A hidden code in our DNA explains how new pieces of genes are made

We’re all here thanks to mutations. Random changes in genes are what create variety during a species, and this can be what allows it to adapt to new environments and eventually evolve into a completely new species. But most random mutations actually disrupt the functions of our genes then are a standard source of genetic diseases.

This ambiguity creates a good challenge. On the one hand, mutations are needed for biological innovation, and on the opposite hand, they cause diseases. How does nature resolve this conflict? Research by me and my colleagues suggests that one answer could exist an order that enables evolution to innovate while minimizing the disruption this will create.

This code is hidden within a component of our genome (the complete set of our genetic material) referred to as repetitive genetic elements, which we now know plays a key role in evolution. These elements are sequences within our DNA which will make many copies of themselves. so as to create the proteins that our bodies need, our cells take instructions from our DNA by transcribing it into the same molecule called RNA. But in rare cases, rather than building a protein, some RNA molecules convert into DNA and insert themselves at new locations in our genome.

In this way, the repetitive elements can continually create new copies of themselves. As a result, the human genome contains thousands of repetitive elements that aren't present in the other species because they need to copy themselves since humans evolved.

But repetitive elements aren’t just useless copies. Barbara McClintock, the scientist who discovered them in 1948, showed they'll act as switches that switch genes on and off in maize. This was initially thought to be an obscure phenomenon with no relevance for humans. Yet now it's become clear that repetitive elements are a vital toolkit for evolution. By turning genes on and off, the repetitive elements can influence what characteristics a species evolves. they need been useful for biological innovations, like the evolution of pregnancy in mammals.

Perhaps the foremost elegant example of this is often within the evolution of the peppered moth. This moth normally has light-colored wings, but during Britain’s age, a repetitive element inserted itself into the gene that controls the color pattern of the wings. As a result, a black strain of the peppered moth evolved and this allowed it to blend in and escape its predators amid the polluted environment.

So what does all this should do with managing the disruption of mutations? Our research looks at the repetitive elements that were copied within the genome of the ancestors of contemporary primates. There are over 1.6m of those “Alu elements” dispersed everywhere in the human genome, and a few of them have accumulated random mutations that enabled them to become functional parts of our genes.

We have found a code within the RNA that controls Alu elements hiding inside human genes. This code combines competing for positive and negative molecular forces, sort of a yin and yang in our cells. it's well-known that competing molecular forces control many aspects of our genes. In our case, the positive force (acting through the protein called U2AF65) allows the Alu elements to stay a part of RNA and also the resulting protein. The negative force (acting through the protein called hnRNPC) opposes this and removes the weather from the RNA.

We’ve known for many years that evolution has to tinker with genetic elements so that they can accumulate mutations while minimizing disruption to the fitness of a species. Research, published within the journal eLife, checked out over 6,000 Alu elements to indicate that our code does exactly this.

The two forces are tightly coupled in evolution, so as soon as any mutations make the ying stronger, the yang catches up and stops them. this enables the Alu elements to stay during a harmless state in our DNA over long evolutionary periods, during which they accumulate plenty of change via mutations. As a result, they decrease harm and gradually start escaping the repressive force. Eventually, a number of them tackle a very important function and have become indispensable pieces of human genes.

To put it otherwise, the balanced forces buy the time needed for mutations to create beneficial changes, instead of disruptive ones, to a species. And this is often why evolution proceeds in such small steps – it only works if the 2 forces remain balanced by complementary mutations, which takes time. Eventually, important new molecular functions can emerge from randomness.

These findings tell us that humans don't seem to be a set pinnacle of evolution. Our genomes are like those of the other species: a fluid landscape of DNA sequences that keep changing. This explains how our genome can host its ever-changing repetitive elements despite their potential to disrupt the prevailing order in our cells.

6 Reasons Why Herd Immunity Without a Vaccine Is a Terrible Idea in This Pandemic

 It's a tantalizing prospect to think that herd immunity could end the coronavirus pandemic. If true herd immunity were achieved, the coronavirus would not spread, and that we could return to normal life as we knew it before.

But herd immunity is difficult to drag off. It can only be achieved in two ways: by getting plenty of people sick, or by giving many people a good, safe vaccine.

