WebProNews

Tag: biology

  • Google’s Anti-Aging Company Calico Gets A Website

    As you may recall, Google announced the formation of a new company called Calico lat fall, aimed at studying aging and its effects on health and well-being (or as some us put it, keeping us from dying).

    SFGate discovered (via Business Insider) that Calico now has a website up at CalicoLabs.com.

    Here’s what it says:

    We’re tackling aging, one of life’s greatest mysteries.

    Calico is a research and development company whose mission is to harness advanced technologies to increase our understanding of the biology that controls lifespan. We will use that knowledge to devise interventions that enable people to lead longer and healthier lives. Executing on this mission will require an unprecedented level of interdisciplinary effort and a long-term focus for which funding is already in place.

    It goes on to say that Calico is made up of scientists from the fields of medicine, drug development, molecular biology, and genetics, and shows off the team:

    It also says, it will post career opportunities as they become available, and that its ability to handle press inquiries will be limited, but does include an email address for such inquiries.

    Image via Calico

  • The Earliest Life Form Found So Far is in Australia

    The Guardian is reporting that Earth’s earliest life form has been found in Australia. An Aussie research team accompanied by some U.S. scientists discovered a series of “complex microbial ecosystems” they date to 3.5 billion years ago.

    The find was made in Australia’s western Pilbara region in rock sediments considered to be some of the oldest found. In a rock body called the Dresser formation, the scientists found entire microbe communities. Slivers of ancient rock were sampled in order to search for the microscopic life.

    Team leader and professor David Walcey of the University of Western Australia told the Guardian that the radical find “pushes back evidence of life on Earth by a few more million years.” The simpler organisms (bacterium and archaea) ruled for millions of years before evolutionary leaps led to more complex, multi-celled lifeforms.

    He added, “The Pilbara has some of the best, least deformed rocks on Earth; there aren’t many rocks older than there… I would say this is the most robust evidence of the oldest life on Earth. My team has found evidence dated at 3.45bn years in the past, so we have gone further back by a few million years.”

    Walcey’s work is slowly painting a looking-glass view into lifeforms that existed eons before the evolution of man. “Microbes and bacteria like to live in communities. Think about the bacteria in your stomach, for example. These microbes lived in layers that required different chemical gradients to survive. So bacteria that liked light would be towards the top while those that didn’t were towards the bottom.”

    Earth was so radically different in almost every way, from higher temperatures to even higher sea levels. Bacteria like those the team discovered would have been the predominant form of life for several billion years.

    “Bacteria ruled the world back then [and] it would’ve been a very smelly world indeed,” Walcey observed. “It would’ve been pretty hostile for us. There was essentially no oxygen, a lot of CO2 and methane and much warmer oceans.”

    The ramifications of the discovery could impact how we view the entire solar system. “These kinds of ecosystems could be viewed by a rover, such as the one that visited Mars,” Walcey said. “We wouldn’t know the age, of course, as we couldn’t date them. But we would know that there was life at some point on another planet, which would be pretty exciting.”

    If you’re interested in the elementary basics of life on Earth, here’s a BBC2 clip describing the evolution of the first microorganisms on our planet:

    [Image via this BBC2 clip on YouTube]

  • New Bacteria Found in NASA, ESA Clean Rooms

    New Bacteria Found in NASA, ESA Clean Rooms

    Researchers this week revealed that a new genus of bacteria has been discovered in some of the cleanest places on Earth. A paper published in the International Journal of Systematic and Evolutionary Microbiology names the new bacteria “Tersicoccus phoenicis.”

    The “berry-shaped” bacteria was found in spacecraft clean rooms on two different continents. One was a NASA clean room located at Kennedy Space Center in Florida and the other is a European Space Agency (ESA) clean room located in Kourou, French Guiana. Spacecraft clean rooms are kept spotless to ensure that no contamination from Earth escapes the planet on spacecrafts. The rooms are cleaned with chemicals, ultraviolet radiation, heat, and other methods.

    Researchers are now sequencing the bacteria’s DNA and developing methods to eliminate the bacteria from clean rooms.

    “We want to have a better understanding of these bugs, because the capabilities that adapt them for surviving in clean rooms might also let them survive on a spacecraft,” said Parag Vaishampayan, lead author of the paper and a microbiologist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “This particular bug survives with almost no nutrients.”

