Science 101

[cranefly]

Wow.
I mean, WOW!
What an impressive cloudy morning.

One more opportunity Saturday morn.

[cranefly]

Gosh. What a lovely cloudy Saturday morning.

never mind....

[Greg_phpbb3_import1]

Wow. It was amazing.

Put me down for missing yet another celestial object that I should have been able to see. Group it with the comet that is supposed to be near Jupiter

[cranefly]

Obviously, I was born too late.

http://news.sciencemag.org/paleontology/...t-platypus

Could this be Godzilla's new nemesis? Platyzama!

Whatever, this really calls for a movie.

[cranefly]

A news item brought to our attention by the ever-vigilant Lady Cranefly:

Rapper GZA, of Wu-Tang Clan fame, is releasing a space-themed album called Dark Matter. He's even been chatting with astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson about the project. Here, as part of a talk at the University of Toronto, he previewed an a cappella version of one track.

http://www.popsci.com/article/science/al...t-big-bang

[cranefly]

Evolutionary psychology and other gene-oriented modern paradigms cannot explain why many women enjoy reading "monster porn."

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cros...sexuality/

[cranefly]

Japan laboratory says stem-cell data faked by researcher Haruko Obokata

My goodness. How does a fine young upstanding scientist come to do something like this? She sure pulled a fast one on the prestigious journal Nature.

http://www.scmp.com/news/asia/article/14...ko-obokata

By the way, don't let your subscription to Nature lapse (it's only $200/yr). I will be appearing in it sometime in April.

And no, this is not an April Fools' joke.

[Drunk Monk]

When I search 'platypus', I get this:

Thread: Science 101
Post: Giant Rampaging Pre-Historic Platypus

Obviously, I was born too late. http://news.sciencemag.org/paleontology/...t-platypus Could this be Godzilla's new nemesis? Platyzama! Whatever, this really calls for a movie.

But I don't see it here on the thread. Which just makes platypi weirder. 

Platypuses just got weirder: turns out, they glow in the dark

CBC Kids News • Published November 26, 2020

Scientists not yet sure why they glow

Platypuses are making sure they keep up their rep as one of the world’s weirdest animals.
According to new research published in the scientific journal Mammalia, platypus fur glows bluish-green under ultraviolet light.
Ultraviolet light is the kind that makes your teeth glow when you go cosmic bowling under a black light. It isn’t visible to the naked eye.
Only a few other mammals on the planet are able to do this, and the platypus is the first monotreme — a mammal that lays eggs — that has been shown to have this ability.
The science behind the glow
Platypuses glow because of something called biofluorescence.
Biofluorescence is when a living organism absorbs short wavelengths of light — from the sun or another light source — and re-emits them as longer wavelengths of light.
Biofluorescence is different from bioluminescence. That’s when a living organism, like a firefly, can create light from its body, rather than absorbing that light from another source.
Platypuses were already weird
Platypuses are weird-looking creatures to begin with — like a hybrid between a duck and a beaver.

Unlike most other mammals, platypuses lay eggs. (Image credit: Mick Tsikas/Reuters)

They also have an ability called electrolocation, which means they have receptors in their bills that allow them to detect electric signals from their prey underwater.
Platypuses are also one of only two known mammals that lay eggs, the other being echidna, which are land-dwelling animals that sort of look like hedgehogs.
And they just got weirder
Although many non-mammalian species, including some reptiles, birds and fish, are biofluorescent, very few mammals have ever been found to possess the ability.

Flying squirrels are one of only a few mammals shown to be biofluorescent. They glow a bubblegum pink under ultraviolet light. (Image credit: Nick Kerhoulas/Reuters)

So far, only certain species of opossums and flying squirrels have been shown to glow.
Those findings in flying squirrels got scientists wondering whether platypuses would share the same traits.
Using pelts from three dead platypus specimens stored at Chicago’s Field Museum, the scientists from Northland College in Wisconsin discovered that platypus pelts did indeed glow.

One of the platypus pelts in the study is photographed under different types of light. The left shows the pelt in its normal brown colour under natural light, and the other three panels show the pelt’s biofluorescence under different types of UV light. (Image credit: Mammalia 2020)

But why?
The scientists aren’t exactly sure why platypus pelts are biofluorescent.
It could be that there was some need for the animals to glow in the past and that ability stuck around even though they no longer needed it.
It could also be a way for these nocturnal animals — active at night instead of during the day — to see and communicate with each other in low-light conditions.
Or maybe it’s a form of camouflage. Absorbing ultraviolet light could make it harder for some predators to see platypuses.
The scientists say the next step is to study a living platypus to confirm that the biofluorescence also exists in living specimens.

---

TOP IMAGE CREDIT: Reuters

[Greg]

I had read this awhile back. Time to stop studying platypus or the next thing you know we'll find they can levitate.

[Drunk Monk]

Well, they can't levitate...yet. 

But can we talk about their sex chromosomes?