The goal is that the same: to urge a sizeable majority of the population proof against infection, so a disease can not spread among our collective 'herd'.

The consensus among epidemiologists is that chasing herd immunity without a vaccine wouldn't work. It risks too many unnecessary deaths.

Even so, the concept has become a subject of conversation in households, on social media, on TV, in bars - with people asking: "Why not try it?" Those conversations gained steam last month when the White House propped up the nice Barrington Declaration, a document drafted at a Libertarian company suggesting that almost all people should try and select herd immunity, encouraging infections among the world's young, healthy population.

"For those that are under … for example 60 or 50, the lockdown harms are, mentally and physically, worse than COVID," Jay Bhattacharya, one in every one of the authors of the declaration said last week, during a debate hosted by the medical journal JAMA.

Opposite him was epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch from Harvard, one amongst the thousands of leading experts who signed on to a stinging rebuttal of the declaration, who explained why the approach is so dangerous.

"I think it is a great idea to appear for creative solutions, but nobody responsible would abandon what we all know works, which is controlling viral spread," Lipsitch said.

Their conversation threw up six overarching reasons why achieving natural herd immunity - the sort that does not require a coronavirus vaccine - won't work.

One: Nobody thinks it is a good idea to induce everybody infected, but just targeting the young is near impossible

You'd be hard-pressed to seek out a significant public health expert who thinks natural herd immunity will work.

Leaders in Sweden recently backtracked on their unique stab at herd immunity against the virus because it killed such a lot of people in their nursing homes.

Bhattacharya name-checked Sweden as a decent example of herd immunity done right.

But, when pressed, he agreed that letting anyone within the population get sick so as to draw near disease resistance within the community isn't a decent idea. "You should social distance once you can definitely use masks after you can't social distance," he said. "All of the mitigation measures are really important."

Even Sweden's approach failed to follow what the nice Barrington Declaration suggests: "focused protection" for the vulnerable, and focused infection of the young and healthy.

Bhattacharya asked listeners for his or her ideas about the way to achieve this focused approach and added some of his own ideas, including employing rapid testing in nursing homes and multi-generational households and isolating cases.

"We protect the vulnerable with every single tool we've got," he said. "We use our testing resources. We use our staff rotations in nursing homes. We use PPE. We do every kind of thing."

The problem is, those ideas are already being tried across the US, to only mixed success.

Nevada has found the US's new federal rapid testing protocol in nursing homes so unreliable that the state sought to ban them last month, a home workforce already spread thin is getting sick, and case isolation is near-impossible to attain within the dangerous pre-symptomatic phase of the many illnesses, when people may transmit their virus to others before they even know they need it.

Two: COVID-19 has many long-term side effects which will impact lives and also the healthcare system for years to come back

The second issue with this idea of "focused protection" is that we do not actually know who we'd like to safeguard.

"For younger populations, and folks who are less in danger, frankly, COVID is a smaller amount of a risk than the lockdown," Bhattacharya said, reiterating that such closures harm people's psychological, mental, and physical health.

But COVID-19 doesn't just kill people. It also has devastating long-term effects on many of its survivors, including debilitating brain fog, hair loss, swollen toes, and scaly rashes, tinnitus, and loss of smell.

The Centres for Disease Control and Prevention notes that almost half (45.4 percent) of the adult population within the US is in danger for COVID-19 complications - including death - "because of upset, diabetes, respiratory illness, hypertension, or cancer."

Three: we do not actually know who COVID-19 kills and why

The argument for "focused protection" also ignores the truth of what we've learned about the coronavirus: it's killed people of each age, race, and sex because it tears through community after community across the world.

In the US, quite 45,500 people under the age of 65 have died from the coronavirus thus far, per the CDC.

It's impossible to understand, before someone becomes infected, what their true risk is. Children have died. So have college students and lots of others who failed to necessarily have hallmark preconditions.

Scientists are still studying the virus to raised understand how it works, but a unifying thread among severe cases could also be what percentage of ACE-2 receptors (which the virus uses to invade our cells) we've got.

