Interesting Science Bits

These are all from “Science Daily”. I was wandering through it a few days ago and these just kind of had some “wow” factor for me.

Dachshund Gene and Cancer

Now I have no idea why the gene is named “Dachshund” but it is what it is. The interesting thing is it seems to turn cancer cells back to normal. Find a way to turn it on, cure cancer.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/10/061031191114.htm

‘Dachshund’ Gene Reverts Cancer Genes To Normal, Predicts Breast Cancer Prognosis

Date: November 1, 2006
Source:Thomas Jefferson University
Summary:

Scientists have shown that the activity of a gene that commandeers other cancer-causing genes, returning them to normal, can predict the prognosis of an individual with breast cancer. They looked at cancer cells from more than 2,000 breast cancer patients and found that this commandeering or “organizing” ability is increasingly lost in cancer cells and associated with the progression of disease. The more the gene is expressed in breast cancer, the better the patient did.
[…]
The gene, Dachshund, normally regulates eye development and development of other tissues, in essence playing a role in determining the fate of some types of cells. Richard Pestell, M.D., Ph.D., director of the Kimmel Cancer Center at Jefferson and professor and chair of cancer biology at Jefferson Medical College, and co-workers looked at cancer cells from more than 2,000 breast cancer patients and found that this commandeering or “organizing” ability is increasingly lost in cancer cells and associated with the progression of disease. The more the gene is expressed in breast cancer, the researchers saw, the better the patient did. The scientists report their findings in October in the journal Molecular and Cellular Biology.

“This is a new type of gene in cancer that commandeers the cancerous genes and returns them to normal,” says Dr. Pestell. “The standard cancer treatment strategy has been to block the proliferation of cancer cells or cause them to die. This is quite different. We’ve shown that the Dachshund gene reverts the cancerous phenotype and turns the cell back to a pre-malignant state. Cells don’t die, but rather, they revert.

IF that can be turned into a treatment by locking that gene on with a genetic trigger drug, the world of cancer will change dramatically.

Spinal Cord Repair

It might just be one guy, or it might be that this is the start of generic repair of catastrophic spinal cord damage even years after paralysis. In any case, at least one guy is now standing and moving limbs after years stuck in a chair.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/10/171026103116.htm

Individual with complete spinal cord injury regains voluntary motor function

Extended activity-based training with epidural stimulation resulted in ability to stand and move without stimulation

Date:October 26, 2017
Source:University of Louisville

Summary:
A man with a complete spinal cord injury, who had lost motor function below the level of the injury, has regained the ability to move his legs voluntarily and stand six years after his injury.

The “trick” seems to be adding “trying” to the electrical stimulation of the damaged spinal cord. Something about signals going down to the broken spot added to the general electrical field causes the nerves to reconnect. Golly.

A research participant at the University of Louisville with a complete spinal cord injury, who had lost motor function below the level of the injury, has regained the ability to move his legs voluntarily and stand six years after his injury.

A study published today in Scientific Reports describes the recovery of motor function in a research participant who previously had received long-term activity-based training along with spinal cord epidural stimulation (scES). In the article, senior author Susan Harkema, Ph.D., professor and associate director of the Kentucky Spinal Cord Injury Research Center (KSCIRC) at the University of Louisville, and her colleagues report that over the course of 34.5 months following the original training, the participant recovered substantial voluntary lower-limb motor control and the ability to stand independently without the use of scES.

“Activity-dependent plasticity can re-establish voluntary control of movement and standing after complete paralysis in humans even years after injury,” Harkema said. “This should open up new opportunities for recovery-based rehabilitation as an agent for recovery, not just learning how to function with compensatory strategies, even for those with the most severe injuries.”

Ice Age Glacial Period Farming

Looks like agriculture to some degree started during the last ice age glacial period, not just in the last few thousand years.

In general, wild plants want to disburse their seeds so see heads ‘shatter’. We want them to stay stuck together through harvesting, so select for plants that don’t have seed shatter (either deliberately or just via those being the seeds we get to keep and plant).

Gene age says that happened a long time ago… So maybe civilization started a lot earlier to? Maybe?

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/10/171023094942.htm

Crops evolving ten millennia before experts thought

Date:October 23, 2017
Source:University of Warwick

Summary:
Ancient hunter-gatherers began to systemically affect the evolution of crops up to thirty thousand years ago — around ten millennia before experts previously thought — according to new research.

Like maybe 10,000 years earlier…

Professor Robin Allaby, in Warwick’s School of Life Sciences, has discovered that human crop gathering was so extensive, as long ago as the last Ice Age, that it started to have an effect on the evolution of rice, wheat and barley — triggering the process which turned these plants from wild to domesticated.

In Tell Qaramel, an area of modern day northern Syria, the research demonstrates evidence of einkorn being affected up to thirty thousand years ago, and rice has been shown to be affected more than thirteen thousand years ago in South, East and South-East Asia.

Furthermore, emmer wheat is proved to have been affected twenty-five thousand years ago in the Southern Levant — and barley in the same geographical region over twenty-one thousand years ago.

The researchers traced the timeline of crop evolution in these areas by analysing the evolving gene frequencies of archaeologically uncovered plant remains.

Wild plants contain a gene which enables them to spread or shatter their seeds widely. When a plant begins to be gathered on a large scale, human activity alters its evolution, changing this gene and causing the plant to retain its seeds instead of spreading them — thus adapting it to the human environment, and eventually agriculture.

