Interesting Stuff Thread

Kivaro

I find this story fascinating.
It appears that we are older than you thought (or were taught).

A miniscule bit of DNA from an African American man now living in South Carolina has been traced back 338,000 years, according to a new study. The fellow’s chromosome turned out to carry a rare mutation, which researchers matched to a similar chromosome in the Mbo, a population living in a tiny area of western Cameroon in sub-Saharan Africa.

We can now (possibly) call Western Cameroon home.

Here is the gist of the story:

The DNA detective work began after the South Carolinian submitted a small tissue sample to the National Geographic Genographic Project. The researchers were shocked after they noticed none of the genetic markers used to assign lineages to known Y chromosome groupings were found.
They sent the man’s DNA sample to Family Tree DNA for sequencing.
The scientists could then estimate the emergence of the chromosome mutation based on rates of change, creating a sort of “family tree” for the chromosome.

The study has even further implications. It strengthens the belief that there is no “mitochondrial Eve” or “Y chromosome Adam.”

Result:
All of humankind, as a result, did not descend from exactly one pair of humans that lived at a certain point in human evolution.
Say What?

Turtwig

Kivaro wrote: »

Result:
All of humankind, as a result, did not descend from exactly one pair of humans that lived at a certain point in human evolution.
Say What?

You know what.

darjeeling

Kivaro wrote: »

I find this story fascinating.
It appears that we are older than you thought (or were taught).



We can now (possibly) call Western Cameroon home.

Here is the gist of the story:



Result:
All of humankind, as a result, did not descend from exactly one pair of humans that lived at a certain point in human evolution.
Say What?

It's an interesting finding, though journalists have struggled to explain what it means.

The discovery pushes the common ancestor of all modern human Y chromosomes further back into the past - earlier in fact than the first modern humans, but still in Africa.

Y chromosomes still have a common ancestor, as this is a key prediction of evolutionary theory. The same also applies to any other segment of the human genome. However, the date of the most recent common ancestor (MRCA) differs for each fraction of the genome. Usually MRCA dates will be older than for the Y chromosome, though they can be younger where recent strong Darwinian selection has been acting (reasons here).

The MRCA of any gene corresponds in each case to a real individual who lived at some time in pre-history. Only for the two DNA molecules that come down the female and male lines have we given the individuals names: 'mtDNA Eve' and 'Y chromosome Adam'. Whether or not these names should be used depends on whether they aid understanding or cause confusion. They have been much abused by creationists, who have misrepresented the science as telling us we are all descendants of just two recent individuals, one man and one woman.

Bannasidhe

darjeeling wrote: »

It's an interesting finding, though journalists have struggled to explain what it means.

The discovery pushes the common ancestor of all modern human Y chromosomes further back into the past - earlier in fact than the first modern humans, but still in Africa.

Y chromosomes still have a common ancestor, as this is a key prediction of evolutionary theory. The same also applies to any other segment of the human genome. However, the date of the most recent common ancestor (MRCA) differs for each fraction of the genome. Usually MRCA dates will be older than for the Y chromosome, though they can be younger where recent strong Darwinian selection has been acting (reasons here).

The MRCA of any gene corresponds in each case to a real individual who lived at some time in pre-history. Only for the two DNA molecules that come down the female and male lines have we given the individuals names: 'mtDNA Eve' and 'Y chromosome Adam'. Whether or not these names should be used depends on whether they aid understanding or cause confusion. They have been much abused by creationists, who have misrepresented the science as telling us we are all descendants of just two recent individuals, one man and one woman.

but..but..we are -mummy and daddy.

:pac:

recedite

Kivaro wrote: »

We can now (possibly) call Western Cameroon home.

That particular man's ancestor was probably taken from there.
But the Rift Valley in Kenya and Bloemfontein in South Africa are the two places where the oldest proto-humans are found, so we probably evolved near either or both of these places.

Didn't think it would be worth starting a new thread to ask this and this thread looked the best place for it. :P I was wondering if anyone remembers a recent enough documentary on Channel 4 about trying to find out about Mohammed etc. I think it was on in the last year or so. I may well have imagined seeing ads for it however. :pac:

PopePalpatine

I think it was called "Untold History of Islam".

