Physicists offer a solution to the puzzle of the origin of matter in the universe

Image credit: NASA

By Science Daily

Most of the laws of nature treat particles and antiparticles equally, but stars and planets are made of particles, or matter, and not antiparticles, or antimatter. That asymmetry, which favors matter to a very small degree, has puzzled scientists for many years.

New research by UCLA physicists, published in the journal Physical Review Letters, offers a possible solution to the mystery of the origin of matter in the universe.

Alexander Kusenko, a professor of physics and astronomy in the UCLA College, and colleagues propose that the matter-antimatter asymmetry could be related to the Higgs boson particle, which was the subject of prominent news coverage when it was discovered at Switzerland’s Large Hadron Collider in 2012.

Specifically, the UCLA researchers write, the asymmetry may have been produced as a result of the motion of the Higgs field, which is associated with the Higgs boson, and which could have made the masses of particles and antiparticles in the universe temporarily unequal, allowing for a small excess of matter particles over antiparticles.

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Can GMOs End Hunger in Africa?

By Elizabeth Lopatto

Depending on who you ask, genetically modified organisms, or GMOs, are the solution to malnutrition and hunger in the developing world, or a threat to food sovereignty. Take Uganda, for example. Ugandans eat, on average, a pound of bananas daily — more than any other population. But this crucial resource has been threatened by a bacterial wilt disease, which turns the banana plant’s sap into ooze, wilts the leaves, rots the fruit, and eventually destroys the crop.

Banana wilt was first seen in Uganda in 2001, and neither pesticides nor chemicals have stopped it. Farmers tried to control the wilt’s spread by torching infected plants and disinfecting tools, but the disease cut Ugandan banana yields by as much as half from 2001 to 2004. In the country’s central region, wilt hit 80 percent of plants, and sometimes knocked out whole fields, according to a report from The Guardian.

So scientists at Uganda’s National Agricultural Research Organization (NARO) — which receives funding from the Gates Foundation — created a genetically modified banana by inserting a green pepper gene into the banana’s genome. The new gene seems to trigger a process that kills infected cells and saves the plant. NARO wants to give the seeds away for free, but no regulation exists around GMOs in Uganda, and Uganda is obligated to take a cautionary approach to GMO technology, as signer of 2000’s Cartagena protocol. The Ugandan government is considering passing a law that would allow the introduction of GMOs, including the bacteria-resistant banana, but some food scientists worry it may open the door to corporate exploitation by multinational companies like Monsanto down the line.

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Germany measles: Toddler death fuels compulsory vaccination debate

By BBC News

An 18-month-old boy has died of measles in an outbreak of the disease that has seen authorities in Berlin register more than 500 cases since October.

The boy died in hospital and it was not clear how he contracted the disease, Berlin’s health senator Mario Czaja said on Monday.

The outbreak has sparked a debate over whether vaccinations against the disease should be made compulsory.

US authorities are also reporting more than 120 new cases in California.

The death of the young boy showed that measles continued to be a serious disease, Mr Czaja said. The disease is treatable but can weaken the immune system and cause lung and brain infections.

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3-D engineered bone marrow makes functioning platelets

Credit: Courtesy Tufts University

By Science Daily

A team led by researchers at Tufts University School of Engineering and the University of Pavia has reported development of the first three-dimensional tissue system that reproduces the complex structure and physiology of human bone marrow and successfully generates functional human platelets. Using a biomaterial matrix of porous silk, the new system is capable of producing platelets for future clinical use and also provides a laboratory tissue system to advance study of blood platelet diseases.

“There are many diseases where platelet production or function is impaired,” says Alessandra Balduini, M.D., research associate professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Tufts, associate professor at the Department of Molecular Medicine at the University of Pavia and co-corresponding author on the paper. “New insight into the formation of platelets would have a major impact on patients and healthcare. In this tissue system, we can culture patient-derived megakaryocytes — the bone marrow cells that make platelets — and also endothelial cells, which are found in bone marrow and promote platelet production, to design patient-specific drug administration regimes.”

