Apparently Twinkies aren’t immortal. After discovering that his 8-year-old Twinkies “tasted like old sock,” biologist Colin Purrington sent them to a pair of scientists — Brian Lovett and Matt Kasson from West Virginia University in Morgantown — to study the kind of fungus growing on them. An anonymous reader shares the report from NPR: The researchers immediately thought some kind of…
Tag: DNA
Social life of extinct sabre-toothed cat revealed by ancient DNA
Homotherium, a sabre-toothed cat that lived in the Americas and Eurasia during the most recent ice age, was a swift and social predator, according to its genes Source: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2257509-social-life-of-extinct-sabre-toothed-cat-revealed-by-ancient-dna/?utm_campaign=RSS%7CNSNS&utm_source=NSNS&utm_medium=RSS&utm_content=home…
The best DNA testing service is just $99 this Amazon Prime Day
DNA testing 23andMe is now just $99 for Prime Day and covers health and ancestry reports Source: https://www.livescience.com/news/the-best-dna-testing-service-is-just-dollar99-this-amazon-prime-day
Amazon’s Latest Gimmicks Are Pushing the Limits of Privacy
At the end of September, Amazon debuted two especially futuristic products within five days of each other: a small autonomous surveillance drone, called Ring Always Home Cam, and a palm recognition scanner, called Amazon One. “Both products aim to make security and authentication more convenient — but for privacy-conscious consumers, they also raise red flags,” reports Wired. From the report: Amazon’s…
Ancient microbial life used arsenic to thrive in a world without oxygen
Today, most life on Earth is supported by oxygen. But ancient microbial mats existed for a billion years before oxygen was present in the atmosphere. So what did life use instead? Source: https://earthsky.org/earth/ancient-microbial-life-arsenic…
Computer Scientists Break Traveling Salesperson Record
After 44 years, there’s finally a better way to find approximate solutions to the notoriously difficult traveling salesperson problem. From a report: When Nathan Klein started graduate school two years ago, his advisers proposed a modest plan: to work together on one of the most famous, long-standing problems in theoretical computer science. Even if they didn’t manage to solve it, they…
2 women earn Chemistry Nobel Prize for gene-editing tool CRISPR
The gene-editing tool can precisely snip DNA from the genome. Source: https://www.livescience.com/2020-nobel-prize-chemistry-crispr.html
Scientists Win Historic Nobel Chemistry Prize for ‘Genetic Scissors’
Two scientists have been awarded the 2020 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing the tools to edit DNA. Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna are the first two women to share the prize, which honours their work on the technology of genome editing. From a report: Their discovery, known as Crispr-Cas9 “genetic scissors”, is a way of making specific and precise changes…
A protocol to minimize the thermodynamic cost of erasing a single bit over a given amount of time
Stochastic thermodynamics theory is a framework that delineates the amount of heat, dynamics and entropy in small (i.e., mesoscopic) systems that are far from a state of thermodynamic equilibrium. In recent years, scientists have tried to use this theory to better understand the dynamics underlying a variety of systems, including colloidal particles, DNA, RNA, enzymes, molecular motors and electronic devices. …
A drop of blood can reveal how old wild elephants are
Wild elephants’ ages are often roughly estimated based on their sex and size, but a new technique that analyses chemical changes in DNA can tell their age with 97 per cent accuracy Source: https://www.newscientist.com/article/2255870-a-drop-of-blood-can-reveal-how-old-wild-elephants-are/?utm_campaign=RSS%7CNSNS&utm_source=NSNS&utm_medium=RSS&utm_content=home…