Kivaro

I am in the middle of reading Dawkins' Selfish Gene, so this story is topical for me.

There is new evidence suggesting that evolution does not proceed inexorably forward in a more or less straight line as many have long believed.

Researchers have discovered that the common house dust mite has undergone “reverse” evolution, changing from a parasitic life form to a free-living one, presenting scientists with a new piece of the evolution puzzle.

This notion of "direction" may be misleading. Isn't it just Evolution?

Kivaro

Kivaro wrote: »

This notion of "direction" may be misleading. Isn't it just Evolution?

Yep, the language thing makes it awkward.
We covered something similar in a lecture recently when the lecturer said pandas aren't going to "go back" to eating what their ancestors did. I'm pretty sure most people understood what he meant but the current thing of "evolution in reverse" smacks of non-scientist journalists torturing things out.

robindch

Kivaro wrote: »

This notion of "direction" may be misleading. Isn't it just Evolution?

There is no "direction" in evolution -- there's just generation-by-generation adaption to changing conditions over time.

One simple example of complex adaptions evolving, but subsequently being lost, are the many species of cave fish, snails etc which used to have colors and the eyes to see them, but which lost both as neither conferred any advantage in the absence of light.

legspin

Not quite sure where to put this...

Today is the late Douglas Adams' birthday. Check out the Google doodle for today.

Only decent tune the Eagles ever did, afaic.

Turtwig

Google Doodle had better feature him on Towel Day too.

Delirium

Support Cells Found in Human Brain Make Mice Smarter

Glial cells – a family of cells found in the human central nervous system and, until recently, considered mere “housekeepers” – now appear to be essential to the unique complexity of the human brain. Scientists reached this conclusion after demonstrating that when transplanted into mice, these human cells could influence communication within the brain, allowing the animals to learn more rapidly.

The study, out today in the journal Cell Stem Cell, suggests that the evolution of a subset of glia called astrocytes – which are larger and more complex in humans than other species – may have been one of the key events that led to the higher cognitive functions that distinguish us from other species.

“This study indicates that glia are not only essential to neural transmission, but also suggest that the development of human cognition may reflect the evolution of human-specific glial form and function,” said University of Rochester Medical Center (URMC) neurologist Steven Goldman, M.D., Ph.D., co-senior author of the study. “We believe that this is the first demonstration that human glia have unique functional advantages. This finding also provides us with a fundamentally new model to investigate a range of diseases in which these cells may play a role.”

Sarky

I love reading about new discoveries. Each one is another "F*CK YOU" to the ignorance-is-bliss status quo religion and its associated organisations like to promote.

Liamario

Interesting video with depressing comments.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3Dqn1m6Rok

recedite

koth wrote: »

Support Cells Found in Human Brain Make Mice Smarter

On the basis of these findings, the team then evaluated the mice in a series of behavioral tasks designed to test memory and learning ability. They found that the transplanted mice were more rapid learners and both acquired new associations and performed a variety of tasks significantly faster than mice without the human glial cells.

Hmmm... I'm thinking if you transplanted some of these human astrocytes into puppies, then sell them as "smart-puppies". When they start winning at all kinds of trials, everyone will want one.... Is that unethical?

ShooterSF

I want to see what happens if they're transplanted into a gorilla!

recedite

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74-WSM0xTyE

OK, admittedly its a chimp, and its a set-up, but still one of my favourites

robindch

Survival of the fittest, Ukrainian Navy style:

http://en.ria.ru/world/20130312/179963392.html

RIA wrote:

SEVASTOPOL, March 12 (RIA Novosti) - Three of the Ukrainian navy's “killer” dolphins that swam away from their handlers during training exercises probably left to look for mates, an expert said on Tuesday. Ukrainian media reported earlier this month that only two of five military-trained dolphins returned to their base in the Crimean port of Sevastopol after a recent exercise.
Ukraine’s Defense Ministry denied the reports, while refusing to confirm the navy makes use of dolphins, despite the frequent appearance in Ukrainian media of photographs of dolphins with military equipment strapped to them.

“Control over dolphins was quite common in the 1980's,” said Yury Plyachenko, a former Soviet naval anti-sabotage officer. “If a male dolphin saw a female dolphin during the mating season, then he would immediately set off after her. But they came back in a week or so.” Dolphins were trained at Sevastopol for the Soviet Navy as far back as 1973. They were trained to find military equipment such as mines on the seabed, as well as attacking divers and even carrying explosives on their heads to plant on enemy ships.