Four: Lockdowns save lives

Lockdowns, though they're an extreme disease-fighting measure, have saved tens of thousands of lives around the world, on nearly every continent.

When schools are closed, more kids go hungry, and education gets interrupted too. Domestic abuse, ill-usage, habit, and suicidal ideation have all gone up in recent months within the US.

"I haven't been able to visit church nose to nose, really, in seven months," Bhattacharya lamented.

However, these measures have bought critical, life-saving time for developing vaccines, formulating drugs, and discovering best practices for patient treatment. "Six months from now, [a] case may well be prevented by vaccination, or can be treated by a far better therapeutic," Lipsitch said.

Bhattacharya also argued that lockdowns are "the single biggest generator of inequality since segregation."

But that's a deeply misleading statement. Racial inequality, for instance, has not been generated by the pandemic, if anything it's only been unmasked.

"Obviously, the African-American community has suffered from racism for a really, very long period of your time," Dr. Fauci told members of Congress in June. "

And I cannot imagine that that has not contributed to the conditions that they find themselves in, economically and otherwise."

Five: Getting obviate the virus is feasible, and it doesn't require killing people

Bhattacharya, and other backers of herd immunity, often peddle a false dichotomy between lockdowns and "normal life," with no area or room for virus-fighting in between.

But that either-or approach doesn't take into consideration what proportion mitigation measures like distancing, avoiding crowds, and getting everybody wearing masks can really help slow viral transmission.

Besides, the US has never really, truly tried to lock down yet. Even within the spring, "we really functionally close up only about 50 percent," Fauci recently told members of Congress.

Countries including Australia, New Zealand, and China have already achieved the "impossible goal" of zero (or, near zero) COVID, and have largely gone back to normal life after strict lockdowns. 

Taiwan even did it without locking down the least bit, by instituting strict screening and surveillance measures, effective isolation and quarantining, and widespread masking.

Six: Natural herd immunity probably won't work for this pandemic, irrespective of how hard we try

The US, like everywhere else within the world, still features a great distance to travel to hit even a number of very cheap posited herd immunity thresholds, which require 50 percent (or more) of the population to be exposed and subsequently immune. At best, only around 10 percent to twenty percent of individuals nationwide are exposed.

But whether or not everyone was to become exposed to the virus, natural herd immunity likely still wouldn't work.

This is thanks to the way that our immunity against all coronaviruses - from common colds to the current novel coronavirus - wanes over time. Immunity to the present virus through prior infection isn't definitive, or lasting: coronavirus reinfections are possible, and they are happening in some rare cases already.

That's why serious scientists agree it's better to attend for a vaccine and build up our collective immunity against the virus simultaneously.

"Humans don't seem to be herded," the WHO decision-maker of Health Emergencies Mike Ryan said in May, slamming the thought.

"I think we want to be really careful after we use terms during this way around natural infections in humans because it can cause an awfully brutal arithmetic which doesn't put people, and life, and suffering at the center of that equation."

One projection suggests that attempting herd immunity within the US would end in 640,000 deaths by February 2023.

It's true that there are adverse consequences. many folks have lost their jobs, shuttered their businesses, missed doctor's appointments, experienced more loneliness, and commenced drinking more alcohol.

Iconic Australian Telescope Has Been Named Murriyang, And The Meaning Is Beautiful

 Australia's iconic 64-meter (210 ft) Parkes astronomical telescope has been given a replacement traditional name to acknowledge the Wiradjuri, who owns the land on which the telescope sits.

The Wiradjuri are a number of Australia's First people that have occupied the continent and its adjacent islands for over 65,000 years.

The telescope received the name Murriyang, which represents the 'Skyworld' where a prominent creator spirit of the Wiradjuri Dreaming, Biyaami (Baiame), lives. the 2 smaller telescopes at CSIRO's Parkes Observatory also received Wiradjuri names.

"This recognizes Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples because the first people of Australia and respects their enduring connection to lands, skies, waters, plants, and animals," said Louisa Warren Executive Manager the Office of Indigenous Engagement for the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), the govt agency accountable for a research project.

Warren added that the new names acknowledges and pays reference to the astronomical knowledge of the indigenous peoples.

