Posts

The case of a 15-year-old Afghan boy with a rare genetic condition that caused him to age rapidly may help scientists unlock the mysteries how and why we age, bringing them closer to finding a way to halt or dramatically slow the aging process. Physicians discovered that the boy, admitted to a Dutch hospital in the 1990s suffering from symptoms including hypertension, hearing and vision loss, kidney failure, anemia and sensitivity to light, had a mutation in a key gene responsible for the enzyme that is essential to the repair of DNA damage in cells....

X-rays can help reveal anything from bombs hidden in luggage to tumors in breasts, but some potentially vital clues might be too faint to capture with conventional methods. Now a new x-ray technique adapted from atom smashers could resolve more key details. Conventional x-ray imaging works much like traditional photography, relying on the light—in this case, x-rays—that a target absorbs, transmits and scatters. To make out fine details, one typically needs a lot of x-rays, either over time, which can expose targets to damaging levels of radiation, or all at once from powerful sources such as circular particle accelerators, or synchrotrons, which are expensive....

Scientists have succeeded in retrieving and sequencing nuclear DNA from the bones of an extinct cave bear. The method they used could conceivably be applied to ancient human remains, such as those of Neandertals. Ancient DNA has been recovered from human bones in the past. In 1997 Svante Pbo of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, and his colleagues extracted and sequenced DNA from a Neandertal bone....

Researchers have developed an approach to break down a class of long-lasting chemicals that they say is easier and cheaper than the harsh methods currently used. The work also hints at how these chemicals, which have been linked to health problems, fall apart — a finding that could help to ultimately destroy these persistent pollutants. Per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFASs, are widely used in products such as firefighting foams, waterproof clothes and nonstick cookware....

In a head-to-head competition held 10 years ago, scientists at the National Institutes of Health tested two promising new types of vaccine to see which might offer the strongest protection against one of the deadliest viruses on earth, the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) that causes AIDS. One vaccine consisted of DNA rings called plasmids, each carrying a gene for one of five HIV proteins. Its goal was to get the recipient’s own cells to make the viral proteins in the hope they would provoke protective reactions by immune cells....

August 1969 Drifting Genes “The survival and preferential multiplication of types better adapted to the environment (natural selection) is the basis of evolution. Into this process, however, enters another kind of variation that is so completely independent of natural selection that it can even promote the predominance of genes that oppose adaptation rather than favoring it. Called genetic drift, this type of variation is a random, statistical fluctuation in the frequency of a gene as it appears in a population from one generation to the next....

By Alister Doyle and Nina ChestneyOSLO/LONDON (Reuters) - World governments are likely to recoil from plans for an ambitious 2015 climate change deal at talks next week, concern over economic growth at least partially eclipsing scientists’ warnings of rising temperatures and water levels.“We are in the eye of a storm,” said Yvo de Boer, United Nations climate chief in 2009 when a summit in Copenhagen ended without agreement. After Copenhagen, nations targeted a 2015 deal to enter into force from 2020 with the goal of averting more floods, heatwaves, droughts and rising sea levels....

Everyone in my family is sleep-deprived. My wife, who usually writes this column, is so overtaxed this month that she asked me to fill in for her. It’s tempting to blame our sleep deprivation on nightly interruptions by our nine-month-old or our toddler. But it’s my own fault, too: like 30 percent of my fellow Americans, my sleep habits are fairly wretched. Instead of treating my sleep as a valuable resource, I approach bedtime like folding the laundry: as a regular obligation that I’ll get to, eventually....

Before whales dive into the darkness of the deep ocean they often come to the surface and release a huge plume of fecal matter—which can be the color of over-steeped green tea or a bright orange sunset. When Joe Roman, a conservation biologist at the University of Vermont, saw one of these spectacular dumps in the mid-1990s, he got to wondering: “Is it ecologically important? Or is it a fart in a hurricane?...

Shrinking Arctic sea ice may have helped cause unusually snowy winters that have blanketed parts of the Northern Hemisphere in recent years. That’s the conclusion of a new study that suggests such winter blasts may become more frequent as warming further shrinks sea ice. “We think there’s probably a linkage between the record decline of Arctic sea ice and record snowfall over much of the northern continents,” said lead author Jiping Liu, a senior research scientist at the Georgia Institute of Technology, whose work was published yesterday by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences....