After the breakup of the USSR and the division of the Black Sea Fleet into Ukrainian and Russian fleets, the dolphin training section and its specialists were handed over to the Ukrainian navy. They were then used for civilian tasks such as working with disabled children, in order to keep the unit intact. A military source in Sevastopol told RIA Novosti last year that the Ukrainian navy had restarted training dolphins to attack enemy combat swimmers and detect mines. The killer-dolphins would be trained to attack enemy combat swimmers using special knives or pistols fixed to their heads, the source said.

Sarky

They're going to train an army of their dolphin brothers, and retake the Black Sea in a tide of blood.

recedite

They were then used for civilian tasks such as working with disabled children, in order to keep the unit intact. A military source in Sevastopol told RIA Novosti last year that the Ukrainian navy had restarted training dolphins to attack enemy combat swimmers

The disabled children will be in for a nasty surprise next summer, when they come down to the beach to say hello again to their dolphin buddies...

Delirium

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oOvNQXDLoi4

Bannasidhe

recedite wrote: »

The disabled children will be in for a nasty surprise next summer, when they come down to the beach to say hello again to their dolphin buddies...

Extreme Eugenics :eek:

joseph brand

robindch wrote: »

There is no "direction" in evolution -- there's just generation-by-generation adaption to changing conditions over time.

One simple example of complex adaptions evolving, but subsequently being lost, are the many species of cave fish, snails etc which used to have colors and the eyes to see them, but which lost both as neither conferred any advantage in the absence of light.

Or Dinesh D'Souza.

He evolved a second ar*e, which was a necessity, considering how full of sh1te he is.

recedite

This doctor evolved a whole set of extra fingers.....

A doctor at a hospital in Brazil has been arrested after she was caught using silicon "fingers" to sign in up to six colleagues who then failed to turn up for work...... as many as 300 civil servants in the town were "ghost workers" who claimed their pay packets but never showed up to work.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/southamerica/brazil/9926151/Doctor-in-Brazil-used-fake-fingers-to-sign-in-absent-colleagues.html

Hotblack Desiato

The alternative approach to defeating fingerprint recognition:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biometrics

Danger to owners of secured items

When thieves cannot get access to secure properties, there is a chance that the thieves will stalk and assault the property owner to gain access. If the item is secured with a biometric device, the damage to the owner could be irreversible, and potentially cost more than the secured property. For example, in 2005, Malaysian car thieves cut off the finger of a Mercedes-Benz S-Class owner when attempting to steal the car.[19]

This is akin to 'rubber hose cryptography' i.e. don't bother guessing or cracking a password, get someone who knows it and beat/torture them until they give it up. Thankfully most of us will never know secrets valuable enough for this approach to be employed :cool:

Liamario

Republican senator changes his mind on gay marriage, now that the shoe is on the other foot

seamus

recedite wrote: »

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74-WSM0xTyE

OK, admittedly its a chimp, and its a set-up, but still one of my favourites

I initially thought it was just a simple funny, but as Fox are behind it, I reckon it's a viral for the next Planet of the Apes instalment...

recedite

It came out just before the last movie, AFAIK.

[-0-]

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21828202

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21828202 wrote:

American Nobel Laureate John Mather believes the bar has been set very high for the European Space Agency's (Esa) Planck surveyor.

The satellite was launched in 2009 to make temperature maps of the sky, and on Thursday this data will finally be released to the worldwide scientific community.

There is great hope that Planck will be able to tell us what happened in the first fractions of a second after the Big Bang when the Universe that we can observe today occupied almost no space at all. And by fractions, we mean about a millionth of a billionth, of a billionth, of a billionth of a second after it all got going.

To get at this information, Planck has sampled the "oldest light" in the cosmos - the light that was finally allowed to spread out across space once the Universe had cooled sufficiently to permit the formation of hydrogen atoms.

Before that time, about 375,000 years into the life of the cosmos, conditions would have been so hot that all the light would have been bounced around and trapped in a fog of ionised matter. The Universe would have been opaque.

