A race to unlock genetic clues behind living to 100 is set to begin next year, after a US team announced it will compete for the $10m Genomics X Prize.
Genetic entrepreneur Dr Jonathan Rothberg is entering the challenge to identify genes linked to a long, healthy life. His team - and any other contenders - will be given 30 days to work out the full DNA code of 100 centenarians at a cost of no more than $1,000 per genome. |  |
Human Ancestors Were Nearly All Vegetarians
Right now, one half of all Americans are on a diet. The other half just gave up on their diets and are on a binge. Collectively, we are overweight, sick and struggling. Our modern choices about what and how much to eat have gone terribly wrong. The time has come to return to a more sensible way of eating and living, but which way? An entire class of self-help books recommends a return to the diets of our ancestors. Paleolithic diets, caveman diets, primal diets and the like, urge us to eat like the ancients. Taken too literally, such diets are ridiculous. After all, sometimes our ancestors starved to death and the starving to death diet, well, it ends badly. Yet, the idea that we might take our ancestral diet into consideration when evaluating the foods on which our organs, cells and existence thrive, makes sense. But what did our ancestors eat?
Forty years later, debate over ‘Momo the Missouri Monster' lingers
The Sasquatch-like creature stood tall like a man – just bigger, stinkier and hairier – cradling a dead dog under one arm and growling. The stench from ole' Big Foot was horrific and sickening before the creature darted back into the rural Missouri woods.
Or, none of that happened and teenagers punked the world. Either way, for a couple of weeks 40 years ago, tiny Louisiana, Mo., was the center of attention as people came from around the nation to help search for the mysterious beast. People in this historic old town on the banks of the Mississippi River are still debating whether the creature dubbed “Momo the Missouri Monster” really existed. |  |
WikiLeaks Grand Jury: Members of Congress Now Want to New York Times Journalists Too
For more than a year now, EFF has encouraged mainstream press publications like the New York Times to aggressively defend WikiLeaks’ First Amendment right to publish classified information in the public interest and denounce the ongoing grand jury investigating WikiLeaks as a threat to press freedom.
Well, we are now seeing why that is so important: at a House Judiciary subcommittee hearing on July 11th, some members of Congress made it clear they also want New York Times journalists charged under the Espionage Act for their recent stories on President Obama’s ‘Kill List’ and secret US cyberattacks against Iran. During the hearing, House Republicans “pressed legal experts Wednesday on whether it was possible to prosecute reporters for publishing classified information,” according to the Los Angeles Times.
Well, we are now seeing why that is so important: at a House Judiciary subcommittee hearing on July 11th, some members of Congress made it clear they also want New York Times journalists charged under the Espionage Act for their recent stories on President Obama’s ‘Kill List’ and secret US cyberattacks against Iran. During the hearing, House Republicans “pressed legal experts Wednesday on whether it was possible to prosecute reporters for publishing classified information,” according to the Los Angeles Times.
Future of war revealed by Sheffield scientists
Models to accurately predict the future of military conflicts based on classified information from the Afghan war revealed by whistleblower website Wikileaks have been created by scientists at the University of Sheffield.
Using war logs with about 77,000 events including location, day and time of occurrence and other details from the war in Afghanistan between 2004 and 2009, the team of scientists – including scientists from the universities of Edinburgh and Columbia, USA – were able to predict armed opposition group activity way into the future of the battle. |  |
Recharged in Midair By Flying Battery-Drones, Electric Aircraft May Never Have to Land
Instead of taking off with thunderous jet engines, future airplanes may soar into the air on battery packs, and jettison them like so much ballast once the juice has been drained. Then these batteries could be replaced in flight. Instead of refueling with flying tankers, electric planes would rendezvous with autonomous flying battery-drones.
This plan could enable an all-electric trip across the Atlantic, retracing Charles Lindbergh’s flight path. Later this month, aviation enthusiast Chip Yates — inventor of the Swigz Pro electric superbike — plans to test an electric plane at Inyokern Airport in Southern California. |  |
Handicapping NASA's commercial space race
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — If astronauts are launched from American soil once again during the next presidential term, they'll almost certainly be riding a rocket called Liberty, Atlas or Falcon.
Those are the rockets being offered as the main contenders in a new commercial space race to carry NASA's spacefliers to the International Space Station. So which one is the most ready to go? SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon capsule have taken up most of the spotlight to date, thanks to May's successful cargo-carrying mission to the International Space Station. But this old curmudgeon sees the situation differently, as do some other longtime observers of the space program. |  |
Earth's hot formation may be reason behind water shortage
Earth probably formed in a hotter, drier part of the solar system than previously thought, which could explain our planet's puzzling shortage of water, a new study reports.
Our newly forming solar system's "snow line" — the zone beyond which icy compounds could condense 4.5 billion years ago — was actually much farther away from the sun than prevailing theory predicts, according to the study. "Unlike the standard accretion-disk model, the snow line in our analysis never migrates inside Earth's orbit," co-author Mario Livio, of the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) in Baltimore, said in a statement. |  |
Where the Buffalo No Longer Roamed
The telegram arrived in New York from Promontory Summit, Utah, at 3:05 p.m. on May 10, 1869, announcing one of the greatest engineering accomplishments of the century:
The last rail is laid; the last spike driven; the Pacific Railroad is completed. The point of junction is 1086 miles west of the Missouri river and 690 miles east of Sacramento City. The telegram was signed, “Leland Stanford, Central Pacific Railroad. T. P. Durant, Sidney Dillon, John Duff, Union Pacific Railroad,” and trumpeted news of the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad. After more than six years of backbreaking labor, east officially met west with the driving of a ceremonial golden spike. In City Hall Park in Manhattan, the announcement was greeted with the firing of 100 guns. Bells were rung across the country, from Washington, D.C., to San Francisco. Business was suspended in Chicago as people rushed to the streets, celebrating to the sounding of steam whistles and cannons booming. |  |
Blogging the Human Genome
Junk DNA—or, as scientists call it nowadays, noncoding DNA—remains a mystery: No one knows how much of it is essential for life. As one scientist mused, “Is the genome a trash novel, from which you can remove a hundred pages and it doesn’t matter, or is it more like a Hemingway, where if you remove a page, the story line is lost?” However enigmatic, though, noncoding DNA has proved mighty useful for scientists in one way—it’s great for tracking evolution, through so-called DNA clocks.