Dinosaurs might have ruled the planet out of sheer luck. The dominant status that dinosaurs enjoyed for some 135 million years had suggested there was something inherently superior about the creatures. To see why the dinosaurs rose to prominence, paleontologists investigated the first years of their existence in the late Triassic, from 230 million to 200 million years ago. The researchers discovered their main competitors at that time, the crurotarsans (ancestors to crocodiles), thrived—the fossil record shows that crurotarsans were actually twice as diverse as dinosaurs when it came to body types, diets and ways of life and that they were more abundant in many ecosystems....

An old yarn about a classic marketing con game on the secret of wealth instructs you to write a book about how to make a lot of money and sell it through the mail. When your marks receive the book, they discover the secret–write a book about how to make a lot of money and sell it through the mail. A confidence scheme similar to this can be found in The Secret (Simon & Schuster, 2006), a book and DVD by Rhonda Byrne and a cadre of self-help gurus that, thanks to Oprah Winfrey’s endorsement, have now sold more than three million copies combined....

As humankind’s radio and television broadcasts leak out into space and propagate across the galaxy at the speed of light, it is tempting to speculate on who might be listening in—and what they might know about us. A hypothetical civilization 50 light-years away, should they possess the technology to receive and decipher our stray radio waves, would witness a planet enmeshed in the Cuban Missile crisis, the sights and sounds of 1962 only just having reached their detectors....

“Dimmer switches” that control the level of protein created from a given gene may regulate the development, function and, ultimately, the life span of cells that begin to vanish from the brain at the onset of Parkinson’s disease. The finding, published in last week’s Science, could offer a new therapeutic target for treating the neurodegenerative disorder—making it one of the first to tie these protein modulators, small snippets of RNA known as microRNAs, to human disease....

Despite gun battles in the capital of Chad, rioting in Kenya and galloping inflation in Zimbabwe, the economies of sub-Saharan Africa are, as a whole, in better shape than they were a few years ago. The World Bank has reported recently that this part of the continent experienced a respectable growth rate of 5.6 percent in 2006 and a higher rate from 1995 to 2005 than in previous decades. The bank has given a cautious assessment that the region may have reached a turning point....

Chemist Chuck Wight of the University of Utah provides the following explanation: Small bubbles caused by shaking help to hasten the escape of the soda’s carbon dioxide. Cans of carbonated soft drinks contain carbon dioxide under pressure so that the gas dissolves in the liquid drink. Once the the can is opened, all of the gas will eventually escape from the liquid as bubbles, and the soda will go “flat.” If the liquid is handled gently, it takes a long time for the dissolved gas to escape....

Taste is not what you think. Every schoolchild learns that it is one of the five senses, a partner of smell and sight and touch, a consequence of food flitting over taste buds that send important signals—sweet or bitter, nutrient or poison?—to the brain. Were it so simple. In the past decade our understanding of taste and flavor has exploded with revelations of the myriad and complex ways that food messes with our consciousness—and of all the ways that our biases filter the taste experience....

Adapted from Born Anxious: The Lifelong Impact of Early Life Adversity—and How to Break the Cycle, by Daniel P. Keating. Published by St. Martin’s Press. Copyright © 2017 Daniel P. Keating. Reprinted with permission of the publisher, St. Martin’s Press. All rights reserved. By the late 1990s, our group at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research had identified robust connections between early adversity and lifelong anxiety and stress, leading to problems in social relationships and mental and physical health—and even to shorter lives....

Over her 34-year nursing career Martha Kuhl, a pediatric oncology nurse at U.C.S.F. Benioff Children’s Hospital Oakland in California, has seen her patient load more than double. She recalls one night shift when she was the lone nurse on duty with five patients. “These are all babies that can’t breathe,” she says. “I felt okay at four” but that last patient “sort of tipped it over the edge where I felt unsafe in being able to handle all of these patients....

The following essay is reprinted with permission from The Conversation, an online publication covering the latest research. The experience of visiting a zoo is about to change dramatically. The Next Generation Zoo concept is based on how animals use space in the wild, giving them more freedom and better using the resources available to most zoos. Take Philadelphia Zoo, for example. It is a small, city-based institution, which like many zoos has suffered from the lack of space or opportunity to expand....