Epigenome Prefixes from the Great Depression to the 21st Century: The New Metrics for the Big, the Small, and the Strange

People conceived during the Great Depression show signs of aging faster than they should. The change was measured in the cells’ Epigenome, which is the genetic information that is used to express genes. Researchers say that the patterns they have uncovered could be tied to higher rates of disease and death.

By the 2030s, the world will generate around a yottabyte of data per year — that’s 1024 bytes, or the amount that would fit on DVDs stacked all the way to Mars. The data boom has prompted the governors of the metric system to agree on new prefixes to describe the outrageously big and small. The prefixes ronna and quetta represent 1027 and 1030, and ronto and quecto signify 10−27 and 10−30. Earth weighs around one ronnagram, and an electron’s mass is about one quectogram. ronna, quitta, and giga all sound strange now, but once did, says metrologist Olivier Pellegrino. This is the first update to the system since 1991, when additions of zetta, yocto, and yetta were made.

Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-03829-8

The Case of Elizabeth Holmes: Getting Around the Problem and Making the Mistakes of Brain Research ‘Tails Me, Not Mine’

Elizabeth Holmes has been sentenced to 11 years and 1 month in prison after being found guilty of fraud against investors in her blood-testing company, Theranos. Theranos claimed it could run more than 200 health tests on just a few drops of blood taken from a finger prick — but the claims were exaggerated. Anat Alon-Beck, a legal scholar, claims she pushed the envelope a little too far. You faked it til you made it, but it was too much fake.

Giving women fair access to careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) requires mentorship and a professional network — so-called social capital. The community is important for girls and non-binary people, says the chief executive of the non-profit organization Girls Who Code. “When they’re feeling as though they can’t persist in the field, they have that community to lean on, coupled with their computer-science expertise.” Four leaders of groups dedicated to women in technology share their stories and tips for better allyship.

Climate change is driven by human behavior, and it will be possible to achieve solutions. A joint special from Nature Human Behaviour and Nature Climate Change focuses on how to better incorporate behavioural science into tangible improvements in climate policy. “We are at the beginning of a new era of behavioural climate research,” says the accompanying editorial.

Neuroscientist Gina Rippon describes shoddy science reporting and the misuse of brain research as “neurotrash”. She says that brain images are hijacked by self-help guru, relationship counsellors and even those with single-sex education. Neurotrash contributed to the furore over her book, in which she argues that our brains are not fixed as male or female at birth, but are instead highly plastic, changing constantly throughout our lives and influenced by the gendered world in which we live. How she dealt with the backlash and how she wrote her first book, are some of the things she shared with us.

Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-03829-8

Hemgenix: a vaccine for haemophilia, the most expensive drug in the world, and a fuel for the far-reaches of the Solar System

The countries in the south who found themselves with no vaccine at the end of the queue formed a radical plan to produce their own vaccine. If they succeeded, they could end the dependency on wealthy nations and stop the spread of diseases before they start.

A radioactive isotope from nuclear power plants’ spent fuel will power lengthy space missions. The world’s most expensive drug is the first gene therapy for haemophilia.

The US Food and Drug Administration approved Hemgenix, the first gene therapy for a blood-clotting disorder. Its price tag of US$3.5 million makes it the world’s most expensive drug, but it could save the US health-care system millions for every person treated by eliminating the need for regular injections of factor IX, a protein involved in blood clotting. Edward Tuddenham, who was part of the team that designed Hemgenix, said that for 15% of people with haemophilia, there would be no need to worry about it.

Nuclear waste could power space missions to the far reaches of the Solar System — places that are too dark for solar panels. Scientists are developing batteries containing americium-241, a radioactive isotope that can be extracted from power plants’ spent fuel. The project is funded by the European Space Agency, which hopes to wean itself off plutonium-powered equipment sourced from international partners.

Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-04394-w

The fossil-hunter Robert DePalma, whose work on the Tanis project has been published in Nature, does not support evidence of asteroid destruction

A colleague of the scientist who published the evidence about the dinosaurs being wiped out has accused him of faking data to support his paper. Melanie is a paleontologist. During published her work in Nature in February. She says that fellow fossil-hunter Robert DePalma, who published a study a couple of months earlier in Scientific Reports that scientists called “nearly identical”, wanted to scoop her. DePalma says their data and samples wouldn’t fit this or another team’s results.

Some scientists think the first hours after an asteroid hit the ground, there was a debate about whether dinosaurs existed or not. Scientists began reporting tanis fossils in The New Yorker rather than in a peer-reviewed paper last year, but they’ve been incomprehensible since then. The lease that DePalma has on the Tanis site, which is located on private land and has relatively few scientists visiting it, adds fuel to the fire.

