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From ScienceDaily: Researchers chart landscape of genetic, epigenetic regulation in plants New findings yield insights into how plants get their traits. Revealing a landscape of protein-binding zones on DNA, collectively dubbed the “cistrome,” shows how plants control where and when genes are expressed. Previous methods for mapping the cistrome in plant cells were difficult and slow, but the new approach, say authors, overcomes those hurdles to offer a sweeping view of this critical aspect of genetic regulation. … Lots of information in plant and animal cells is contained in “coding” stretches of DNA that have the instructions to make proteins, the physical workhorses of cells. But researchers are increasingly realizing that other sections of the genome have elements that control Read More ›

From the Guardian: Fossils from China are said to prove that multi-cellular organisms evolved as early as 1.5bn years ago – but some experts dismiss findings “Our discovery pushes back nearly one billion years the appearance of macroscopic, multi-cellular eukaryotes compared to previous research,” said Maoyan Zhu, a professor at the Nanjing Institute of Geology and Palaeontology. The fossils were uncovered in the Yanshan region of Hebei province in China. Zhu and colleagues said they had found 167 measurable fossils, a third of them in one of four regular shapes – an indication of complexity. The largest measured 30cm by 8cm. Taken together they were “compelling evidence for the early evolution of organisms large enough to be visible with the Read More ›

From Kelly Crowe at CBC: What gets clicks? Words like “breakthrough,” “groundbreaking,” “game changer” and “lifesaver.” And that’s how much of medical news is described. In one week last June, researchers counted 36 different cancer drugs being described using those superlatives. But when they took a closer look at the actual drugs, half were not yet approved as safe and effective, and some hadn’t even been tried on humans. … And there’s evidence of that hype being routinely amplified by reporters, scientists and scientific journals.More. Why does that remind us so much of hypotheses for the origin of life? The difference, of course, is that in this case, the research actually matters. See also: Scientists should publish less? and Authors: Read More ›

If early Earth even had much oxygen. From Rice University: Based on a new model that draws from research in diverse fields including petrology, geodynamics, volcanology and geochemistry, the team’s findings were published online this week in Nature Geoscience. They suggest that the rise of oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere was an inevitable consequence of the formation of continents in the presence of life and plate tectonics. “It’s really a very simple idea, but fully understanding it requires a good bit of background about how the Earth works,” said study lead author Cin-Ty Lee, professor of Earth science at Rice. “The analogy I most often use is the leaky bathtub. The level of water in a bathtub is controlled by the Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: How did life originate on Earth and what were its chemical building-blocks? One possible source of answers to these questions can be found in outer space. On the surface of comets planetary scientists have detected simple organic molecules that could also have been available on the young Earth — either because they were present in the material from which our planet was formed or were subsequently delivered by comets or meteorites. LMU chemist Thomas Carell and members of his research group have now shown that, under the conditions that prevailed on the young Earth, these simple molecules could indeed have served as precursors for the synthesis of one class of molecules that is an integral part of all Read More ›

From Jonah Goldberg National Review: For starters, why are liberalism’s pet issues the lodestars of what constitutes scientific fact? Medical science informs us fetuses are human beings. The liberal response? “Who cares?” Genetically modified foods are safe, sayeth the scientists. “Shut up,” reply the liberal activists. IQ is partly heritable, the neuroscientists tell us. “Shut up, bigot,” the liberals shriek. More. See also: Ignorance and cronyism are the only settled sciences and The Whole Foods circus Follow UD News at Twitter!

From ScienceDaily: A gene that scientific dogma insists is inactive in adults actually plays a vital role in preventing the underlying cause of most heart attacks and strokes, researchers have determined. The discovery opens a new avenue for battling those deadly conditions, and it raises the tantalizing prospect that doctors could use the gene to prevent or delay at least some of the effects of aging. … The gene, Oct4, plays a key role in the development of all living organisms, but scientists have, until now, thought it was permanently inactivated after embryonic development. Some controversial studies have suggested it might have another function later in life, but the UVA researchers are the first to provide conclusive evidence of that: Read More ›

From MacGregor Campbell at at New Scientist: We are used to thinking small when it comes to alien life. Our list of living worlds has a sole data point, Earth, and even our convivial planet seems to have been a tricky place for life to get started. How could we expect more than a self-replicating bag of biomolecules anywhere else? That might be too lofty a view of Earth. After all, huge areas of our planet, including the poles and deserts, are rather barren. And whole epochs of time were inhospitable to life. More. So, of course, “There should be worlds out there so balmy they make Earth look stale, and there are signs of one just four light years Read More ›