The new system can also provide an in vitro laboratory tissue system with which to study mechanisms of blood disease and to predict efficacy of new drugs–providing a more precise and less costly alternative to in vivo animal models.

“The need for platelet production systems to treat patients with related diseases is significant. This patient-specific system could provide new insight and options for clinical treatments,” says David Kaplan, Ph.D., chair of biomedical engineering and Stern Family professor at Tufts and co-corresponding author. “Further the platelets can be generated on demand, avoiding the complications of storage problems, and in greater quantities and with better quality and control in terms of morphology and function.”

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Carnivorous plant packs big wonders into tiny genome

Credit: Enrique Ibarra-Laclette, Claudia Anahí Pérez-Torresand Paulina Lozano-Sotomayor

By Phys.org

Great, wonderful, wacky things can come in small genomic packages.

That’s one lesson to be learned from the carnivorous bladderwort, a plant whose tiny genome turns out to be a jewel box full of evolutionary treasures.

Called Utricularia gibba by scientists, the bladderwort is a marvel of nature. It lives in an aquatic environment. It has no recognizable roots. It boasts floating, thread-like branches, along with miniature traps that use vacuum pressure to capture prey.

A new study in the scientific journal Molecular Biology and Evolution breaks down the plant’s genetic makeup, and finds a fascinating story.

According to the research, the bladderwort houses more genes than several well-known plant species, such as grape, coffee or papaya—despite having a much smaller genome.

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Sam Harris: Atheists have no ‘blood on their hands’ for Chapel Hill murders

Steve Jurvetson/Flickr

By Scott Kaufman

Sam Harris addressed the role atheism may or may not have played in the murders of Deah Barakat, Yusor Abu-Salha, and Razan Abu-Salha by Craig Hicks in Chapel Hill, North Carolina last week.

He began by noting that while many have blamed the “militancy” in the atheist community for these murders, “there’s absolutely nothing in my work or my mind that is supportive of a crime like this, and I would hope that this would go without saying — but it probably can’t. The deluge of claims of equivalence between this crime, and the Charlie Hebdo atrocity and the daily behavior of a group like ISIS, has been astonishing to witness.”

“You can sense that people have just been waiting for a crime like this that could conceivably be pinned on atheism.”

“The analogy between militant atheism and militant Islam is a terrible one,” Harris continued. “It’s an anti-analogy. It is false in every respect. Atheists are simply not out there harming people on the basis of their atheism. Now, there may be atheists who do terrible things, but there is no atheist doctrine or scripture; and insofar as any of us have written books or created arguments that have persuaded people, these books and arguments only relate to the bad evidence put forward in defense of a belief in God. There’s no argument in atheism to suggest that you should hate or victimize or stigmatize whole groups of people, as there often is in revealed religion.”

Part of the reason that Harris believes atheism is being blamed is because people can’t fathom that a triple-homicide could be the result of a parking dispute. “This is the most common form of interpersonal violence! It never makes sense on paper!” he says. “You’re talking about people who fail to regulate their emotional states. And they have, in the US, ready access to weaponry that makes it incredibly easy to kill someone impulsively.”

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Evolution ‘favours bigger sea creatures’

By Jonathan Webb

The animals in the ocean have been getting bigger, on average, since the Cambrian period – and not by chance.

That is the finding of a huge new survey of marine life past and present, published in the journal Science.

It describes a pattern of increasing body size that cannot be explained by random “drift”, but suggests bigger animals generally fare better at sea.

In the past 542 million years, the average size of a marine animal has gone up by a factor of 150.

It appears that the explosion of different life forms near the start of that time window eventually skewed decisively towards bulkier animals.

Measured by volume, today’s tiniest sea critter is less than 10 times smaller than its Cambrian counterpart; both are minuscule, sub-millimetre crustaceans. But at the other end of the scale, the mighty blue whale is more than 100,000 times the size of the largest animal the Cambrian could offer: a trilobite less than half a metre long.

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Ancient rocks show life could have flourished on Earth 3.2 billion years ago

Photo: R. Buick / UW

By Hannah Hickey

A spark from a lightning bolt, interstellar dust, or a subsea volcano could have triggered the very first life on Earth.