Professor Allaby and his colleagues made calculations from archaeobotanical remains of crops mentioned above that contained ‘non-shattering’ genes — the genes which caused them to retain their seeds — and found that human gathering had already started to alter their evolution millennia before previously accepted dates.

The study shows that crop plants adapted to domestication exponentially around eight thousand years ago, with the emergence of sickle farming technology, but also that selection changed over time. It pinpoints the origins of the selective pressures leading to crop domestication much earlier, and in geological eras considered inhospitable to farming.

Or maybe 30,000 years ago…

Now this may not be full on farming. Just hunter gatherers giving a bit of a boost to where they wanted to gather more… but it’s the start of farming. Which implies settlements and land rights. Way earlier than the Consensus History said.

Clear Transparent Solar Cells?

Sounds like an impossible thing, what with the light going through by definition not making power, but these guys are making multi-layer multiple band gap semiconductors that use near infra-red and UV but let the visible bit go through. Neat trick, that.

It would let you use windows for solar collectors. Or having the bezel covering your cell phone not just let the display be seen, but gather sunlight to power it too.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/10/171023123526.htm

Transparent solar technology represents ‘wave of the future’

Date:October 23, 2017
Source:Michigan State University

Summary:
See-through solar materials that can be applied to windows represent a massive source of untapped energy and could harvest as much power as bigger, bulkier rooftop solar units, scientists report.

See-through solar materials that can be applied to windows represent a massive source of untapped energy and could harvest as much power as bigger, bulkier rooftop solar units, scientists report in Nature Energy.

Led by engineering researchers at Michigan State University, the authors argue that widespread use of such highly transparent solar applications, together with the rooftop units, could nearly meet U.S. electricity demand and drastically reduce the use of fossil fuels.

“Highly transparent solar cells represent the wave of the future for new solar applications,” said Richard Lunt, the Johansen Crosby Endowed Associate Professor of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science at MSU. “We analyzed their potential and show that by harvesting only invisible light, these devices can provide a similar electricity-generation potential as rooftop solar while providing additional functionality to enhance the efficiency of buildings, automobiles and mobile electronics.”

Lunt and colleagues at MSU pioneered the development of a transparent luminescent solar concentrator that when placed on a window creates solar energy without disrupting the view. The thin, plastic-like material can be used on buildings, car windows, cell phones or other devices with a clear surface.

The solar-harvesting system uses organic molecules developed by Lunt and his team to absorb invisible wavelengths of sunlight. The researchers can “tune” these materials to pick up just the ultraviolet and the near-infrared wavelengths that then convert this energy into electricity.

Fine Grain Temperture Record & Yellowstone Double Tap

What I find most interesting in this one is the fine grain old sea surface temperature record it provides. They find it neat as it let them show Yellowstone did a “double tap” last super eruption. While I do find that interesting, it’s the broader use of this sediment record that has me thinking.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/10/171026085804.htm

Yellowstone spawned twin super-eruptions that altered global climate

Date: October 26, 2017
Source: Geological Society of America

Summary:
A new geological record of the Yellowstone supervolcano’s last catastrophic eruption is rewriting the story of what happened 630,000 years ago and how it affected Earth’s climate. This eruption formed the vast Yellowstone caldera observed today, the second largest on Earth.
[…]
A new geological record of the Yellowstone supervolcano’s last catastrophic eruption is rewriting the story of what happened 630,000 years ago and how it affected Earth’s climate. This eruption formed the vast Yellowstone caldera observed today, the second largest on Earth.

Two layers of volcanic ash bearing the unique chemical fingerprint of Yellowstone’s most recent super-eruption have been found in seafloor sediments in the Santa Barbara Basin, off the coast of Southern California. These layers of ash, or tephra, are sandwiched among sediments that contain a remarkably detailed record of ocean and climate change. Together, both the ash and sediments reveal that the last eruption was not a single event, but two closely spaced eruptions that tapped the brakes on a natural global-warming trend that eventually led the planet out of a major ice age.

So, you might be wondering, why Santa Barbara? Are there not sediments everywhere?

“We discovered here that there are two ash-forming super-eruptions 170 years apart and each cooled the ocean by about 3 degrees Celsius,” said U.C. Santa Barbara geologist Jim Kennett, who will be presenting a poster about the work on Wednesday, 25 Oct., at the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America in Seattle. Attaining the resolution to detect the separate eruptions and their climate effects is due to several special conditions found in the Santa Barbara Basin, Kennett said.

One condition is the steady supply of sediment to the basin from land — about one millimeter per year. Then there is the highly productive ocean in the area, fed by upwelling nutrients from the deep ocean. This produced abundant tiny shells of foraminifera that sank to the seafloor where they were buried and preserved in the sediment. These shells contain temperature-dependent oxygen isotopes that reveal the sea surface temperatures in which they lived.

But none of this would be much use, said Kennett, if it not for the fact that oxygen levels at the seafloor in the basin are so low as to preclude burrowing marine animals that mix the sediments and degrade details of the climate record. As a result, Kennett and his colleagues can resolve the climate with decadal resolution.

So, want a nice climate record with decadal resolution going back a million years? Go to Santa Barbara…

But get there quick, before NASA and UEA start a dredging program…

Oh, and from the unsettling Settled Science department:

But each time, the cooling lasted longer than it should have, according to simple climate models, he said. “We see planetary cooling of sufficient magnitude and duration that there had to be other feedbacks involved.” These feedbacks might include increased sunlight-reflecting sea ice and snow cover or a change in ocean circulation that would cool the planet for a longer time.

Gee, Climate Models running hot, who knew ;-)

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