From Gregory Radick at Nature: The problem is that the Mendelian ‘genes for’ approach is increasingly seen as out of step with twenty-first-century biology. If we are to realize the potential of the genomic age, critics say, we must find new concepts and language better matched to variablebiological reality. This is important in education, where the reliance on simple examples may even promote an outmoded determinism about the power of genes. … What of Mendel? Some might complain that it is a poor anniversary gift to jettison him from his place of honour in the genetics curriculum. Let me suggest that this grumbling, although understandable, is misguided. If we want to honour Mendel, then let us read him seriously, which Read More ›

And is not even trying to be, according to Robert Epstein at Aeon: To understand even the basics of how the brain maintains the human intellect, we might need to know not just the current state of all 86 billion neurons and their 100 trillion interconnections, not just the varying strengths with which they are connected, and not just the states of more than 1,000 proteins that exist at each connection point, but how the moment-to-moment activity of the brain contributes to the integrity of the system. Add to this the uniqueness of each brain, brought about in part because of the uniqueness of each person’s life history, and Kandel’s prediction starts to sound overly optimistic. (In a recent op-ed Read More ›

Last time, it was climate change. From Smithsonian Mag: A new theory links their fate to a meat-heavy regimen While humans have barrel-shaped chests and narrow pelvises, Neanderthals had bell-shaped torsos with wide pelvises. The prevailing explanation has been that Neanderthals, often living in colder and drier environments than their human contemporaries, needed more energy and therefore more oxygen, so their torsos swelled to hold a bigger respiratory system. … Alas, though fat is easier to digest, it’s scarce in cold conditions, as prey animals themselves burn up their fat stores and grow lean. So Neanderthals must have eaten a great deal of protein, which is tough to metabolize and puts heavy demands on the liver and kidneys to remove toxic Read More ›

From an interesting 2013 paper: on peafowl courtship: Conspicuous, multicomponent ornamentation in male animals can be favored by female mate choice but we know little about the cognitive processes females use to evaluate these traits. Sexual selection may favor attention mechanisms allowing the choosing females to selectively and efficiently acquire relevant information from complex male display traits and, in turn, may favor male display traits that effectively capture and hold female attention. Using a miniaturized telemetric gaze-tracker, we show that peahens (Pavo cristatus) selectively attend to specific components of peacock courtship displays and virtually ignore other, highly conspicuous components. Females gazed at the lower train but largely ignored the head, crest and upper train. When the lower train was obscured, Read More ›

From Human Genesis: So that leaves intentional burial, not necessarily because burial makes perfect sense but because everything else makes much less sense. After all, it is really hard to imagine why Homo naledi would crawl so far underground to bury their dead. If they did access the cave, they must have been able to use fire well. They must have advanced beyond just making a fire to making functional torches or lamps. The fact that these bodies were deposited over time even suggests that there was a cultural transmission going on: Older Homo naledi must have taught the younger ones where to take dead bodies and how to get into the Dinaledi chamber. As mentioned above, the intentional burial Read More ›

From Mark: The point I made – about the criminal enforcement of state ideology – has since been reinforced by the disgusting behavior of 20 (so far) attorneys-general from California to the US Virgin Islands ganging up to investigate and charge “climate deniers” for the crime of holding a different opinion and exercising their First Amendment right to express it. As I noted in my testimony, a group of lavishly enriched climate scientists led by Professor Jagadish Shukla of George Mason University recently urged the President to prosecute climate dissenters under RICO racketeering laws. In fact, the behavior of Shukla and his gang more closely resembles that of racketeers – as does the conspiracy of state attorneys-general. The freedom-of-information release Read More ›

Yes, we know. It’s complicated. Science writer John Horgan might have expected some pushback from his advice to Skeptics: Bash Bigfoot less, pop science more, and he got his wish (!) via Steven Novella at Neurologica blog: Horgan gives a very superficial analysis, in my opinion to the point of being wrong. He claims they [multiverse, string theory] are not falsifiable, therefore they are pseudoscientific, “Like astrology.” For those of you playing logical fallacy bingo, that is a false analogy. There are many problems with astrology that do not apply to string theory. Indeed. Astrology eventually became testable* and flunked. It’s not clear that the multiverse or the computer sim universe will ever become testable. The “non-falsifiable” criticism has been Read More ›