This week, we see Pluto’s hazy atmosphere in color for the first time, and surprise... it’s blue!
WOMEN AREN’T CRAZY! PERIOD.
Clue (free app) : http://bit.ly/1Rd2e8z
A video about PMS making women a little crazy, how we can keep in touch with our body, and why you should stand with planned parenthood.
Stand With Planned Parenthood: https://secure.ppaction.org/site/Donation2?df_id=17853&17853.donation=form1&s_src=StandwithPP_Evergreen_c3_ad_gsea1&s_subsrc=3NALz1601K1N1V&gclid=Cj0KEQjwqNiwBRDnq93MioaqtKQBEiQAb7Ezn-qIGI2q8YHZgDEYUw0-UOYp-ATR6ADAwDYgIRLKJUEaAgpc8P8HAQ
Thanks to Nickey Huntsman for being in this video! https://www.youtube.com/user/TheShannamosity
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I’m so lucky to be sponsored by Clue for this video. All opinions on products are true and honest and they are mine. If you use this period tracking app please let me know how you like it! PMS can be crazy and emotions are high and low. Birth control has helped me regulate my hormones during PMS/period emotional changes. Also, please consider lending your support to Planned Parenthood. They provide a great service and are under attack. I stand with planned parenthood!
Researchers Find Link Between DNA Marks And Sexual Orientation
Photo credit:
Dragon Images/Shutterstock
The idea that a “gay gene” exists is not without controversy, but evidence strongly suggests that sexual orientation, at least in men, is influenced largely (but not entirely) by genetics. New research is offering the first piece of evidence for an idea that has been proposed before: a link between sexual preference and DNA tags that can be influenced by the environment.
Nobel Prize In Chemistry Awarded For Work On Natural DNA Repair
Photo credit:
At the Nobel Chemistry Prize announcement. Reuters/Fredrik Sandberg/TT News
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry for 2015 has been awarded jointly to Sweden’s Tomas Lindahl, USA’s Paul Modrich and Turkish-born Aziz Sancar for their discoveries in the field of natural DNA repair.
How A One Night Stand In The Ice Age Affects Us All Today
Photo credit:
Reconstruction of a Neanderthal man in a modern suit, at the Neanderthal Museum. Einsamer Schütze via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA
Over the past half decade, ancient DNA research has revealed some surprising aspects to our evolutionary history during the past 50,000 years.
Perhaps the most startling of these has been the extent to which the ancestors of living people across the planet interbred with other closely related species of human.
But where in the world did these cross-species matings occur? Which archaic species were involved?
Venus Encounters The Moon Before Dawn
Photo credit:
The crescent moon and Venus often make a pretty sight together in the sky. Phil Plait/flickr, CC BY-SA
Before sunrise this Friday, October 9, Venus will briefly hide behind the moon, as seen from central and eastern Australia. This rare event is known as a Lunar Occultation of Venus.
For about an hour, the moon will travel past Venus blocking it from view. During this time, the moon will be found low to the eastern horizon.
October 7, 2015
Chemistry Nobel: Keeping DNA In Good Repair
The 2015 Nobel Prize in Chemistry goes to Tomas Lindahl, Paul Modrich and Aziz Sancar for discoveries of the mechanisms by which cells maintain the integrity of their DNA sequences.
Antioxidants May Make Cancer Worse
Antioxidants are supposed to keep your cells healthy. That is why millions of people gobble supplements like vitamin E and beta-carotene each year. Today, however, a new study adds to a growing body of research suggesting these supplements actually have a harmful effect in one serious disease: cancer.
The work, conducted in mice, shows that antioxidants can change cells in ways that fuel the spread of malignant melanoma—the most serious skin cancer—to different parts of the body. The progression makes the disease even more deadly. Earlier studies of antioxidant supplement use by people have also hinted at a cancer-promoting effect. A large trial reported in 1994 (pdf) that daily megadoses of the antioxidant beta-carotene increased the risk of lung cancer in male smokers by 18 percent and a 1996 trial was stopped early after researchers discovered that high-dose beta-carotene and retinol, another form of vitamin A, increased lung cancer risk by 28 percent in smokers and workers exposed to asbestos. More recently, a 2011 trial involving more than 35,500 men over 50 found that large doses of vitamin E increased the risk of prostate cancer by 17 percent. These findings had puzzled researchers because the conventional wisdom is that antioxidants should lower cancer risk by neutralizing cell-damaging, cancer-causing free radicals.
But scientists now think that antioxidants, at high enough levels, also protect cancer cells from these same free radicals. “There now exists a sizable quantity of data suggesting that antioxidants can help cancer cells much like they help normal cells,” says Zachary Schafer, a biologist at the University of Notre Dame, who was not involved in the new study. Last year the scientists behind the melanoma study found that antioxidants fuel the growth of another type of malignancy, lung cancer.
