Archive for the ‘evolution’ category: Page 130
Jan 28, 2019
A cure for cancer? Israeli scientists say they think they found one
Posted by Paul Battista in categories: biotech/medical, evolution
A small team of Israeli scientists think they might have found the first complete cure for cancer.
“We believe we will offer in a year’s time a complete cure for cancer,” said Dan Aridor, of a new treatment being developed by his company, Accelerated Evolution Biotechnologies Ltd. (AEBi), which was founded in 2000 in the ITEK incubator in the Weizmann Science Park. AEBi developed the SoAP platform, which provides functional leads to very difficult targets. “Our cancer cure will be effective from day one, will last a duration of a few weeks and will have no or minimal side-effects at a much lower cost than most other treatments on the market,” Aridor said. “Our solution will be both generic and personal.”
It sounds fantastical, especially considering that an estimated 18.1 million new cancer cases are diagnosed worldwide each year, according to reports by the International Agency for Research on Cancer. Further, every sixth death in the world is due to cancer, making it the second leading cause of death (second only to cardiovascular disease).
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Jan 19, 2019
Evolution calls on us to lose weight slowly over time
Posted by Nicholi Avery in categories: energy, evolution, food, health, neuroscience
| Local | http://idahostatejournal.com/ Cutting calories (dieting) and increasing caloric expenditure (exercise) cause your brain to activate neurons that will not allow you to utilize fat or lose weight.
Recently, and at a most appropriate time, another study published in the journal eLife has given explanation as to why your current New Year’s Resolution diet will not work.
Cutting calories (dieting) and increasing caloric expenditure (exercise) cause your brain to activate neurons that will not allow you to utilize fat or lose weight.
Continue reading “Evolution calls on us to lose weight slowly over time” »
Jan 9, 2019
NASA telescope spots black hole shrinking after devouring a star
Posted by Michael Lance in categories: cosmology, evolution
About 10,000 light years away from Earth, a black hole is engaged in a stellar feast, devouring the gases of a nearby star.
A stellar meal provides tantalizing new evidence about black hole evolution.
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Jan 5, 2019
Synthetic organisms are about to challenge what ‘alive’ really means
Posted by Klaus Baldauf in categories: evolution, space
And there will be increasing pressures to continue this research. We may need to accelerate the evolution of terrestrial life forms, for example, including homo sapiens, so that they carry traits and capabilities needed for life in space or even on our own changing planet.
All of this will bring up serious issues as to how we see ourselves – and behave – as a species. While the creation of multicellular organisms that are capable of sexual reproduction is still a long way off, in 2019 we will need to begin a serious debate about whether artificially evolved humans are our future, and if we should put an end to these experiments before it is too late.
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Dec 18, 2018
Scientists develop method to visualize a genetic mutation
Posted by Xavier Rosseel in categories: biotech/medical, evolution, genetics
A team of scientists has developed a method that yields, for the first time, visualization of a gene amplifications and deletions known as copy number variants in single cells.
Significantly, the breakthrough, reported in the journal PLoS Biology, allows early detection of rare genetic events providing high resolution analysis of the tempo of evolution. The method may provide a new way of studying mutations in pathogens and human cancers.
“Evolution and disease are driven by mutational events in DNA,” explains David Gresham, an associate professor in New York University’s Department of Biology and the study’s senior author. “However, in populations of cells these events currently cannot be identified until many cells contain the same mutation. Our method detects these rare events right after they have happened, allowing us to follow their trajectory as the population evolves.”
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Dec 16, 2018
Evolution Saves Species From ‘Kill the Winner’ Disasters
Posted by Xavier Rosseel in categories: evolution, particle physics
‘’But they noticed an unrealistic defect in the calculations that had traditionally been used in models to validate the KTW idea: They “described populations as if individuals did not exist. It’s as if we described a liquid without acknowledging atoms,” Goldenfeld explained by email.’’
Modelers find evidence that a combination of competition, predation and evolution will push ecosystems toward species diversity anywhere in the universe.
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Dec 11, 2018
These ‘useless’ quirks of evolution are actually evidence for the theory
Posted by Xavier Rosseel in category: evolution
Dec 11, 2018
Rapid genetic evolution linked to lighter skin pigmentation in a southern African population
Posted by Genevieve Klien in categories: evolution, genetics
Populations of indigenous people in southern Africa carry a gene that causes lighter skin, and scientists have now identified the rapid evolution of this gene in recent human history.
The gene that causes lighter skin pigmentation, SLC24A5, was introduced from eastern African to southern African populations just 2,000 years ago. Strong positive selection caused this gene to rise in frequency among some KhoeSan populations.
UC Davis anthropologist Brenna Henn and colleagues have shown that a gene for lighter skin spread rapidly among people in southern Africa in the last 2,000 years.
Dec 6, 2018
Double the stress slows down evolution
Posted by Xavier Rosseel in categories: biotech/medical, evolution, genetics
Neoliberalism slows down evolution! Just kidding…or am I? 🧐😁🤣🙈.
Like other organisms, bacteria constantly have to fight to survive in hostile living conditions. Together with colleagues in Finland, researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Biology in Plön have discovered that bacteria adapt to their environment more slowly and less efficiently as soon as they are exposed to two stress factors rather than one. This is due to mutations in different genes. The slower rate of evolution led to smaller population sizes. This means that evolution can take divergent paths if an organism is exposed to several stress factors.
Bacteria rarely live alone; they are usually part of a community of species that is exposed to various stress factors. They can often react to these factors by adapting to new environmental conditions with astonishing speed. Antibiotics that enter soil and water via waste water and accumulate there in low concentrations can trigger the evolution of resistance in bacteria – even though these concentrations are so low that they inhibit bacterial growth only slightly or not at all. However, bacteria do not only have to fight antibiotics; they also have to deal with predators. This is why they often grow in large colonies that cannot be consumed by predatory organisms.