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The Meaning of Life — According to Geneticist J. Craig Venter
In 1943, the Austrian-born physicist Erwin Schrödinger delivered a lecture at Trinity applying the principles of his own field to the foreign territory of biology. His purpose was to tackle the biggest question of all: what is life? He told his audience of 400, among them the then-Taoiseach Eamon de Valera, that the filaments in cells called chromosomes must contain "some kind of code-script" determining "the entire pattern of the individual's future development." This hypothesis would inspire the scientists James D. Watson and Francis Crick to seek that code-script. A mere decade later, they published a revolutionary article describing the double helix structure of what we now familiarly call DNA, explaining how it stores hereditary information. Their discovery underpins all modern genetics.
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"Dramatic" New Maya Temple Found, Covered With Giant Faces
Some 1,600 years ago, the Temple of the Night Sun was a blood-red beacon visible for miles and adorned with giant masks of the Maya sun god as a shark, blood drinker, and jaguar.
Long since lost to the Guatemalan jungle, the temple is finally showing its faces to archaeologists, and revealing new clues about the rivalrous kingdoms of the Maya. Unlike the relatively centralized Aztec and Inca empires, the Maya civilization—which spanned much of what are now Guatemala, Belize, and Mexico's Yucatán region (Maya map)—was a loose aggregation of city-states. |  |
Blindness, Bone Loss, and Space Farts: Astronaut Medical Oddities
In space, no one can hear you sneeze.
Though astronauts have been flying above the Earth for more than half a century, researchers are still working to understand the medical toll that space takes on travelers’ bodies and minds. Astronauts must deal with a highly stressful environment, as well as weakening bones and muscles and the ever-present dangers of radiation. If people are ever to venture far from our home planet, such obstacles will need to be overcome. |  |
What Space Smells Like
When astronauts return from space walks and remove their helmets, they are welcomed back with a peculiar smell. An odor that is distinct and weird: something, astronauts have described it, like "seared steak." And also: "hot metal." And also: "welding fumes."
Our extraterrestrial explorers are remarkably consistent in describing Space Scent in meaty-metallic terms. "Space," astronaut Tony Antonelli has said, "definitely has a smell that's different than anything else." Space, three-time spacewalker Thomas Jones has put it, "carries a distinct odor of ozone, a faint acrid smell." Space, Jones elaborated, smells a little like gunpowder. It is "sulfurous.". |  |
Chief Joseph's shirt auctioned for $900,000
A war shirt worn by Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce tribe that can be seen in a painting hanging in the Smithsonian Institution sold on Saturday for $877,500 (£562,000) at auction, organisers said.
Mike Overby, an organiser of the annual Coeur d'Alene Art Auction, said the shirt that sold in Reno is considered to be one of the most important Native American artifacts ever to come to auction. It had been expected to raise from $800,000 to $1.2m, he said. "Anything associated with Chief Joseph is highly desirable, and that's a pretty special shirt," he told Associated Press. |  |
France's 20th century radium craze still haunts Paris
The Belle Epoque, France's golden era at the turn of the last century, bequeathed Paris elegant landmarks such as the Eiffel Tower, but also a more sinister legacy of radioactive floors and backyards which the capital is only now addressing.
When the Franco-Polish Nobel Prize winner Marie Curie discovered the radioactive element radium in 1898, she set off a craze for the luminescent metal among Parisians, who started using it for everything from alarm clock dials to lipsticks and even water fountains. |  |
Polar bears' ancient roots pushed way back
The polar bear has been around for a surprisingly long time. A new analysis of its DNA suggests that Ursus maritimus split from the brown bear between 4 million and 5 million years ago — around the same time when, some scientists believe, the Arctic’s thick sea ice first formed.
With such old origins, the creature must have weathered extreme shifts in climate, researchers report online July 23 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Simulations of how the DNA changed over time suggest that polar bear populations rose and fell with the temperature. After thriving during cooler times between 800,000 and 600,000 years ago, the bears seem to have suffered a genetic bottleneck and crashed after a warmer period that started about 420,000 years ago. |  |
GPS sheep tracking supports 40-year-old theory
Instead of fleeing randomly when faced with a predator, sheep attempt to bury themselves within their flock, new UK research has shown.
The theory that animals moving in groups retreat towards the centre of their flocks if a predator appears has been tested before. But the researchers are the first to show that sheep behave this way using GPS technology. Details of the work are published in the journal Current Biology. |  |
Elderly storytelling android debuts in Japan
The art of humorous storytelling in Japan, known as rakugo, isn't as popular as it once was. But now an android has joined the ranks of comics who kneel on cushions while spinning out jokes.
The narrative droid is a copy of Beicho Katsura III, an 86-year-old rakugo comic recognized by the government as a Living National Treasure. The Beicho Android, as it's known, is the work of Osaka University professor Hiroshi Ishiguro, creator of the Geminoid series of lifelike androids, and makeup artist Shinya Endo. |  |