But what happened next? Life can exist without oxygen, but without plentiful nitrogen to build genes – essential to viruses, bacteria and all other organisms – life on the early Earth would have been scarce.

The ability to use atmospheric nitrogen to support more widespread life was thought to have appeared roughly 2 billion years ago. Now research from the University of Washington looking at some of the planet’s oldest rocks finds evidence that 3.2 billion years ago, life was already pulling nitrogen out of the air and converting it into a form that could support larger communities.

“People always had the idea that the really ancient biosphere was just tenuously clinging on to this inhospitable planet, and it wasn’t until the emergence of nitrogen fixation that suddenly the biosphere become large and robust and diverse,” said co-author Roger Buick, a UW professor of Earth and space sciences. “Our work shows that there was no nitrogen crisis on the early Earth, and therefore it could have supported a fairly large and diverse biosphere.”

The results were published Feb. 16 in Nature.

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Dowsing useless in finding missing girl

By Doubtful News

The “Find Me” crew is back in the news. And, again, not really helping.

Private Investigator believes he knows who the suspects are in the Celis kidnapping

The private investigator the family contacted said, “Whoever did this knows the family 100 percent guaranteed, and my suspect has a key to the house.”

Retired federal agent Jerry “Kelly” Snyder is the founder of “Find Me,” an organization he started in 2002 to look for missing children. His group has been searching for Isabel Celis since the 6-year-old was kidnapped in April 2012. He has two suspects who we can’t name because they’ve not been charged with a crime.

“I provided the Tucson Police Department with two individuals names who I truly believe were involved in her disappearance,” said Snyder. “Either physically they took her, or they had something to do with her disappearance.”

So far, this is OK. There is much merit in hiring a private investigator to help with a case. The more eyes on it the better. Police have other cases and sadly can’t devote all their time and attention to it. This is not a bad idea, until…

Dan Baldwin helped Snyder start “Find Me.” He’s written a book about it and he uses Pendulum Dowsing, a way to find answers normally not available to our senses.

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Losing faith: Atheism rising in Britain, poll suggests

Reuters / Suzanne Plunkett

By RT

Religiosity in Britain is dying as almost one in five British people now identifies themselves as atheist, a poll for The Times has found.

The poll, made in conjunction with YouGov, surveyed 1,550 adults. It found 19 percent identify themselves as atheists, 7 percent as “agnostic” and 3 percent as “humanist.”

In contrast, 49 percent identified themselves as Christian, while 42 percent said they had “no religion”they directly identified with.

The poll is one of the first to measure the number of self-identifying atheists in the UK, while previous studies had simply measured the number of people who believed in “God” against those who didn’t.

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Recommended article: Chomsky: We Are All – Fill in the Blank.

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Scientists reprogram plants for drought tolerance

Credit: Sang-Youl Park, UC Riverside

By Science Daily

UC Riverside-led research in synthetic biology provides a strategy that has reprogrammed plants to consume less water after they are exposed to an agrochemical, opening new doors for crop improvement.

Crops and other plants are constantly faced with adverse environmental conditions, such as rising temperatures (2014 was the warmest year on record) and lessening fresh water supplies, which lower yield and cost farmers billions of dollars annually.

Drought is a major environmental stress factor affecting plant growth and development. When plants encounter drought, they naturally produce abscisic acid (ABA), a stress hormone that inhibits plant growth and reduces water consumption. Specifically, the hormone turns on a receptor (special protein) in plants when it binds to the receptor like a hand fitting into a glove, resulting in beneficial changes — such as the closing of guard cells on leaves, called stomata, to reduce water loss — that help the plants survive.

While it is true that crops could be sprayed with ABA to assist their survival during drought, ABA is costly to make, rapidly inactivated inside plant cells and light-sensitive, and has therefore failed to find much direct use in agriculture. Several research groups are working to develop synthetic ABA mimics to modulate drought tolerance, but once discovered these mimics are expected to face lengthy and costly development processes.