    According to NASA, microbiologists often survey the bacteria able to survive in clean rooms. Though other new species of bacteria have been found in clean rooms, Tersicoccus phoenicis is the first to be discovered in a clean room but not outside of one. Existing bacteria databases checked by Vaishampayan and his colleagues failed to turn up the new bacteria anywhere but these two clean rooms.

    “We find a lot of bugs in clean rooms because we are looking so hard to find them there,” said Vaishampayan. “The same bug might be in the soil outside the clean room but we wouldn’t necessarily identify it there because it would be hidden by the overwhelming numbers of other bugs.”

    (Image courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech)

  • Study Confirms Humans Came From Africa Using… Herpes

    Scientists have debated, since such discussions were made permissible, the origins of the human species: did we come from Asia? Africa? Maybe even the Middle East?

    Until very recently, many of these theories had equal merit. However, a study of the complete genetic code of the herpes simplex virus type one (HSV-1), notorious for its oral cold sores, has confirmed the theory that the human species emigrated out of one location: Africa.

    The study is available online in the journal PLOS-ONE and was conducted by several specialists, including two professors of Ophthalmology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Medicine and Public Health: Aaron W. Kolb (who also does Visual Sciences), Curtis R. Brandt (who specializes in microbiology and immunology), and Cécile Ané of the Departments of Botany and Statistics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

    The three authors compared 31 different strains of HSV-1 that were sampled all across the world from North America to Eurasia and Africa. “The result was fairly stunning,” Brandt said. “The viral strains sort exactly as you would predict based on sequencing of human genomes. We found that all of the African isolates cluster together, all the [sic] virus from the Far East, Korea, Japan, China clustered together, all the viruses in Europe and America, with one exception, clustered together.”

    He continued: “What we found follows exactly what the anthropologists have told us, and the molecular geneticists who have analyzed the human genome have told us, about where humans originated and how they spread across the planet.”

    The scientists hope the technology they used in analyzing 31 complete viral genomes may help us to understand why certain diseases can have a sudden lethal turn. “We’d like to understand why these few viruses are so dangerous, when the predominant course of herpes is so mild. We believe that a difference in the gene sequence is determining the outcome, and we are interested in sorting this out,” Brandt said.

    Oh, and that “one exception” that Brandt mentioned? A single strain of HSV-1 sampled in Texas came out of the gene sequencer looking Asian. “How did we get an Asian-related virus in Texas?” Aaron Kolb pondered. Since some Native American ancestors traveled across the Bering Land Bridge to settle in modern North America, Brandt believes that to settle the mystery.

    “We found support for the land bridge hypothesis because the date of divergence from its most recent Asian ancestor was about 15,000 years ago,” Brandt says. “The dates match, so we postulate that [the exception] was an Amerindian virus.”

    If you want to read the release, you can find it here.

    [Image via the study and its authors on PLOS-ONE]

  • Biologist Discovers New Species of Tick… Up Nose

    ScienceDaily reported that American biologist Tony Goldberg regularly travels to Kibale National Park in western Uganda to watch how infectious diseases travel throughout the wilds, but something he did not anticipate was finding an undiscovered species of tick up his nose. A Wisconsin native and familiar with his local tick population, he’d never heard of anyone having a tick in their nose, so he did some extensive research.

    “When I got back to the U.S., I realized I had a stowaway,” he said. “When you first realize you have a tick up your nose, it takes a lot of willpower not to claw your face off.”

    The findings were published in the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, which may be viewed here in its entirety.

    Goldberg is a professor of pathobiological science at University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Veterinary Medicine and associate director for research in the UW-Madison Global Health Institute, so he has a little experience dealing with intrusive insects.

    After carefully removing the tick, he sealed it in a test tube and froze it. When he and a Texas A&M University colleague sequenced the tick’s DNA, they discovered it had no matches in the database. “Either it’s a species of tick that is known but has never been sequenced, or it’s a new species of tick,” he wrote in the study.

    Chimpanzees, common in the Kibale National Park, deal with nose ticks all the time, and Goldberg’s tick was not the first to latch onto a human. In order to determine just how frequent the nose ticks are at Kibale, Goldberg and Harvard chimp expert Richard Wrangham took a series of high-res photos to study chimp noses. In about one of five chimps’ noses was a tick.

    Believed to be of the genus Amblyomma, Goldberg suggests that the nose tick “could be an underappreciated, indirect, and somewhat weird way in which people and chimps share pathogens.”

    Since the tick avoided detection as Goldberg flew internationally, if the frequency of global travel is factored in, nose ticks could easily spread from Uganda to the rest of the world. The ticks likely evolved to target the nose to escape being combed out through regular chimpanzee grooming.