Extraordinary Diversity: Unusual Sex Chromosomes of Platypus, Emu and Duck
TOPICS:BiodiversityEvolutionGeneticsPopularUniversity Of ViennaZoology
By UNIVERSITY OF VIENNA JANUARY 7, 2021
New methods have shown that platypus has ten sex chromosomes. Credit: © Doug Gimesy
[b]Three papers unveil the extraordinary diversity of animal sex chromosomes.[/b]
[i]The sex chromosomes genetically define the developmental fate of an embryo to become a male or a female individual, and usually appear as one pair of morphologically different chromosomes between sexes. For example, women have one pair of XX chromosomes, while men have one pair of XY chromosomes.[/i]
[i]Now three studies led or co-led by Qi Zhou’s group at the University of Vienna and Zhejiang University of China uncovered the unusual sex chromosomes of Australian iconic animals platypus and emu, as well as Pekin duck. Platypus have five pairs of sex chromosomes forming an unusual chain shape, while the sex chromosomes of emu and duck are not as different between sexes as those of humans.[/i]

[i]These works are the results of international collaboration between scientists from Austria, Australia, China and Denmark, and are published as research papers together on Jan. 6th in the journals Nature, Genome Research and GigaScience.[/i]
Sex chromosomes are presumed to originate from a pair of identical ancestral chromosomes by acquiring a male- or a female-determining gene on one chromosome. To prevent the sex-determining gene from appearing in the opposite sex, recombination is suppressed on sex chromosomes.
This leads to the degeneration of the Y chromosome (or the W chromosome in the case of birds) and the morphological difference of sex chromosomes between sexes. For example, the human Y chromosome bears only less than 50 genes, while the human X chromosome still maintains over 1500 genes from the autosomal ancestor. This process occurred independently in birds, in monotremes (the Australian platypus and echidnas), and in the other mammals (therians, e.g., kangaroo, mouse, human, etc.)
Platypus has ten sex chromosomes
With its venom, duck-bill, egg, and milk, platypus features an extraordinary combination of reptiles, birds, and mammals. Previous work showed that platypus, although undoubtedly a mammalian species, have sex chromosomes that do not share the same origin with those of humans. It turns out that the male platypus has five pairs of XY chromosomes (named as X1Y1, X2Y2, etc.), and none of them are homologous to the XY of human or mouse.
These ten sex chromosomes pair with each other in a head-to-tail manner and form a chain during meiosis when sperm cells develop. The genetic makeup and the evolution process of such a complex and unique sex chromosome system remained unclear, because the previously published platypus genome is was from a female, and only a quarter of the sequences is was mapped onto chromosomes.
Cutting-edge sequencing techniques
An international team of researchers adopted a new sequencing technique (called PacBio, or third-generation sequencing) that can “read” the genome information for over 300-fold longer in length than the last-generation technique, and the new chromatin conformation capture technique that can connect and map the genomic sequences into the chromosome level.
“With further laborious cytogenetic experiments, we improved the genome quality and mapped over 98% of the sequences into 21 autosomes, and 5X and 5Y chromosomes of platypus,” says Guojie Zhang from BGI-Shenzhen and University of Copenhagen. “The new genomes are a hugely valuable public resource for research in mammalian biology and evolution, with applications in wildlife conservation and even human health,” says Frank Grützner at University of Adelaide in Australia.
From a ring to a chain
“What surprised us is that, from the new sex chromosome sequences, we found the last Y chromosome, Y5 does not share many sequences with its pairing X5 chromosome, but with the first X chromosome of the chain, X1”, says Qi Zhou. “This suggested that the 10 platypus sex chromosomes used to be in a ring shape. Maybe the acquisition of a male-determining gene and suppression of recombination broke the ancestral chromosome ring into a chain.” This part of the sex chromosome work provides an entirely new perspective on the evolution of this extraordinary sex chromosome system, along with other new discoveries of platypus genes related to milk production, loss of teeth and so on, were published in [i]Nature as[/i] a research article.
Different sex systems of birds and mammals
With similar new techniques used for the platypus genome, the Zhou group simultaneously decoded the sex chromosome sequences of emu and Pekin duck, which represent the different phase of sex chromosome evolution. Most mammalian and bird species’ sex chromosomes have evolved into their terminal stage of evolution like that of human or chicken. A key difference between mammals and birds is that instead of the XY sex system, birds have so-called ZW sex chromosomes. That is, male birds have a pair of ZZ chromosomes, female birds have a Z and a W sex chromosomes.
Slow-evolving sex chromosomes of emu and duck
The Y or W chromosomes usually have lost most functional genes, and become a “gene desert” full of repetitive sequences. Emu is an exception: its sex chromosomes are largely like a pair of autosomes, with over two-thirds of the sequences and active genes still shared between the Z and W chromosomes. “This may be related to the slower evolution rate of the emu compared to other birds”, says Jing Liu, a Ph.D. student in the Zhou group. “By comparing the genomes of emu and 11 other bird species, we found that large-bodied birds like emu and ostrich tend to have much fewer chromosome rearrangements than other birds.”
Another possible reason is that these flightless large birds may undergo much weaker sexual selection, a potential driver for sex chromosome evolution, compared to other birds, given that male and female emus are largely monomorphic. This provides a great system to understand how sex chromosomes evolve in their early phase – and in the case of Pekin duck, in the middle phase. Another project from the Zhou group generated the high-quality genome sequence of Pekin duck, a very popular poultry species. Emu, duck, and chicken together mark the different time phases of sex chromosome evolution.
In this work, we found that the W chromosomes of emu and duck have retained many more functional genes on their W chromosomes compared to the chicken. Such a large variation in the tempo of sex chromosome evolution is not observed in mammals, and reflects the different evolutionary modes of the XY and ZW sex systems. These novel sex chromosome sequences of emu and duck will also provide important resources for poultry studies.
References:
“Platypus and echidna genomes reveal mammalian biology and evolution” by Yang Zhou, Linda Shearwin-Whyatt, Jing Li, Zhenzhen Song, Takashi Hayakawa, David Stevens, Jane C. Fenelon, Emma Peel, Yuanyuan Cheng, Filip Pajpach, Natasha Bradley, Hikoyu Suzuki, Masato Nikaido, Joana Damas, Tasman Daish, Tahlia Perry, Zexian Zhu, Yuncong Geng, Arang Rhie, Ying Sims, Jonathan Wood, Bettina Haase, Jacquelyn Mountcastle, Olivier Fedrigo, Qiye Li, Huanming Yang, Jian Wang, Stephen D. Johnston, Adam M. Phillippy, Kerstin Howe, Erich D. Jarvis, Oliver A. Ryder, Henrik Kaessmann, Peter Donnelly, Jonas Korlach, Harris A. Lewin, Jennifer Graves, Katherine Belov, Marilyn B. Renfree, Frank Grutzner, Qi Zhou and Guojie Zhang, 6 January 2021, [i]Nature[/i].
DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-03039-0
“A new emu genome illuminates the evolution of genome configuration and nuclear architecture of avian chromosomes” by Jing Liu, Zongji Wang, Jing Li, Luohao Xu, Jiaqi Liu, Shaohong Feng, Chunxue Guo, Shengchan Chen, Zhanjun Ren, Jinpeng Rao, Kai Wei, Yuezhou Chen, Erich Jarvis, Guojie Zhang and Qi Zhou, 6 January 2021, [i]Genome Research[/i].
DOI: 10.1101/gr.271569.120
“A new duck genome reveals conserved and convergently evolved chromosome architectures of birds and mammals” by Jing Li, Jilin Zhang, Jing Liu, Yang Zhou, Cheng Cai, Luohao Xu, Xuelei Dai, Shaohong Feng, Chunxue Guo, Jinpeng Rao, Kai Wei, Erich D Jarvis, Yu Jiang, Zhengkui Zhou, Guojie Zhang and Qi Zhou, 6 January 2021, [i]GigaScience[/i].
DOI: 10.1093/gigascience/giaa142