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Tweaking Bacteria, Scientists Turn Sunlight Into Liquid Fuel

Photograph by Dominick Reuter, MIT

By Christina Nunez

A few years ago, Daniel Nocera pioneered an “artificial leaf” that—just like the real thing—uses only the sun and water to produce energy. He touted the silicon cell as a breakthrough that could allow every home to become its own power station.

His compelling invention, a cheap wafer-thin device, attracted lots of publicity but hasn’t quite taken off. The leaf works well, Nocera says, but there’s a key flaw.

“The problem with the artificial leaf,” Nocera says, is that “it makes hydrogen. You guys don’t have an infrastructure to use hydrogen.”

By “you guys,” Nocera means the world outside the lab. Although Toyota and others companies are making cars built to run on hydrogen, emitting only water vapor, filling up is a problem: Most gas stations are set up to serve liquid fuel.

Storing the Sun

Enter Nocera’s latest creation, a collaboration with biologists at Harvard University and detailed in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Monday. The researchers created a specially engineered bacteria that can convert hydrogen (from the artificial leaf or another source) into alcohol-based fuel.

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Richard Dawkins condemns Chapel Hill shooting suspected to have been carried out by ‘anti-theist’ that left three Muslims dead

By Helen Nianias

Richard Dawkins has decried the shooting in North Carolina that left three young Muslims dead in their family home.

The vocal opponent of organised religion called for condemnation of the massacre on Twitter.

How could any decent person NOT condemn the vile murder of three young US Muslims in Chapel Hill? http://bit.ly/19cEaSN

— Richard Dawkins (@RichardDawkins) February 11, 2015

The victims were identified as Deah Shaddy Barakat, 23, his wife Yusor Mohammad, 21, and her sister, Razan Mohammad Abu-Salha, 19.

A 46-year-old man, named by police as Craig Stephen Hicks, has been arrested on suspicion of three counts of first-degree murder.

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Sea slug has taken genes from algae it eats, allowing it to photosynthesize like a plant

Credit: Patrick Krug

By Science Daily

How a brilliant-green sea slug manages to live for months at a time “feeding” on sunlight, like a plant, is clarified in a recent study published in The Biological Bulletin.

The authors present the first direct evidence that the emerald green sea slug’s chromosomes have some genes that come from the algae it eats.

These genes help sustain photosynthetic processes inside the slug that provide it with all the food it needs.

Importantly, this is one of the only known examples of functional gene transfer from one multicellular species to another, which is the goal of gene therapy to correct genetically based diseases in humans.

“Is a sea slug a good [biological model] for a human therapy? Probably not. But figuring out the mechanism of this naturally occurring gene transfer could be extremely instructive for future medical applications,” says study co-author Sidney K. Pierce, an emeritus professor at University of South Florida and at University of Maryland, College Park.

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Australian mammals on brink of ‘extinction calamity’

By Helen Briggs

Australia has lost one in ten of its native mammals species over the last 200 years in what conservationists describe as an “extinction calamity”.

No other nation has had such a high rate of loss of land mammals over this time period, according to scientists at Charles Darwin University, Australia.

The decline is mainly due to predation by the feral cat and the red fox, which were introduced from Europe, they say.

Large scale fires to manage land are also having an impact.

As an affluent nation with a small population, Australia’s wildlife should be relatively secure from threats such as habitat loss.

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How will data retention laws cope with the Internet of Things?

Credit: plenty.r./Flickr, CC BY-SA

By Philip Branch

One of the many things that is troubling about the current Australian government’s metadata retention proposals is how rooted in the past they are, which could make them obsolete before they even come into force.

The Telecommunications Interception Act was first enacted in 1979, when telephony was the only widespread and available communications service. Updates to the act have really only been at the edges, keeping in place the assumption that communications is essentially telephony with a few additional services.

However, as has been pointed out many times before, modern communications is much more than telephony. Modern communications is used more and in many different ways by far more of us than was the case with the simple telephone. Yet interception is still built on a telephony model, most apparently in the continued distinction between data and metadata.