The telescope staff worked for 2 years together with Wiradjuri Elders and other indigenous groups on the telescope naming project.

Wiradjuri Elder Rhonda Towney conducted the naming ceremony, and Elder Dr Stan Grant revealed the telescope's Wiradjuri names.

"This could be a very proud day for the Wiradjuri people, Grant said. "The naming of the telescopes is one in all the largest things to happen to our people."

The UN estimates that 90 percent of all languages will disappear within 100 years. a good majority of those languages are spoken by indigenous peoples, and these unique languages are in peril of becoming extinct.

Indigenous languages are a necessary a part of a peoples' collective identity and is usually linked to the land or region traditionally occupied by indigenous peoples. When the language dies, that sense of connected community may also disappear.

Wiradjuri Elder and representative of the NSW Aboriginal Education Consultative Group David Towney said language is "everything about who and what we are. We teach language to know country, culture and sky stories. Connecting our language to the telescope is … the simplest way for people to return together and celebrate Wiradjuri culture."

"Science is that the hunt for truth, often we expect we are the primary to find it, but much of the knowledge we seek was discovered long before us," said CSIRO Chief Executive Larry Marshall.

"We're honored that the Wiradjuri Elders have given traditional names to our telescopes at Parkes, to attach them with the oldest scientific tradition within the world."

The naming ceremony was held in conjunction with a yearly celebration of indigenous peoples in Australia called NAIDOC, which originally stood for National Aborigines and Islanders Day Observance Committee.

The telescope facility is found on Wiradjuri country in central west New South Wales, approximately 380 kilometres (236 miles) west of Sydney.

The names for the smaller telescopes:

Giyalung Miil, for the 12-metre (39-foot) ASKAP testing antenna, means 'Smart Eye.

This telescope was commissioned in 2008 as a testbed for a special new style of receiver technology (a phased array feed, PAF) used on CSIRO's Australian Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) antennas. The PAF is in a position see different parts of the sky simultaneously making it a 'smart eye'.

Giyalung Guluman, for the 18-metre (59-foot) decommissioned antenna, means 'Smart Dish.'

This antenna had the flexibility to maneuver along a railway track while observing, and when linked to the most 64-meter (210-foot) antenna became pivotal in early work that determined the scale and brightness of radio sources within the sky.

The antenna was originally assembled at the CSIRO Fleurs radio reflector site, Penrith NSW in 1960, was transported to Parkes in 1963 and have become operational in 1965.

The Quantum Experiment Reveals “Time” Doesn’t Exist as we Think it does

 Seven years ago, in 2012, one paper, which was published naturally Physics, has shown the globe that our present is, in fact, constrained by our future and our past. this suggests that what occurs now, in our past, could also be obsessed on what occurred in our future. Although this failed to be for lots of individuals, for people who are in physics matters, it made a large difference.

Well, physical science could also be said to be something which plenty of individuals find it difficult to wrap their heads around. Although plenty of them will do their best so as to understand it, they will sometimes be left in confusion.

This wasn't the only time quantum physicists studied the time structure.

It was exhausted the past, and something which goes to be researched and studied within the years within the future.

This ‘delayed-choice’ experiment has been a groundbreaking one which is additionally said to be the modified sort of the so-called double slit experiment. This double silt experiment has been that during which some small bits of matter are shot towards one screen with two slits inside it. While on the screen’s other side, there was a technology camera which recorded the landing of protons. When one slit closes, the camera shows some expected pattern, the one you'll be able to see during this video here.

However, regarding the opening of the 2 slits, there comes up the so-called ‘interference pattern.’ These will start acting like some quite waves, and each photon will individually undergo the 2 slits simultaneously. it'll undergo one in all the 2 slits, through the 2 of them, or none of them. Then, the matter pieces will become waves of potential.

On the opposite hand, the so-called ‘delayed-choice’ experiment was demonstrated several times, and in an almost identical way because the double silt experiment was. This one includes the adding of the quantum eraser within the mix. you'll watch this video here, so as to seek out something more about the experiment or also about the differences existing between both of the experiments.