The "fossil" light is still evident today. It bathes the Earth in a near-uniform glow which, thanks to the expansion of the Universe, can now be found at microwave frequencies.

Its temperature profile has also dropped to just 2.7 degrees above absolute zero, with only a minute excess of warmth or cold either side of this signal depending on where you look on the sky.

These temperature fluctuations reflect differences in the density of matter when the light parted company and set out on its journey.

American satellites, including Mather's historic COBE mission in 1989, have already extracted astonishing insights from this Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) radiation. These include refined estimates for:

The age of Universe - 13.7 billion years old
Its contents - 4.6% atomic matter; 24% dark matter; and 71.4% dark energy
Its shape - it is "flat", meaning space adheres to Euclidean geometry, where straight lines can be extended to infinity and the angles of a triangle add up to 180 degrees, etc.
The ignition of the first stars - now timed to have occurred some 400 million years after the Big Bang
"Planck has the extra sensitivity and resolution to retrieve yet more information," the Nasa scientist told BBC News. "The question then is: have they done the right things with the data?"

The European team behind Planck will present maps of the sky in nine frequencies - six more than COBE, and three more than its US successor, WMAP, which flew in 2001.

This broader sweep was designed to give the Esa mission a sharper, cleaner view of the CMB, and the minuscule fluctuations in temperature that are seen around that mean of 2.7 kelvins (-270C).

It is with this keener vision that Planck will endeavour to find "some new phenomenon", not at 375,000 years after the Big Bang but long before then.

Information encoded in the satellite's maps should also tell us about "inflation", the faster than light expansion that cosmologists believe the Universe may have experienced in its first fleeting moments.

Inflation has become the accepted add-on to Big Bang theory in the past 30 years, even though its physics is highly speculative. Scientists like the concept because it would explain some important observations, not least the geometry of space - a superluminal expansion could have stretched everything until it was flat. The tiny quantum fluctuations that drove the expansion could also have given rise to small variations in the amount of matter from one place to another, seeding the later gravitational growth of stars and galaxies.

But there are numerous models for how inflation might have worked. They cannot all be right.

"What we need to do now is back some of these models into the corner, and Planck can help us do that," said Prof Andrew Jaffe from Imperial College London.

One of the ways scientists study the CMB is by subjecting the warm and cold spots in the radiation to a detailed statistical analysis, examining the deviations in temperature as a function of their size on the sky - their angular scale.

This produces a characteristic wiggle on a graph, a so-called power spectrum, which can then be matched against theoretical expectation.

Inflation - if it happened - predicts that this spectrum should be ever so slightly tilted; and WMAP has seen evidence for this.

"It's not yet very precisely determined but this is one of the instances in which Planck will make a real difference," explained Prof Bruce Partridge of Haverford College, Philadelphia.

"Because it has high resolution, it is spanning a wide range of angular scale. And what you want to do to see a slight tilt with respect to angular scale is to have as large a lever arm as possible, and Planck will do that," he told BBC News.

Another prediction of inflation is that the CMB should be gaussian. If you pick up all the temperature data points in the sky map and put them in histogram, you should get a nice bell curve.


"If it's not gaussian then we have to re-think inflation or maybe inflation is more complicated than the simplest models suggest," said Prof Marc Kamionkowski from Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore.

Planck's capabilities mean it will provide one of the best checks yet for non-gaussianity.

The ultimate test, however, would be to look for a special signal in the CMB referred to as B-Modes.

Most models of inflation suggest the expansion would have been accompanied by ripples of gravitational energy. These should have been imprinted on the fossil light in its polarisation.

Even if they are there, these B-modes will be very hard to detect, and the Planck team does not intend to make a statement on the issue until a further year of analysis has been completed.

Nonetheless, Thursday's announcement is likely to make some important statements on inflationary tests. A whole swathe of models will probably be confined to the bin at the end of the day.

Esa's Planck project scientist, Dr Jan Tauber, will not be drawn on the findings before the release in Paris. Asked to describe the new temperature maps, he says merely: "They're beautiful."

Great article. The comments make me sad, however.

For example:

YAWN!!! What a waste of 2 minutes of my life reading this
GOD CREATED THE UNIVERSE....THERE WAS NO BIG BANG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I really think it's time we moved to another planet.