Lawful interception of telephony distinguishes between “intercept related information” (metadata) and “call content” (the actual voice conversation). In telephony, metadata consists of the parties to a call, the duration of the call, any call forwarding and perhaps (in mobile telephony) the location of the parties.

In telephony, distinguishing between metadata and call content made sense. In modern communications it does not. Attempting to identify the boundary between what is and what is not metadata in the modern communications environment leads to all manner of contradictions and confusion.

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Novel technology could combat flight pollution

Credit: ACHEON

By Marie Daniels

A breakthrough propulsion technology to provide greener air transport could be developed after the underlying engineering was declared a success.

ACHEON, involving six universities and two research organisations from across the EU, aimed to demonstrate the scientific feasibility of a novel propulsion method which is expected to overcome the main limitations of traditional systems related to jet deflection exhausts.

This revolutionary technology is capable of directing the flow and pressure without any mechanical moving parts, which could see shorter take-off and landing, more comfortable and safe flight operations and greener propulsion.

This emerging technology, funded by the 7th Framework Programme of the European Commission, is an example of a project starting from an academic research basic which aims to produce an impact in terms of effective industrial innovation.

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New campaign to end blasphemy laws worldwide launches

By Samira Shackle

Blasphemy laws hit international headlines when they result in a particular abuse of rights. Aasia Bibi, the Christian woman sentenced to death in Pakistan; Raif Badawi, the Saudi blogger currently enduring 50 lashes every week.

Yet the problem is far wider than just these individual aberrations. Blasphemy laws, broadly, are those which restrict or punish speech which is deemed to insult religion. The New Humanist has reported extensively on this issue; read our World of Blasphemy series for more information about the status of these repressive laws all over the globe.

According to the International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU)’s 2014 Freedom of Thought Report, 55 countries worldwide – including EU member states – have criminal laws restricting blasphemy. In 39 countries, it is an imprisonable offence, and in six, it carries the death penalty.

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White House Requests Boosted $18.5B NASA Budget

NASA TV/IAN O’NEILL, DISCOVERY NEWS

By Discovery News

NASA on Monday hailed a proposal by President Barack Obama to boost spending for the US space agency and announced plans for a mission to explore Jupiter’s moon, Europa.

The agency’s administrator, Charles Bolden, said at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida that NASA has made strides in the journey toward Mars—where a human mission is planned for 2024—with a “near-flawless” flight test of its new Orion deep space vehicle.

He also heralded success in handing over International Space Station resupply missions to commercial partners, with the first crew flights on the horizon in 2017.

Although Obama’s overall $4 trillion US budget plan faces an uphill climb through Republican-controlled Congress, support for the space agency tends to reach across bipartisan lines.

“President Obama is proposing a fiscal year 2016 budget of $18.5 billion dollars for NASA, building on the significant investments the administration has made in America’s space program over the past six years,” Bolden said in an address broadcast online and shown at NASA locations across the United States.

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Tiny volcanic cracks ‘incubated’ ancient DNA

© NPG

By Emma Stoye

Tiny pores within volcanic rocks on ancient Earth may have provided the ideal conditions for replicating molecules, and could also have driven the evolution of longer and longer genetic sequences, researchers in Germany have shown.

One puzzling dilemma of origin of life simulations is that shorter fragments of genetic material replicate faster than longer ones and tend to out-compete them. This trend favours the loss of information over time rather than the development of longer strands.

But Dieter Braun and colleagues at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich think conditions that favour the opposite – as well as concentrating molecules in the primordial soup – could have existed inside tiny cracks within heated volcanic rocks on the sea bed millions of years ago.

‘We thought that a thermal gradient across a porous rock is a most simple and very common setting on the early Earth,’ says Braun. ‘That it can solve so many problems for the origin of life was actually not expected!’

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Delaware Governor Announces ‘Charles Darwin Day’

Photo by Neilson Barnard/Getty Images

By Jesse Rifkin

Delaware Gov. Jack Markell (D) has declared Feb. 12 as “Charles Darwin Day” in the state.

Praising Darwin’s theory of evolution as “the foundation of modern biology, an essential tool in understanding the development of life on earth,” Markell’sproclamation says Feb. 12 — Darwin’s birthday — “is a time to reflect and celebrate the importance of his scientific achievements.”