Talking about physics, this sort of thing feels like a daily phenomenon. The second experiment suggests that the quantum entanglement definitely exists, irrespective of of the time. This, in fact, means just two bits of matter is also entangled continuously in time. All this also points to the massive answer which says that the time which we all know, doesn't really exist.

After 86 Years, Physicists Have Finally Made an Electron Crystal

 In 1934, theoretical physicist Wigner proposed a replacement style of crystal.

If the density of charged electrons may be maintained below a particular level, the subatomic particles can be held in a very repeating pattern to form a crystal of electrons; this concept came to called a Wigner crystal.

That's plenty easier said than done, though. Electrons are fidgety, and it's extremely difficult to urge them to take a seat still. Nevertheless, a team of physicists has now achieved it - by trapping the wiggly little brats between a pair of two-dimensional semiconducting tungsten layers.

Conventional crystals - like diamonds or quartz - are formed from a lattice of atoms arranged in an exceedingly fixed, three-dimensional repeating grid structure. per Wigner's idea, electrons may well be arranged in an exceedingly similar fashion to make a solid crystal phase, but as long as the electrons were stationary.

If the density of the electrons is low enough, the Coulomb repulsion between electrons of the identical charge produces mechanical energy that ought to dominate their mechanical energy, leading to the electrons sitting still. Therein lies the issue.

"Electrons are quantum mechanical. whether or not you do not do anything to them, they're spontaneously jiggling around all the time," said physicist Kin Fai Mak of Cornell University.

"A crystal of electrons would even have the tendency to simply melt because it is so hard to stay the electrons fixed at a periodic pattern."

Attempts to form Wigner crystals, therefore, depend on some type of electron trap, like powerful magnetic fields or single-electron transistors, but complete crystallization has still eluded physicists as yet. In 2018, MIT scientists attempting to make a kind of insulator may have instead produced a Wigner crystal, but their results left room for interpretation.

(UCSD Department of Physics)

MIT's trap was a graphene structure referred to as a moiré superlattice, where two two-dimensional grids are superimposed at a small twist and bigger regular patterns emerge, as seen within the example image above.

Now the Cornell team, led by physicist Yang Xu, has used a more targeted approach with their own moiré superlattice. for his or her two semiconducting layers, they used tungsten disulfide (WS2) and tungsten diselenide (WSe2) specially grown at Columbia.

When overlaid, these layers produced a hexagonal pattern, allowing the team to manage the common electron occupancy at any specific moiré site.

The next step was to carefully place electrons in specific places within the lattice, using calculations to see the occupancy ratio at which different arrangements of electrons will form crystals.

The final challenge was a way to actually see if their predictions were correct, by observing the Wigner crystals or lack thereof.

"You have to hit just the proper conditions to form an electron crystal, and at the identical time, they're also fragile," Mak said.

"You need an honest thanks to probing them. you do not actually need to perturb them significantly while probing them."

This problem was solved with insulating layers of hexagonal boron nitride. An optical sensor was placed very near (but not touching) the sample, at a distance of only one nanometre, separated by a boron nitride layer. This prevented electrical coupling between the sensor and therefore the sample while maintaining enough proximity for prime detection sensitivity.

This arrangement allowed the team to probe the sample cleanly, and that they made their detection. Within the moiré superlattice, electrons arranged into a range of crystal configurations, including triangular Wigner crystals, stripe phases, and dimers.

This achievement doesn't just have implications for studying electron crystals. The findings demonstrate the untapped potential of moiré superlattices for physics research.

"Our study," the researchers wrote in their paper, "lays the groundwork for using moiré superlattices to simulate a wealth of quantum many-body problems that are described by the two-dimensional extended Hubbard model or spin models with long-range charge-charge and exchange interactions."

Passengers Just Took First-Ever Test Ride in Virgin's Hyperloop And Didn't Throw Up

 The Virgin Hyperloop made its first journey carrying passengers Sunday, during a test the corporate claimed represented a serious revolution for the "groundbreaking" technology capable of transporting people at 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) an hour.

The Hyperloop is meant to hold passengers in small pods through a thermionic tube, with proponents arguing it could revolutionize high-speed travel.

Virgin says the Hyperloop is ready to reach top speeds of 1,080 kilometers an hour (671 mph) - projecting a 45-minute journey from la to the port of entry - and can produce no carbon emissions.

