Lifeboat Foundation

Indeed, as Gizmodo’s report highlights, many experts believe that these researchers have not actually found evidence of dinosaur DNA. They told the news outlet, for example, that—even under the best circumstances—DNA couldn’t last more than three million years. Let alone more than 100 million. And that the chemicals may have been staining inorganic matter that only looks cellular in nature.

As of now, the most ancient DNA that scientists have been able to sequence was that of a million-year-old woolly mammoth. And the youngest dinosaurs are at least 65 million years old. But if future experiments do confirm this evidence as real, then that really changes things. At least in our fantasies, where reanimated dinosaurs and Ian Malcolms abound.

The post Fossil of Peacock-Like Dinosaur May Have Preserved DNA Remnants appeared first on Nerdist.

Residents of Abusir el-Meleq, an ancient Egyptian city south of Cairo, the men died between 1,380 B.C.E. and 450 C.E. A team from Parabon NanoLabs presented the trio’s facial reconstructions at the International Symposium on Human Identification in September.

“[T]his is the first time comprehensive DNA phenotyping has been performed on human DNA of this age,” says Parabon, a Virginia-based company that typically uses genetic analysis to help solve cold cases, in a statement.

To approximate the men’s faces, researchers used DNA phenotyping, which predicts individuals’ physical appearance based on genetic markers. (Phenotyping can suggest subjects’ skin, hair and eye color, but as Caitlin Curtis and James Hereward wrote for the Conversation in 2,018 the process has its limitations.) The team determined the mummies’ other characteristics through examination of their physical remains, reports Hannah Sparks for the New York Post.

Today, the conjunction of climate change, the advent of artificial intelligence and the capacity to import human purposiveness into evolution through the reading and rewriting of our own genome are, like the first leaps in technology and their consequences, stirring a search for the sacred that frames both the limits and potentialities of what it means to be human. As the Polish thinker Leszek Kołakowski sagely put it, without a sense of the sacred, culture loses all sense.

For this reason, he posited in a conversation some years ago at All Souls College in Oxford, that “mankind can never get rid of the need for religious self-identification. … Who am I, where did I come from, where do I fit in, why am I responsible, what does my life mean, how will I face death? Religion is a paramount aspect of human culture. Religious need cannot be excommunicated from culture by rationalist incantation.”

In this, Rees agrees. Far from consigning faith to the past, science fiction plumbs its future. Where technology and its consequences go, the religious imagination will follow.

When Dr. Robert Murphy first started researching biochemistry and drug development in the late 1970s, creating a pharmaceutical compound that was effective and safe to market followed a strict experimental pipeline that was beginning to be enhanced by large-scale data collection and analysis on a computer.

Now head of the Murphy Lab for computational biology at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), Murphy has watched over the years as data collection and artificial intelligence have revolutionized this process, making the drug creation pipeline faster, more efficient, and more effective.

Recently, that’s been thanks to the application of machine learning—computer systems that learn and adapt by using algorithms and statistical models to analyze patterns in datasets—to the drug development process. This has been notably key to reducing the presence of side effects, Murphy says.

The timeframe for reinfection is fundamental to numerous aspects of public health decision making. As the COVID-19 pandemic continues, reinfection is likely to become increasingly common. Maintaining public health measures that curb transmission—including among individuals who were previously infected with SARS-CoV-2—coupled with persistent efforts to accelerate vaccination worldwide is critical to the prevention of COVID-19 morbidity and mortality.

US National Science Foundation.

And, depending on how further studies progress, it could be implemented via gene therapy.

Early-stage pancreatic cancer has a ‘reset button’

Continue reading “A Biological ‘Time Machine’ With Human Cells Can Help Reverse Cancer” »

Brains aren’t the easiest of organs to study, what with their delicate wiring and subtle whispering of neurotransmitter messages. Now, this research could be made a little easier, as we’ve learned we can swap some critical chemical systems with the host animal being none the wiser.

In a proof-of-concept study run by a team of US researchers, the microscopic worm Caenorhabditis elegans was genetically gifted pieces of a nervous system taken from a radically different creature – a curious freshwater organism known as Hydra.

The swap wasn’t unlike teaching a specific brain circuit a foreign language, and finding it performs its job just as well as before.

Genetic information can be messy. Mapping proteins could offer a clearer view of what’s driving cancer.

Scientists have unveiled new maps of the protein networks underlying different types of cancer, offering a potentially clearer way to see what’s driving the disease and to find therapeutic targets.

Sequencing the genetic information of tumors can provide a trove of data about the mutations contained in those cancer cells. Some of those mutations help doctors figure out the best way to treat a patient, but others remain more of a mystery than a clear instruction manual. Many are exceedingly rare, or there are so many mutations it’s not clear what’s fueling the cancer.

Continue reading “Mapping proteins could offer a clearer view of what’s driving cancer” »

A new resource profiles gene expression and the accessibility of DNA in single cells across the developing human cerebral cortex and may help scientists decipher the effects of noncoding mutations linked to autism.