Lifeboat Foundation

Just as there is a mysterious dark matter that accounts for 85 percent of our universe, there is a “dark” portion of the human genome that has perplexed scientists for decades. A study published March 9, 2020, in Genome Research identifies new portions of the fruit fly genome that, until now, have been hidden in these dark, silent areas.

The collaborative paper titled “Gene Expression Networks in the Drosophila Genetic Reference Panel” is the culmination of years of research by Clemson University geneticists Trudy Mackay and Robert Anholt. Their groundbreaking findings could significantly advance science’s understanding of a number of genetic disorders.

The “dark” portion refers to the approximate 98 percent of the genome that doesn’t appear to have any obvious function. Only 2 percent of the human genome codes for proteins, the building blocks of our bodies and the catalysts of the chemical reactions that allow us to thrive. Scientists have been puzzled by this notion since the 1970s when gene sequencing technologies were first developed, revealing the proportion of coding to noncoding regions of the genome.

The World Health Organization has repeatedly stopped short of calling the coronavirus outbreak a pandemic – until this week.

Speaking at a press conference on Wednesday afternoon the director general, Dr Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, finally used the term to describe the outbreak, which has now spread to well over 100 countries and infected over 120,000 people.

“WHO has been assessing this outbreak around the clock and we are deeply concerned both by the alarming levels of spread and severity, and by the alarming levels of inaction,” Dr Tedros said.

Chemical changes in the brain associated with chronic stress can put our cognition and mood under serious strain.

Rosalind Franklin has been built to try to detect life, past or present, on the Red Planet.

Because of this, the rover and its instruments have been prepared to incredibly stringent levels of cleanliness. This status must now be maintained over the coming two years of storage.

The project’s industrial prime contractor, Thales Alenia Space of Italy, will do this in an ISO-7 chamber at its Turin factory.

They use fewer resources, they take up less space—and they might also be less susceptible to the cognitive hazards caused by cosmic rays.

Morello and colleagues studied an antimony nucleus embedded in silicon. The larger antimony nucleus has higher spin than phosphorus. So, in a magnetic field, it has not just two basic states but eight, ranging from pointing in the same direction as the field to pointing in the opposite direction.

In addition, the distribution of electric charge within the nucleus isn’t uniform, with more charge around the poles than the equator. That uneven charge distribution gives experimenters another handle on the nucleus in addition to its spin and magnetism. They can grab it with an oscillating electric field and controllably ease it from one spin state to another or into combinations of any two. All it takes is applying an electric field of the right frequency with a simple electrode, the researchers report.

The researchers discovered the effect by accident, Morello says. For reasons that have nothing to do with quantum computing, they had wanted to study how the antimony nucleus embedded in a silicon chip would react to jolts of the oscillating magnetic field generated by a wire on the chip. But the wire melted and broke, turning the current-carrying wire into a charge-collecting electrode that instead generated an oscillating electric field.

Electrodes weren’t designed for people with thick, curly hair. A redesign is needed, says engineer Pulkit Grover.

“Our museum has some plum blossoms at the entrance, so while I was hosting, I said it was such a pity that nobody could appreciate the flowers because of the outbreak,” said Jiang, who is a tour host herself. “Then I saw a comment saying, ‘No worries, millions of us just saw it!’ I was touched.”

By offering online tours and a marketplace for souvenirs, e-commerce platforms are helping visitor-less tourist sites survive the COVID-19 epidemic.

Andrew Yang says a Universal Basic Income program would greatly help individuals and their communities during the coronavirus outbreak.