[thatguy]

Shitposting:

https://boingboing.net/2024/02/14/long-t...-poop.html

Long-term meditation changes your poop

David Pescovitz
Wed  Feb 14, 2024 

A new study of Tibetan monks reveals that a dedicated practice of meditation changes your poop. According to the new research from Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine, the specific population of gut bacteria in the meditating monks' poop is "associated with a reduced risk of anxiety, depression and cardiovascular disease and could enhance immune function."
Overall, these results suggest that meditation plays a positive role in psychosomatic conditions and well-being," the researchers write in their scientific paper.

The researchers compared the fecal samples of the monks with a control group living near the temple. Both groups had the same diet of staple food that "included highland barley, rice, steamed bread and noodles, and the supplementary food primarily comprised vegetables, meat and butter tea."
From Psypost:

The researchers employed advanced techniques to analyze the bacterial DNA from the fecal samples, focusing on the 16S ribosomal RNA gene, a common target for identifying and comparing bacteria present in the samples. This method allowed them to determine the diversity and abundance of different bacteria in the gut. Additionally, they measured various biochemical indices in the participants' blood to explore potential health implications of the differences in gut microbiota.

The analysis revealed differences between the monks and their non-meditating counterparts. Specifically, the monks' gut bacteria were less diverse but had a higher prevalence of certain bacteria associated with positive health outcomes, such as Prevotella and Bacteroides[…]

Looking ahead, researchers are eager to dive deeper into the mind-gut connection through metagenomic sequencing, a more detailed method that can unravel the functional capabilities of the gut microbiota. This future research could provide clearer insights into how meditation and other mental practices can be harnessed to enhance our physical health, paving the way for meditation to become an integral part of treatments for a range of psychosomatic disorders.

--tg

[Drunk Monk]

Trippy.
Totally poaching this for KFM.