For the new study, published in Science Translational Medicine, Martin Bergö, a cell biologist at the University of Gothenburg’s Sahlgrenska Cancer Center in Sweden, and his colleagues decided to look at melanoma because rates have been increasing and because the cancer is known to be sensitive to the effects of free radicals. They fed the antioxidant N-acetylcysteine (NAC) to mice that had been genetically engineered to be susceptible to melanoma. The per-weight dose they gave the mice was consistent with what people typically consume in supplements. Although the treated mice did not develop more skin tumors than similar mice that had not been fed the antioxidants, they developed twice as many tumors in their lymph nodes, a hallmark of the spread of cancer—a process called metastasis. When the researchers added NAC or a form of vitamin E to cultured human melanoma cells, they confirmed that the antioxidants improved the cells’ ability to move and invade a nearby membrane.
Antioxidants may bolster protection of these dangerous cells. Bergö and his colleagues found higher levels of glutathione, an antioxidant made by the body, inside metastatic tumor cells in treated mice compared with untreated mice. The treated mice also had a higher ratio of glutathione to glutathione disulfide, the molecule that glutathione becomes after it neutralizes free radicals. These findings suggest that when the body is given extra antioxidants, its tumor cells get to keep more of the antioxidants that they already make themselves. The cells can store the surplus, improving their ability to survive damage. This idea is supported by work that shows some genes that drive cancer growth turn on other genes that make intrinsic antioxidants.
The substances may help cancer cells in other ways, too. Previous research has suggested that glutathione affects the activity of a protein called RhoA, which helps cells move to different parts of the body. “If you were to select one protein that is known to be involved in [cell] migration, RhoA is it,” Bergö explains. He and his colleagues confirmed that the extra glutathione in the treated mice caused levels of RhoA to increase in their metastatic tumors. In their 2014 lung cancer study they also found that antioxidant supplements caused lung tumor cells to turn off the activity of a well-known cancer-suppressing gene called p53; its inactivation is believed to drive metastasis. And Schafer’s work has shown that antioxidants help migrating breast cancer cells survive when they detach from the extracellular matrix, the network of proteins surrounding cells.
These molecular investigations shed light on the large human trials that have implicated antioxidants in cancer. It is possible that the supplements did not triggercancer but rather accelerated the progression of existing undiagnosed cancers, making later discovery of the disease likely.In other words, it “could be that while antioxidants might prevent DNA damage—and thus impede tumor initiation—once a tumor is established, antioxidants might facilitate the malignant behavior of cancer cells,” Schafer says.
The medical advice for people at this point is tentative. More studies need to be done to bolster this hypothesis and understand exactly how antioxidants affect cancer cells in humans. Bergö, who is not a medical doctor, does believe that people who are at an increased risk for lung cancer or melanoma or who have been diagnosed with either one should avoid antioxidant supplements. “There’s no conclusive evidence that it would be beneficial to them, and there’s mounting evidence that it could be harmful,” he says.
His results do have a silver lining. They suggest a potential new way to target the disease. If cancer is very sensitive to the damaging effects of free radicals, then it might be possible to develop drugs that target cancer cells specifically and prevent them from producing antioxidants or that ramp up free radical levels inside of the malignant cells, exploiting their newly discovered weakness.
Plastic-eating worms may offer solution to mounting waste
Yu Yang
By Rob Jordan
Consider the plastic foam cup. Every year, Americans throw away 2.5 billion of them. And yet, that waste is just a fraction of the 33 million tons of plastic Americans discard every year. Less than 10 percent of that total gets recycled, and the remainder presents challenges ranging from water contamination to animal poisoning.
Enter the mighty mealworm. The tiny worm, which is the larvae form of the darkling beetle, can subsist on a diet of Styrofoam and other forms of polystyrene, according to two companion studies co-authored byWei-Min Wu, a senior research engineer in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford. Microorganisms in the worms’ guts biodegrade the plastic in the process – a surprising and hopeful finding.
“Our findings have opened a new door to solve the global plastic pollution problem,” Wu said.
The papers, published in Environmental Science and Technology, are the first to provide detailed evidence of bacterial degradation of plastic in an animal’s gut. Understanding how bacteria within mealworms carry out this feat could potentially enable new options for safe management of plastic waste.
“There’s a possibility of really important research coming out of bizarre places,” said Craig Criddle, a professor of civil and environmental engineering who supervises plastics research by Wu and others at Stanford. “Sometimes, science surprises us. This is a shock.”
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