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The specimen is distinctly different from the modern-day version of Silene stenophylla, or narrow-leafed Campion. It suggests that the permafrost is a potential new source of ancient gene pools long believed to be extinct, scientists said.
The fruits were buried about 125 feet in undisturbed, never thawed permafrost sediments, nestled at roughly 19.4 degrees F (-7 C). Radiocarbon dating showed the fruits were 31,800 years old, give or take about 300 years. Seeds are incredible things, storing the embryo of a new plant and encasing it in protective material until conditions are right for it to germinate.
Scientists led by David Gilichinsky at the Russian Academy of Sciences worked with three of these fruits and took placental tissue samples. They fed the tissue cultures a cocktail of nutrients to induce root growth, and once the plants were rooted, they were transplanted into pots in a greenhouse. Just as they were supposed to, plants grew, developed flowers and fruits, and went to seed. (Gilichinksy died a few days ago, the BBC reported.)
Gilichinsky and colleagues also grew modern-day narrow-leafed Campion as a control, and noticed some key differences among the two generations — the Pleistocene version put out twice as many buds, but the modern version put out roots faster.
To ensure the ancient plants’ own new seeds were viable, the team artificially pollinated the flowers and germinated the resulting seeds. Get this: The seeds from the ancient plants fared even better than the modern ones. The regenerated ancient plants had a 100 percent germination rate, while the control plants had an 86 to 90 percent rate. The research suggests that old age and ice would not have prevent these plants from flowering again someday — if anything, it would be the radioactive cycle of the planet itself. Like anything on Earth, the plants were exposed to low levels of gamma radiation from the radioactive decay of elements in the crust. Over 30,000 years, that adds up to a fair amount of gamma radiation. The scientists calculated that the fruits got a dose of 0.07 kGy of gamma radiation, and they say this is now the maximal dose after which tissues will remain viable and seeds will still germinate. If someone finds a plant older than 30,000 years, maybe that number will go up.
All of this is interesting not just because it’s amazing to regenerate a Pleistocene plant, which of course it is, but because the permafrost may be an important new gene pool. Other ancient squirrel burrows have been found in the Yukon territory and in Alaska. That’s interesting for pure research, but also because of what may happen as the planet warms and more permafrost regions thaw. Organisms will be released from their long, cold sleep, and these ancient life forms could become part of modern ecosystems, affecting modern phenotypes and changing the landscape.
"We consider it essential to continue permafrost studies in
search of an ancient genetic pool, that of preexisting life, which hypothetically has long since vanished from the Earth's surface," the authors write.
The paper was published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
[via BBC]
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So far, our display has only one pixel. But someday you could use the lenses to consolidate all the displays you interact with on a daily basis—your clock, computer, television and phone—into one personal display in your eye. In the distant future, your contact lenses could augment your reality. If you were in a bare hallway, the computer in your contact could put paintings on the wall.
The light-emitting part of the contact lens is opaque, but these little dark spots shouldn’t obscure vision. The control circuitry and the radio harvest energy from a transmitter at the edge of the lens and communicate with the world. They don’t block the view either. We don’t have permission to test the lenses on humans yet, but animals have worn it, and the lens was safe and functional." --Babak Parviz, electrical engineer at the University of Washington, as told to Flora Lichtman
Check out more from our Future of Medicine issue here.
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Scientists are finding that the degree to which we experience those cravings can also be influenced by genes. Obesity runs in families, and although scientists still don’t know just how much of craving is hereditary and how much is learned, they have located more than 100 genes that seem to be linked to the disease. To evolve out of cravings, we’d need to stop passing down these genes.
Rob DeSalle, an evolutionary biologist at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, says that could take a while. The health conditions associated with a poor diet mostly affect middle-aged adults, who have probably already had children and passed their genes on. Perhaps, he speculates, if more children and teens get obesity-related ailments, such as heart disease and Type II diabetes, fewer will survive to reproduce, stripping craving-related genes from populations more quickly. Even then, weeding out all 100 genes is unlikely. Also, genes associated with obesity aren’t killers. They don’t code for sickle-cell anemia or cystic fibrosis. If those bad genes have hung on for a very long time, DeSalle says, marginally bad ones could hang on even longer.