The science community cannot improve a situation in which they refuse to measure, because it still isn’t collecting statistics on sexual orientation and gender identity Collecting official statistics is the first step to addressing documented disparities faced by LGBTQ+ scientists in their careers, argues Freeman. Data determines which groups are eligible for federal funding.

As part of a programme at Princeton University in New Jersey, astrophysics PhD student Erin Flowers teaches science to incarcerated people. Developing one of the United States’ first physics laboratory courses inside a prison proved particularly tricky because magnets, computers and sticky tape are all prohibited. “As an adhesive, we use the putty that swimmers put in their ears, and for calculations, we use pencils and graph paper,” she explains. “I’ve had students tell me that taking the course has changed their life by providing them with the opportunities that come with having a degree,” Flowers says.

The amount of metal, plastic, and silicon it takes to make a computer that weighs a few kilograms. A Nature editorial calls for a complete rethink of how we incentivize the production and use of resources. 5 minutes read.

Climate change and pollution pose a threat to one quarter of all plant and animal species. More than 190 countries have begun negotiations for a treaty that will protect 30% of the earth’s land and sea by the year 2030. There are still many unresolved issues, including how to finance conservation. A US$100-billion aid fund for low- and middle-income countries has not gained traction with wealthier nations.

Exploring wormholes through the evolution of holographic duals of quantum mechanics and human physics with the Artemis I spacecraft

Physicists have used a quantum computer to generate an entity known as an emergent wormhole. Even when there are very long distances, quantum systems can be linked. The authors generated a highly entangled quantum state between the two halves of a quantum computer, creating an alternative description, known as a holographic dual, in the form of an emergent wormhole stretched between two exterior regions. They created a message that traveled through this wormhole. Such exotic physics is part of efforts to reconcile quantum mechanics with the general theory of relativity. 5 min read.

Researchers worry that relaxing COVID restrictions will overload China’s health-care system. Also, how the world leaders can save a million species from extinction is uncovered.

NASA has tested a new spaceship and flew one of it to the Moon over the past three weeks. It now faces its biggest challenge since launching atop a massive rocket as part of the Artemis I mission — surviving a fiery re-entry through Earth’s atmosphere and splashing down in the sea on 11 December. In the process, it will test a re-entry manoeuvre that has never been used by a spacecraft that is intended to carry passengers. NASA needs to keep track of the Artemis programme, in which it will eventually return humans to the Moon.

A study that combined behavioural data from 46,000 dogs with 4,000 dogs’ DNA sequences has pinpointed genetic variants linked to nervousness and predatory behaviour, such as chasing squirrels. The conventional breed categories were removed, and the dogs sorted into ten genetic lineages. In animals, sheepdogs had genes that had been associated with the mothers instinct to protect their pups.

Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-04413-w

AlphaCode: A Robotic Detector to End Humans in Loss: A Science-Facts-Based Review of the City of San Francisco

AlphaCode can beat some people at competitive programming. The system, created by Google company DeepMind, was trained on human answers from software-writing competitions. AlphaCode cannot replace software engineers because there is no simple way to specify what people would like to use the product for.

The city of San Francisco, California, is reconsidering its police force to use machines to kill people. The 1,300 readers who responded to our survey did not approve of implementing the idea in their areas.

“There are other options for the use of robots that are less severe,” suggested reader Berry Billingsley. “They could be used to monitor, assess, and evaluate in real time the parameters of a situation. It could be used to end a person’s life.

New regulations for tattoo inks in the European Union ban the use of some 4,200 chemicals known to be harmful to human health. Scientists are studying how inks and chemicals interact with skin tissue to inform future regulations. Others are developing new inks, ways of delivering them and even tattooable biosensors.

Andrew Robinson picks the five best science books for this week to read, and it includes a complex depiction of the cell across living beings and why doubt is the primary essence of knowing.

Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-022-04413-w

The genome of Yusaku Maezawa during a 2021 jaunt to the IsoSec: The discovery of a rainforest in Greenland

Two-million-year-old DNA recovered from permafrost has revealed that the Arctic desert of northern Greenland was once a lush forest ecosystem inhabited by surprisingly large animals. There were mastodons, reindeers, geese, hares and marine animals such as the horseshoe crab, which suggested a much warmer environment, according to geneticist Eske Willerslev. He thinks that, eventually, scientists will be able to look back further in time by sequencing even older DNA.

Yusaku Maezawa, the internet billionaire who took a jaunt to the International Space Station in 2021. selected a group of amateur crew that included musician Steve Aoki and science communicator Tim Dodd. 4 min read from Space News.