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Category: evolution – Page 151

You may recognize the anglerfish from its dramatic appearance in the hit animated film Finding Nemo, as it was very nearly the demise of clownfish Marlin and blue-tang fish Dory. It lives most of its life in total darkness more than 1,000 meters below the ocean surface. Female anglerfish sport a glowing lure on top of their foreheads, basically a pole with a light bulb on its end, where bioluminescent bacteria live. The light-emitting lure attracts both prey and potential mates to the fish.

Despite its recent fame, little is known about anglerfish and their symbiotic relationship with these brilliant , because the fish are difficult to acquire and study.

For the first time, scientists have sequenced and analyzed the genomes of bacteria that live in anglerfish bulbs. The bacteria were taken from fish specimens collected in the Gulf of Mexico.

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Researchers isolated several mutations leading to melanoma and reproduced them in the lab using CRISPR.

Two papers authored by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco described the genetic changes that turn harmless moles into malignant melanomas and the experiment they devised to recreate the step-by-step evolution of normal skin cells into cancer cells [1], [2].

Summary ([1])

We elucidated genomic and transcriptomic changes that accompany the evolution of melanoma from pre-malignant lesions by sequencing DNA and RNA from primary melanomas and their adjacent precursors, as well as matched primary tumors and regional metastases. In total, we analyzed 230 histopathologically distinct areas of melanocytic neoplasia from 82 patients. Somatic alterations sequentially induced mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) pathway activation, upregulation of telomerase, modulation of the chromatin landscape, G1/S checkpoint override, ramp-up of MAPK signaling, disruption of the p53 pathway, and activation of the PI3K pathway; no mutations were specifically associated with metastatic progression, as these pathways were perturbed during the evolution of primary melanomas. UV radiation-induced point mutations steadily increased until melanoma invasion, at which point copy-number alterations also became prevalent.

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To understand our future evolution we need to look to our past.

Will our descendants be cyborgs with hi-tech machine implants, regrowable limbs and cameras for eyes like something out of a science fiction novel?

Might humans morph into a hybrid species of biological and artificial beings? Or could we become smaller or taller, thinner or fatter, or even with different facial features and skin colour?

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You might assume that evolution gave Charles Darwin enough to ponder during his five year voyage on The Beagle.

But of all the phenomena the naturalist encountered circumnavigating the globe, it was the flight of spiders which continued to puzzle him.

Darwin noticed that hundreds of spiders would inexplicably land on the Beagle even on a calm day without any wind to blow them on board.

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Bizarre fossils from China are revealing our species’ Asian origins and rewriting the story of human evolution.

By Kate Douglas

DECEMBER 1941. Japan has just entered the second world war. China, already fighting its neighbour, is in the firing line. At the Peking Union Medical College Hospital, Hu Chengzhi carefully packs two wooden crates with the world’s most precious anthropological artefacts. Peking Man – in reality some 200 fossilised teeth and bones, including six skulls – is to be shipped to the US for safekeeping. This is the last anyone ever sees of him.

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For the first time, astronomers have directly observed the magnetism in one of astronomy’s most studied objects: the remains of Supernova 1987A (SN 1987A), a dying star that appeared in our skies over thirty years ago.

In addition to being an impressive observational achievement, the detection provides insight into the early stages of the evolution of supernova remnants and the cosmic magnetism within them.

“The magnetism we’ve detected is around 50,000 times weaker than a fridge magnet,” says Prof. Bryan Gaensler. “And we’ve been able to measure this from a distance of around 1.6 million trillion kilometres.”

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Today we will be taking a look at some of the stories people tell themselves to help them pretend aging is not a problem.

If you ask most people what they think about aging, they will shrug their shoulders and say that it is a natural process. With complete tranquility on their faces, they will agree that, yes, in old age, we are haunted by many diseases, but nothing can be done about it, so it makes no sense to worry about it while you are young and healthy. Just live your life.

Then, the conversation will turn towards an even stranger direction: they will start looking for something good about aging – for example, that it ensures a change of generations, prevents society from becoming stuck in obsolete ideas, and, in general, is the engine of evolution. They’ll explain that the notion of death gives meaning to life and makes us accomplish as much as possible in the little time we have.

Here’s the intriguing part. If you ask the same people what they felt when they first encountered the concept of aging and death from old age, they remember that they were frightened. They were not happy with the answers to “Mom, are you gonna get old and die?” and “Will I die too?” Many people remember that they cried bitterly after this conversation and were filled with sorrow for several days.

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Telecom experts are going so far as to herald the arrival of 5G as the advent of the fourth industrial revolution. There are an ever-expanding number of high-tech devices out there trying to connect to the internet every day, many of which require extensive bandwidth, and companies across the board will leverage 5G capabilities to better reach consumers.

“The application of 5G technology will result in massive changes for both consumers and enterprises,” said Jeff Weisbein, founder and CEO of digital media company Best Techie. “5G networks will offer consumers incredible broadband speeds at home (up to 20Gb/s). It will also enable companies to make advancements such as even smarter, better connected cars, advancements in medical technologies and improved retail experiences through personalization.”

5G refers to 5th-Generation Wireless Systems and uses additional spectrum in the existing LTE frequency range to build on the capabilities of 4G, which is often used interchangeably with 4G LTE by marketers. LTE denotes Long Term Evolution, and is a term that was deployed with early 4G networks that presented a substantial improvement on 3G, but did not fully qualify as 4G, meaning 4G LTE is essentially first-generation 4G.

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Did humans evolve from monkeys or from fish? In this enlightening talk, ichthyologist and TED Fellow Prosanta Chakrabarty dispels some hardwired myths about evolution, encouraging us to remember that we’re a small part of a complex, four-billion-year process — and not the end of the line. “We’re not the goal of evolution,” Chakrabarty says. “Think of us all as young leaves on this ancient and gigantic tree of life — connected by invisible branches not just to each other, but to our extinct relatives and our evolutionary ancestors.”

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“Horizontal gene transfer is an important way that antibiotic resistance moves between bacterial species, but the process has never been observed before, since the structures involved are so incredibly small,” said biologist Ankur Dalia of Indiana University Bloomington.

Bacteria are slippery little suckers. They evolve rapidly, developing resistance to antibiotics and therefore becoming increasingly difficult to deal with. Now, for the first time, researchers have caught on film one of the mechanisms the microbes use for this speedy evolution.

Two Vibrio cholerae bacteria — the pathogen responsible for cholera — sit under a microscope, glowing a vivid green. As we watch, a tendril snakes forth from one of the bacterium, harpooning a piece of DNA and carrying it back to its body.

That appendage is called a pili, and the process whereby the bacteria incorporates the new genetic material from a different organism into its own DNA to expedite its evolution is called horizontal gene transfer.

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