Evolution is a messy process that plays out over millions of years. It typically lags far behind changes in species behavior. Until about 50 years ago, craving fats and sugars actually helped us survive. Then fast food became abundant, and the number of obese people in the U.S. tripled between 1960 and 2007. Half a century is “just not enough time to counteract millennia,” says Katie Hinde, a human evolutionary biologist at Harvard University.
Even someone genetically predisposed to crave food doesn’t have to end up fat. “Your genes are not your destiny,” DeSalle says. Take, as an extreme example, people with phenylketonuria, a recessive metabolic disorder in which a person is unable to break down phenylalanine, an amino acid, and risks mental retardation if he ingests it. By avoiding certain foods (eggs, nuts), he’ll be fine.
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For his study, Levine recruited a professional eater, then ranked among the top 10 in the world, and a man who was 45 pounds heavier and four inches taller. He pitted the two against each other in a hot-dog-eating contest and used fluoroscopy, a real-time x-ray, to watch the two men’s stomachs. Levine immediately noticed something odd. Even when empty, our stomach—our entire digestive tract, in fact—makes a wavelike muscular contraction called peristalsis that helps move food through the body (scientists also call this anal propagation).
The competitive eater displayed almost no peristalsis. The regular guy stopped eating after just seven dogs—his stomach was full. The pro, however, was still going strong. After 10 minutes and 36 hot dogs, Levine asked him to stop. The pro’s stomach had stretched to the point that it took up most of his upper abdomen, and still there wasn’t much peristalsis.
By regularly forcing his body to consume past the point of fullness, Levine says, the pro’s stomach had adapted to expand. He never felt full, and by never feeling full his stomach showed very little muscle contraction. Experts still don’t understand this phenomenon.
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Click to see the most amazing science images of the week.
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The finding, published in the journal Molecular Psychiatry, describes an experiment in which 36 adults with serious depression were given blood tests screening for nine biomarkers associated with the symptoms of depression. Forty-three non-depressive patients were also tested as a control. In the end, the blood test accurately indicated depression in 33 of 36 of the subjects with depression. It also registered eight false positives in the control group. The findings were repeated in a second experiment where blood tests went 31 for 34 in diagnosing depression among subjects.
The takeaway? The blood test method isn’t perfect, but it’s certainly interesting. With some tweaking doctors might be onto a proper clinical test for depression, but in the meantime one of the paper’s co-authors said at the very least establishing a physiological link to depression will hopefully get patients to look at their depression as a treatable condition rather than something that’s wrong with their minds. More at the Atlantic.
You can get the paper here, but you’ll have to bring your subscription to Molecular Psychiatry back into good standing.
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There’s a ton of cool science behind this video that won’t be expounded upon in detail here, but suffice it to say that the researchers decided the best way to observe the corkscrewing effect that occurs when plasmas shed their electrons, creating a magnetic field that then acts on the plasma (this phenomenon is known as kink instability) was to fire some jets of super-hot, 20,000-degrees-Kelvin plasmas across a 20 centimeter gap in a vacuum and film it with a microsecond camera. In doing so, they discovered that kink instability actually spawns another phenomenon called Rayleigh-Taylor instability.
That’s two instabilities for the price of one jet of superhot argon plasma, which is what you’re looking at in the video below. Click through to Caltech to see just how kinky this plasma phenomena can be.
[Caltech]
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In 2004, archaeologists dug up a 4,000-year-old stone doll head in the ruins of a village on the Italian island of Pantelleria. That the head wasn’t found in a ceremonial ground made it different than most ancient human figures and suggests that it was probably a toy. It had curly hair and was buried with miniature kitchenware. Bleiberg says that archaeologists have found many wooden dolls in Egyptian tombs that date back just as far, but most of those figures were found engraved with reproductive symbols, and probably weren’t for play.
Games might be older than dolls. In ancient Egypt, senet, a board game that looks like backgammon, appears in wall drawings from around 2686 B.C. Egyptian kids might not have played senet, but they did play something like jacks around the same time—throwing rocks in the air and picking up pieces of clay before they fell back to earth.
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