Tag: science

Wormhole Tunnels in Spacetime May Be Possible, New Research Suggests

In the early days of research on black holes, before they even had that name, physicists did not yet know if these bizarre objects existed in the real world. They might have been a quirk of the complicated math used in the then still young general theory of relativity, which describes gravity. Over the years, though, evidence has accumulated that black holes are very real and even exist right here in our galaxy.

Today another strange prediction from general relativity—wormholes, those fantastical sounding tunnels to the other side of the universe—hang in the same sort of balance. Are they real? And if they are out there in our cosmos, could humans hope to use them for getting around? After their prediction in 1935, research seemed to point toward no—wormholes appeared unlikely to be an element of reality. But new work offers hints of how they could arise, and the process may be easier than physicists have long thought.

The original idea of a wormhole came from physicists Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen. They studied the strange equations that we now know describe that unescapable pocket of space we call a black hole and asked what they really represented. Einstein and Rosen discovered that, theoretically at least, a black hole’s surface might work as a bridge that connected to a second patch of space. The journey might be as if you went down the drain of your bathtub, and instead of getting stuck in the pipes, you came out into another tub just like the first.

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Mysterious New ‘Borg’ DNA Seems to Assimilate Genes From Different Organisms

Mysterious strands of DNA that seemingly assimilate genes from many different organisms in their surrounding environment have been discovered in a Californian backyard.

Scientists have named these elements “Borgs”, and their discovery could help us not just understand the evolution of microorganisms, but their interactions within their ecosystems, and their role in the broader environment.

According to geomicrobiologist Jill Banfield from the University of California, Berkeley, Borgs could make for a tremendously significant discovery.

“I haven’t been this excited about a discovery since CRISPR,” she said on Twitter. “We found something enigmatic that, like CRISPR, is associated with microbial genomes.”

A paper describing the structures has been uploaded to preprint server bioRxiv, and currently awaits peer review.

The first of the Borgs was discovered in mud dredged up from Banfield’s backyard. She was working with geneticist Basem Al-Shayeb of UC Berkeley to identify viruses that infect anoxic microbes known as archaea that live in wetland environments, Science Magazine reports.

Environmental DNA is an excellent way to identify the range of organisms that inhabit an ecosystem. But in their scoop of mud, Banfield and Al-Shayeb found something funny: a structure of DNA consisting of nearly a million base pairs. That’s huge.

A closer look at the sequence revealed even more peculiarities: more than half of the genes were new; it had mirrored sequences at the end of each strand; and it showed structures consistent with the ability to self-replicate.

Puzzled, the researchers turned to DNA databases to see if they could find anything else that looked like their discovery. They identified 19 sequences that seemed to fit the profile.

What these DNA structures are is unclear, but they’re certainly fascinating. They belong to a class of structures called extrachromosomal elements, or ECEs, which can be found outside of the chromosomes that contain most of an organism’s genetic material.

ECEs are huge and self-replicating, and they can be found inside or outside of the cell nuclei; examples include plasmids and viral DNA.

“We can neither prove that they are archaeal viruses or plasmids or mini-chromosomes, nor can we prove that they are not,” the researchers write in their paper.

The Borgs are much larger than other ECEs, however, according to Banfield: one-third of the size of their host microbes.

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World-first CRISPR-edited sugarcane helps reduce environmental impact

Sugarcane is an important food crop, but it’s large environmental impact means there’s plenty of room for improvement. Unfortunately it’s tricky and time-consuming to breed new varieties, but now researchers have used CRISPR gene-editing to do so quickly and more easily.

Sugarcane is a key source of sugar, obviously, but that’s not its only product – the oil in the leaves and stems is often used to make bioethanol for greener fuels and plastics. But these don’t come cheap – sugarcane takes up a large percentage of farmland in many countries, which fuels deforestation. It also takes a huge amount of water to grow, and creates plenty of waste and pollution during processing.

Some of these problems can be addressed with new varieties of the plant, but sugarcane is frustratingly difficult to crossbreed due to its complex genome. It requires a lot of back-and-forth to filter out desirable traits from unwanted ones, so new versions can take years to develop.

That’s where CRISPR comes in. This powerful gene-editing tool allows scientists to switch off genes or cut them out and replace them with more useful ones. It could be useful in treating a range of diseases, but also for improving crops – and now researchers have used CRISPR to develop a couple of new varieties of sugarcane.

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4 Ethics-Breaking Biological Experiments Touted by Chinese Scientists as ‘World Firsts’

Throughout the world, scientific research and experiments involving ethical issues must first pass the scrutiny of ethics committees. In recent years, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has conducted many experiments in the field of biomedical and genetic engineering that break human ethical boundaries.