But until Sunday the technology, first proposed by eccentric US tech magnate Elon Musk in 2012, had not been tested with people on board.

Two Virgin employees made the 500-meter journey in a very two-person vehicle in precisely 15 seconds at a test site within the Nevada desert.

Passenger Sara Luchian told the BBC she felt the trip was "exhilarating both psychologically and physically", and reported no discomfort.

Once brought into regular use, the pods are going to be ready to transport up to twenty-eight people at a time, Virgin says, with larger models for moving goods also in development.

(Virgin Hyperloop)

Virgin's Hyperloop has raised quite US$400 million, largely from company CEO Richard Branson and also the logistics company DP World, which is owned by the Dubai government. Virgin is one in every variety of companies working to develop the technology.

But while Branson on Sunday hailed the success of the "groundbreaking" Hyperloop, concerns have dogged developers about just how safe the technology would be.

One researcher at Sweden's Royal Institute of Technology argued that the high speeds involved could turn the Hyperloop into a "barf ride."

200 Queens Found in Single 'Murder Hornet' Nest Destroyed by US Authorities

 After months of searching, in October scientists located and destroyed the primary nest of giant 'murder hornets' ever discovered within the US, eradicating a hidden enclave of the invasive insects concealed in an exceeding tree in Washington State, near the Canadian border.

While the invention and elimination of the nest is taken into account a victory by state and federal authorities – who are striving to stop the Asian hornet from establishing a grip in North America – a post-mortem of the hornets' former home provides a sobering perspective on the dimensions of the bug threat we're up against.

After tracking down the nest with an inventive radio tag ploy, entomologists from the Washington State Department of Agriculture (WSDA) vacuumed dozens of hornets out of the tree within which it had been found, then cut the tree hospitable reveal the nest hidden inside, measuring about 35 centimeters long and 23 centimeters wide (14 by 9 inches).

(WSDA)

That might not sound overlarge, but it seems it's capacious enough to barrack a veritable army of murder hornets, capable of spawning a big wave of subsequent invasion and colonization.

Inside the nest, the researchers tallied 76 adult queens. the majority but one amongst these were likely virgin queens – imminent matriarchs which eventually emerge from the nest, mate, and so leave the world to start out a brand new colony elsewhere after winter has passed.

In addition, 108 capped cells with pupae were found, most of which the entomologists think would even have been virgin queens in development.

(WSDA)

In other words, this one single nest – which took months for authorities to trace down – contained the seeds of around 200 potential new colonies, if nature were to own had its way and scientists hadn't intervened.

"We got there just within the nick of your time," WSDA entomologist Sven-Erik Spichiger told media during a virtual group discussion on the developments.

"When you see … a comparatively small nest like this ready to pump out 200 queens, it does give one a bit little bit of pause."

Beyond the 200 queens, the researchers found 112 workers, nine drones, 190 larvae, and 6 unhatched eggs. All up, about 500 hornets were related to the nest, many of which might are capable of making new nests.

Of course, simply because this particular nest has been controlled, it's possible other nests are already alive, which insects from this nest may have escaped before and through the eradication.

"We believe there are additional nests," Spichiger said. "There is not any thanks to making certain we got all of them."

(WSDA)

While it's unclear how the Asian hornet ought to North America, sightings in both the US and Canada since 2019 have put agricultural authorities on high alert, given the hornet incorporates a tendency to slaughter local bee populations, which is where the 'murder' nickname comes from (it isn't typically aggressive toward humans).

Despite the recent success of the WSDA's eradication, nobody within the entomology community is saying outright victory here.

Even if the stateside presence has been expunged – which is probably unlikely – a spate of sightings over the border in British Columbia in recent weeks suggests the hornet may already be dispersed within the region.

In other words, the battle may well be over, but the war has just begun – and continued vigilance from authorities and native citizens reporting hornet sightings are going to be the most effective chance of winning it. In the meantime, optimism may be a virtue.

"From accounts we've, we're very near having the bulk of them," Spichiger said with respect to the queen bees captured thus far. "But I am unable to offer you an absolute, certainly, that we got every single one from the nest."