I want a mini trex pet idc what peeps say lol :p.
Scientists have spotted cellular structures—and a substance that behaves like DNA—in cartilage more than 70 million years old.
Category: biotech/medical – Page 2,554
If you want to save bumble bees, plant these flowers in your yard
Humans are the cause of many problems because humans follow humans with no solutions. Everyone is talking about coronavirus, but not about ending the virus because they are not solutions driven. Just as Wangari Maathai taught the world to plant trees to fix what humans messed up. We need to also teach the world to plant bees #beekeeping to fix what humans messed up. This does not just mean bees, but other species we are making extinct. We need to be the change not just talk about and protest for change.
Researchers have figured out which plant species bumble bees prefer to include in their diets, providing advice to those wishing to help with bee conservation efforts.
During the summer months of 2015 to 2016, authors captured bumble bees on more than 100 plant species across more than 400 plots in the Plumas National Forest in California — a mountainous, meadowy area with wildlife habitats near running water, where bumble bees are abundant.
The findings, published Tuesday in the journal Environmental Entomology, revealed that the most popular plant species among the bees were Oregon checker-mallow and mountain pennyroyal flowers.
Whole Genome Sequencing Identifies a Missense Mutation in HES7 Associated with Short Tails in Asian Domestic Cats
Domestic cats exhibit abundant variations in tail morphology and serve as an excellent model to study the development and evolution of vertebrate tails. Cats with shortened and kinked tails were first recorded in the Malayan archipelago by Charles Darwin in 1868 and remain quite common today in Southeast and East Asia. To elucidate the genetic basis of short tails in Asian cats, we built a pedigree of 13 cats segregating at the trait with a founder from southern China and performed linkage mapping based on whole genome sequencing data from the pedigree. The short-tailed trait was mapped to a 5.6 Mb region of Chr E1, within which the substitution c. 5T C in the somite segmentation-related gene HES7 was identified as the causal mutation resulting in a missense change (p. V2A). Validation in 245 unrelated cats confirmed the correlation between HES7-c. 5T C and Chinese short-tailed feral cats as well as the Japanese Bobtail breed, indicating a common genetic basis of the two. In addition, some of our sampled kinked-tailed cats could not be explained by either HES7 or the Manx-related T-box, suggesting at least three independent events in the evolution of domestic cats giving rise to short-tailed traits.
The majority of vertebrate species, with the remarkable exceptions of humans and apes, possess a visible tail throughout their lifespans. The animal tail is an important appendage to the torso and plays adaptive roles in locomotion, balance, communication, thermoregulation and even energy storage1. In vertebrates, tails vary dramatically in color, size, shape and mobility and represent different evolutionary histories, including multiple independent events of shortening or loss of the tail in distinct lineages. Understanding the genetic causes of intraspecific tail length polymorphism would be one essential step toward elucidating the mechanisms underlying the development and evolution of tails. In laboratory mice, genetic studies of axial skeleton development have identified multiple genes and mutations involved in caudal vertebra development that have pleiotropic effects on fertility, somitogenesis, and meiotic recombination, thus shedding light on vertebrate evolution2,3,4,5.
CDC to issue guidance that patients can get coronavirus test with doctor’s orders
Finally!
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) will soon issue new guidance clarifying that Americans can be tested for the coronavirus subject to a doctor’s orders.
Vice President Pence previewed the guidance during an off-camera briefing with reporters at the White House Tuesday evening, explaining that some local officials were given the false impression that tests could only be administered to patients who were more than mildly symptomatic.
“We will issue new guidance from the CDC that will make it clear that any Americans can be tested, no restrictions, subject to doctor’s orders,” Pence said.
The Impossibility of Mind Uploading
My most recent post, “Living in a Computer Simulation,” elicited some insightful comments from a reader skeptical of the possibility of mind uploading. Here is his argument with my own brief response to it below.
My comment concerns a reductive physicalist theory of the mind, which is the view that all mental states and properties of the mind will eventually be explained by scientific accounts of physiological processes and states … Basically, my argument is that for this view of the mind, mind uploading into a computer is completely impractical due to accumulation of errors.
In order to replicate the functioning of a “specific” human mind within a computer, one needs to replicate the functioning of all parts of that specific brain within the computer. [In fact, the whole human body needs to be represented because the mind is a product of all sensations of all parts of the body coalescing within the brain. But, for the sake of argument, let’s just consider replicating only the brain.] In order to represent a specific human brain in the computer, each neuron in the brain would need a digital or analog representation, instantiated in hardware, software or a combination of the two. Unless this representation is an exact biological copy (clone), it will have some inherent “error” associated with it. So, let’s do a sort of “error analysis” (admittedly non-rigorous).
How to Build Up T‐Cells in Your Body
If you’d like to improve your immune system, work on increasing the number of t-cells in your body. T-cells are a type of lymphocyte that will attack cells that are infected with a virus. To improve your t-cell count and responsiveness, eat a healthy diet full of fresh produce and lean protein. If you’re concerned your diet isn’t balanced, take supplements that have been shown to improve the immune system.
Engineers zap and unstick underwater smart glue
With a small zap of electricity, biomedical engineers at Michigan Technological University take an underwater smart glue prototype from sticky to not in seven seconds.
Turning adhesion on and off is what makes a glue smart. It’s one thing to do this in the open air and quite another under water. Inspired by nature, catechols are synthetic compounds that mimic the wet-but-still-sticky proteins secreted by mussels and offer promise for smart adhesives that work in water. The technology could help with underwater glue, wound dressings, prosthetic attachments or even making car parts and in other manufacturing.
Bruce Lee, associate professor of biomedical engineering at Michigan Tech, is a part of the Office of Naval Research’s (ONR) Young Investigator Program (YIP) and showed how to use pH to make smart underwater adhesives. Along with doctoral researcher Saleh Akram Bhuiyan, Lee developed a new method using an electrical current to turn off the adhesion of a catechol-containing material.
Beyond broad strokes: sociocultural insights from the study of ancient genomes
In the field of human history, ancient DNA has provided answers to long-standing debates about major movements of people and has begun to inform on other important facets of the human experience. The field is now moving from mostly large-scale supraregional studies to a more local perspective, shedding light on socioeconomic processes, inheritance rules, marriage practices and technological diffusion. In this Review, we summarize recent studies showcasing these types of insights, focusing on methods used to infer sociocultural aspects of human behaviour. This approach often involves working across disciplines — such as anthropology, archaeology, linguistics and genetics — that have until recently evolved in separation. Multidisciplinary dialogue is important for an integrated reconstruction of human history, which can yield extraordinary insights about past societies, reproductive behaviours and even lifestyle habits that would not be possible to obtain otherwise.