China began implementing the Ethical Review of Biomedical Research Involving Humans on Dec. 1, 2016. However, 122 Chinese scientists who co-signed an open letter in 2018 to oppose gene-edited babies criticized China’s biomedical ethics review as a “sham.”

In the United States, as ethical and moral regulations on animal research have become stricter, budgets and funding have tended to decrease in recent years, making China the most attractive place for such experiments. For example, in 2014, the U.S. government imposed a funding pause of gain of function research involving influenza, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) coronaviruses, and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) coronaviruses. In 2019, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced that it would stop conducting or funding studies on mammals by 2035.

In 2011, the CCP made it a national development goal to create primate disease models through cloning and other biotechnologies. According to the 2020 China Biomedical Industry Development Report published by Chinese Venture, “the overall biopharmaceutical market in China increased from $28.7 billion to $49.6 billion from 2016 to 2019, at a CAGR (Compound annual growth rate) of 20 percent. It is expected to reach $130.2 billion in 2025.”

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Scientists unearth ‘5,000 year old PLAGUE BACTERIA’ that caused Black Death from skull of long-dead pandemic victim in Latvia

An ancient skull found by a river in modern-day Latvia may well hold clues as to how the bubonic plague wiped out tens of millions of people across Europe in what would eventually become the deadliest pandemic in human history.

Researchers from Kiel University in Germany revealed on Wednesday that a strain of the bacterium, known as Yersina pestis, dating back millenia, had been discovered in samples taken from the remains of a hunter gatherer in the Baltic nation. As part of a paper published in the Cell scientific journal, they say the man, estimated to have been in his 20s, lived around 5,000 years ago.

In a revelation that could have implications for the understanding of current and future pandemics, the academics say that this early variant was likely less infectious and deadly than the one that ravaged Eurasia thousands of years later. The Black Death, spread by rats and fleas, is estimated to have killed between 75 and 200 million people from 1347 to 1351.

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After Shocking Revelations About Brutalized Dead Babies, Biden Administration To Shut Down Fetal Harvesting Probe

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary and radical pro-abortion activist Xavier Becerra shut down the National Institutes of Health (NIH) ethics board overseeing human fetal tissue research. Under President Donald Trump, the advisory board had the authority to block fetal research proposals on ethics grounds.

In April, at President Joe Biden’s direction, HHS also reversed the Trump administration’s policy prohibiting funding for intramural research using human fetal tissue. The decision gave the “best and brightest” government researchers and agencies license to use the skin, brains, liver, and eyeballs of aborted children for taxpayer-funded research. In essence, the Biden administration is allowing for taxpayer-funded harvesting of aborted babies, and now it has abolished any sort of ethical oversight.

In response, Republican Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississippi, as well as Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer and Sen. Vicky Hartzler, both of Missouri, are leading a letter signed by more than 100 congressional Republicans on Wednesday demanding Becerra reinstate the ethics board and the policy banning funding from going to fetal tissue research. The lawmakers are asking the Biden administration to instead “embrace more avenues for research that employ ethical, non-fetal alternatives.”

The news that the Biden administration is shutting down the fetal harvesting ethics board comes in the wake of shocking details about how federal agencies traffic aborted babies. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) bought organs such as livers, brains, and eyeballs of dismembered babies for hundreds of dollars apiece from Advanced Bioscience Resources, one of the country’s largest fetal tissue trafficking firms. Firms such as Advanced Bioscience Resources work as the middleman between the federal government and Planned Parenthood, the country’s largest abortion provider.

The FDA pays $2,000 per individual baby, adding up to $12,000 per box of harvested organs. The FDA also requested late-term aborted babies, buying body parts from children up to 24 weeks old (babies can generally survive outside the womb as early as 22 weeks).

Most disturbing, the FDA requested organs from baby boys for “very important and … challenging” surgeries to create humanized mice. Moreover, it was uncovered that FDA employees would be joining Advanced Bioscience Resources associates at a “Humanized Mice Workshop” in Zurich in 2016.

The Center for Medical Progress reported in May that grants from the Anthony Fauci-led National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases at the National Institutes of Health were funding fetal tissue experiments that included stitching the scalp of a killed 5-month-old in utero child onto the back of a lab rat.

Pointing to these examples, Republican lawmakers said in their letter that the restrictions on the use of human fetal tissue in 2019 “were instituted because of glaring abuses that came to light.”

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