    [Image via The American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene]

  • Homosexual Necrophilia Is Apparently A Thing In Ducks

    Homosexual Necrophilia Is Apparently A Thing In Ducks

    What do you do when you see a male duck attempting to have sex with a dead male duck? Most would probably be a little weirded out and walk away. One biologist, however, saw a rare occurrence in nature, and decided to publish a study on it. That study earned him the prestigious Ig Nobel Prize, and a place in history.

    The discovery of “gay dead duck sex” is the focal point of a recent TED talk that’s more fascinating than it sounds. In it, Dutch biologist Kees Moeliker, talks about his strange discovery, and how it has changed his life.

    The moral of this story is that you might just win an award for writing studies about necrophilia in animals.

    [h/t: LiveScience]

  • Humans Wiped Out Tiger, Not Disease, Shows Study

    A new study from the University of Adelaide has shown that humans, not diseases, were responsible for the extinction of the Tasmanian tiger.

    The Tasmanian tiger, also known as thylacine, was a marsupial carnivore found in Tasmania until the species went extinct in the 1930s. According to researchers, the Tasmanian government encouraged the hunting of the animals from 1886 until 1909, paying bounties for thylacine carcasses. The last known wild Tasmanian tiger was captured in 1933.

    “Many people, however, believe that bounty hunting alone could not have driven the thylacine extinct and therefore claim that an unknown disease epidemic must have been responsible,” said Thomas Prowse, leader of the project and a research associate at the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences and the Environment Institute. “We tested this claim by developing a ‘metamodel’ – a network of linked species models – that evaluated whether the combined impacts of Europeans could have exterminated the thylacine, without any disease.”

    The researchers used a modified version of mathematical models developed by conservation biologists to simulate extinction risks to populations of endangered species, called a population viability analysis (PVA). Prowse and his colleagues added species interactions to the normal PVA model.

    “The new model simulated the directs effects of bounty hunting and habitat loss and, importantly, also considered the indirect effects of a reduction in the thylacine’s prey (kangaroos and wallabies) due to human harvesting and competition from millions of introduced sheep,” said Prowse. “We found we could simulate the thylacine extinction, including the observed rapid population crash after 1905, without the need to invoke a mystery disease. We showed that the negative impacts of European settlement were powerful enough that, even without any disease epidemic, the species couldn’t escape extinction.”

    (Image via Wikimedia Commons)

  • Flickr Helps Scientists Discover New Species Of Insect

    I always thought that we knew everything there ever was to know about insects. They’re everywhere and they’re not exactly hard to find. Where would we ever find new species? A Flickr user, Hock Ping Guek, took some pictures of an insect, but only found out later that he had discovered an entirely new species.

    A scientific report recently came out that discussed the “the confluence of citizen scientist, online image database and cybertaxonomy.” The Internet has given rise to such terms like citizen scientist or citizen journalist. What’s fascinating is that such discoveries by these “citizen scientists” are nothing new.

    The paper says that new species are being discovered all the time by people that just like to take pictures. These people upload these seemingly innocuous photos to Facebook or Flickr only to find out later that they have discovered an entirely new species.

    Here’s how it all went down according to the paper:

    The discovery of a new species of Semachrysa described in this paper is a direct result of the incidental interaction of photographer/citizen scientist, online image database and professional scientists. Images of Semachrysa jade sp. n. were initially posted by the second author on the online image database Flickr for comment by the photography and natural history communities. The specimen had been released once it was photographed and at this stage no determination had been made on the taxonomic identity of the species. The online images were then randomly examined by the senior author who determined that this distinctive species was not immediately recognizable as any previously described species. Links to the images were forwarded to additional experts in chrysopid taxonomy to elicit comment on its possible taxonomic identity. After extensive discussion it was concluded that the species was likely new to science but its generic placement inconclusive based solely upon the images at hand.

    After the initial discovery was made, the scientists traveled back to the same spot with the original photographer to capture some specimens for study. They were able to come out of it with a male and female specimen of this new species.

    Check out the beautiful photos of this news species of Green Lacewing:

    Flickr Scientists New Species insect

    Flickr Scientists New Species Insect

    In other science news, you can read the entire fascinating report on social media and science combing their powers for good right now. It’s absolutely free. The study was released under a creative commons license so we call can enjoy it. Now if only other scientific research would go free so we could all benefit from it.

    [h/t: Monga Bay]