As Patheos notes, the proclamation was issued at the request of Chuck Dyke, a member of the Delaware Atheist Meetup group. (According to the governor’s website, any organization based in or connected to Delaware may request special recognition for a day, week or month.)

Darwin Day has been celebrated by groups in the U.S., Europe and Canada on the British naturalist’s birthday since 1980. In 2013 and 2014, then-Rep. Rush Holt (D-N.J.) introduced legislation to designate a national Darwin Day. Despite support from some House Democrats, the proposal never got off the ground. Former Rep. Pete Stark (D-Calif.) made a similar attempt in 2011.

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Telomere extension turns back aging clock in cultured human cells, study finds

Credit: © gitanna / Fotolia

By Science Daily

A new procedure can quickly and efficiently increase the length of human telomeres, the protective caps on the ends of chromosomes that are linked to aging and disease, according to scientists at the Stanford University School of Medicine.

Treated cells behave as if they are much younger than untreated cells, multiplying with abandon in the laboratory dish rather than stagnating or dying.

The procedure, which involves the use of a modified type of RNA, will improve the ability of researchers to generate large numbers of cells for study or drug development, the scientists say. Skin cells with telomeres lengthened by the procedure were able to divide up to 40 more times than untreated cells. The research may point to new ways to treat diseases caused by shortened telomeres.

Telomeres are the protective caps on the ends of the strands of DNA called chromosomes, which house our genomes. In young humans, telomeres are about 8,000-10,000 nucleotides long. They shorten with each cell division, however, and when they reach a critical length the cell stops dividing or dies. This internal “clock” makes it difficult to keep most cells growing in a laboratory for more than a few cell doublings.

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Climate change could impact the poor much more than previously thought

Photograph: Gianluigi Guercia/AFP/Getty Images

By Dana Nuccitelli

It’s widely accepted that climate change will have bigger negative impacts on poorer countries than wealthy ones. However, a new economic modeling studyfinds that the economic impacts on these poorer countries could be much larger than previous estimates.

As a result, they suggest that we should be aiming to limit global warming to near, or perhaps even less than the international target of 2°C. This conclusion is in sharp contrast to current economic models, which generally conclude that the economically optimal pathway results in a global surface warming around 3–3.5°C.

Current economic models mainly treat economic growth as an external factor. In these models, global warming and its impacts via climate change don’t significantly affect the rate at which the economy grows. However, several economic studies have concluded that this is an inaccurate assumption, with a 2012 paper by Melissa Dell and colleagues taking the first stab at quantifying the effects of climate damages on economic growth.

The new study by Frances Moore and Delavane Diaz of Stanford University calibrates the climate ‘damage functions’ in one of these economic models (DICE, developed by William Nordhaus at Yale) using the results from the Dell paper. They grouped the world into rich and poor countries, finding that while the economies of rich countries continue to grow well in a warmer world, the economic growth of poor countries is significantly impaired.

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Telomere extension turns back aging clock in cultured human cells, study finds

Credit: © gitanna / Fotolia

By Science Daily

A new procedure can quickly and efficiently increase the length of human telomeres, the protective caps on the ends of chromosomes that are linked to aging and disease, according to scientists at the Stanford University School of Medicine.

Treated cells behave as if they are much younger than untreated cells, multiplying with abandon in the laboratory dish rather than stagnating or dying.

The procedure, which involves the use of a modified type of RNA, will improve the ability of researchers to generate large numbers of cells for study or drug development, the scientists say. Skin cells with telomeres lengthened by the procedure were able to divide up to 40 more times than untreated cells. The research may point to new ways to treat diseases caused by shortened telomeres.

Telomeres are the protective caps on the ends of the strands of DNA called chromosomes, which house our genomes. In young humans, telomeres are about 8,000-10,000 nucleotides long. They shorten with each cell division, however, and when they reach a critical length the cell stops dividing or dies. This internal “clock” makes it difficult to keep most cells growing in a laboratory for more than a few cell doublings.

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