Posted in food, sustainability
Nowadays, over half of the seafood we enjoy is farm-raised rather than caught in the open. A technique recently developed by Japanese scientists has the potential to fundamentally change yields for farmed fish. And the secret is in the lighting…
50+ Year Study Of The Life Cycle, Conservation And Welfare Of Africa’s Elephants — Dr. Vicki Fishlock, Ph.D., Resident Scientist, Amboseli Trust for Elephants.
Dr. Vicki Fishlock Ph.D. is a Resident Scientist, at The Amboseli Trust for Elephants (https://www.elephanttrust.org/), an organization that aims to ensure the long-term conservation and welfare of Africa’s elephants in the context of human needs and pressures, through scientific research, training, community outreach, public awareness and advocacy, and which is involved in the longest-running study of wild elephants in the world.
Dr. Fishlock joined The Amboseli Trust for Elephants (ATE) in January 2011 to study social disruption and recovery in elephant families after the terrible 2009 drought. Her work focuses on leadership and negotiation in the face of risk, as well as the very long-term social dynamics.
Prior to working at ATE in Kenya, Dr. Fishlock studied Western gorillas and forest elephants in the Republic of Congo, where she earned her Ph.D. under the supervision of Prof. Phyllis Lee, examining the use of forest clearings as social arenas for elephants.
Dr. Fishlock previously graduated with first class honors in Zoology from the University of Edinburgh. After graduation, she worked as a research assistant at Chester Zoo on behavioral and hormonal indicators of welfare in captive orangutans.
Typically abbreviated as TLS, Transport Layer Security uses strong encryption to prove that an end user is connected to an authentic server belonging to a specific service (such as Google or Bank of America) and not an impostor masquerading as that service. TLS also encrypts data as it travels between an end user and a server to ensure that people who can monitor the connection can’t read or tamper with the contents. With millions of servers relying on it, TLS is a cornerstone of online security.
In a research paper published on Wednesday, Brinkmann and seven other researchers investigated the feasibility of using what they call cross-protocol attacks to bypass TLS protections. The technique involves an MitM attacker redirecting cross-origin HTTP requests to servers that communicate over SMTP, IMAP, POP3, or FTP, or another communication protocol.
The main components of the attack are the client application used by the targeted end user, denoted as C; the server the target intended to visit, denoted as Sint; and the substitute server, a machine that connects using SMTP, FTP, or another protocol that’s different from the one serverint uses but with the same domain listed in its TLS certificate.
MIT engineers have discovered a way to generate electricity using tiny carbon particles that can create an electric current simply by interacting with an organic solvent in which they’re floating. The particles are made from crushed carbon nanotubes (blue) coated with a Teflon-like polymer (green). Credit: Jose-Luis Olivares, MIT. Based on a figure courtesy of the researchers.
A new material made from carbon nanotubes can generate electricity by scavenging energy from its environment.
MIT engineers have discovered a new way of generating electricity using tiny carbon particles that can create a current simply by interacting with liquid surrounding them.
The high levels of serotonin seen in the blood of some autistic people have confounded scientists for more than half a century. Despite so little progress, some researchers refuse to give up.
Laurie Graham, a molecular biologist at Queen’s University in Ontario and lead author on the paper, knows she’s making a bold claim in arguing for the direct transfer of a gene from one fish to another. That kind of horizontal DNA movement once wasn’t imagined to happen in any animals, let alone vertebrates. Still, the more she and her colleagues study the smelt, the clearer the evidence becomes.
Nor are the smelt unique. Recent studies of a range of animals — other fish, reptiles, birds and mammals — point to a similar conclusion: The lateral inheritance of DNA, once thought to be exclusive to microbes, occurs on branches throughout the tree of life.
Sarah Schaack, an evolutionary genomicist at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, believes these cases of horizontal transfer still have “a pretty big wow factor” even among scientists, “because the conventional wisdom for so long was that it was less likely or impossible in eukaryotes.” But the smelt discovery and other recent examples all point to horizontal transfers playing an influential role in evolution.
David Sinclair is a geneticist at Harvard and author of Lifespan.
Nature – Reversal of biological clock restores vision in old mice
Sinclair and his team restored vision in old mice and in mice with damaged retinal nerves by resetting some of the thousands of chemical marks that accumulate on DNA as cells age. They are now working to rejuvenate the brains of old mice. This work is so promising that Sinclair believes he can get to human trials within two years. Sinclair is using three genes to reset the age of cells.
Posted in biotech/medical
A strategy for the long fight against COVID-19.
Global herd immunity is now unreachable. How should governments’ strategy in the fight against COVID-19 change in response?
Gosiame Thamara Sithole, 37, was astonished by decuplets after scans only showed eight in the womb.
The Yara Birkeland, the world’s first net-zero, battery-powered autonomous container ship, is undergoing further preparations for autonomous operation and a late 2021 launch.
The Norwegian ship Yara Birkeland, the world’s first net-zero, battery-powered autonomous container ship, is looking at a late 2021 launch.
