Science News
Partly human yeast show a common ancestor's lasting legacy
University of Texas at Austin
Despite a billion years of evolution separating humans from the baker's yeast in their refrigerators, hundreds of genes from an ancestor that the two species have in common live on nearly unchanged in them both, say biologists at The University of Texas at Austin. The team created thriving strains of genetically engineered yeast using human genes and found that certain groups of genes are surprisingly stable over evolutionary time.
The research, published May 22 in the journal Science, paves the way for using humanized yeast to better understand genetic disorders and to screen drugs for treating the diseases.
Although yeast consist of a single cell and humans have trillions of cells organized into complex systems, we share thousands of similar genes. Of those, about 450 are critical for yeast's survival, so researchers removed the yeast version of each one and replaced it with the human version and waited to see whether the yeast would die. Creating hundreds of new strains of yeast, each with a single human gene, resulted in many newly engineered strains -- nearly half, in fact -- that could survive and reproduce after having human genes swapped in for their ordinary ones.
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LHC smashes energy record with test collisions
By Jonathan Webb
A new record has been set by the Large Hadron Collider: its latest trials have smashed particles with vastly more energy than ever before.
On Wednesday night, two opposing beams of protons were steered into each other at the four collision points spaced around the LHC's tunnel.
The energy of the collisions was 13 trillion electronvolts - dwarfing the eight trillion reached during the LHC's first run, which ended in early 2013.
"Physics collisions" commence in June.
At that point, the beams will contain many more "bunches" of protons: up to 2,800 instead of the one or two currently circulating. And the various experiments will be in full swing, with every possible detector working to try to sniff out all the exotic, unprecedented particles of debris that fly out of proton collisions at these new energies.
For now, however, the collisions are part of the gradual testing process designed to ensure nothing is missed and nothing goes awry when the LHC goes into that full "collision factory" mode.
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Technology News
On-Demand Startups Aren’t Delivering on Promises to Workers
Davey Alba
For all the criticisms of the 1099 economy—the cornucopia of app-based, push-button services provided by an army of independent contractors—becoming an on-demand worker can still seem like a very attractive prospect to lots of people. Startups like Uber, Lyft, and TaskRabbit promise they can offer higher wages per hour while letting contractors work whenever they want. They hold out the hope of a bright, flexible future in which you are the micro-entrepreneur—a startup of one. And folks tend to believe them.
Until they actually start doing the jobs. This week, a broad survey of on-demand workers found that many encountered lower pay than they expected and hours tied tightly to periods of peak demand. They discovered they had to work earlier or later than they expected, and longer hours in general, because the systems weren’t as flexible as they assumed. The upshot: people are leaving on-demand work after finding out the promised advantages over traditional jobs don’t hold up.
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How accurate is the Apple Watch's step counter and distance tracking?
by Dan Graziano
There's no doubt that the Apple Watch can do a lot of things. It can be used to communicate with others, view notifications from an iPhone and even pay for items with Apple Pay. It's also a dedicated activity tracker that can measure active calories burned, active minutes, the number of times you stand throughout the day, your daily step count and distance traveled.
We've been testing the Apple Watch over the past few weeks, and focused on those final two metrics -- steps taken and distance traveled -- to see how it stacks up against the competition.
How the Apple Watch measures distance
To be clear, steps taken and distance traveled are two related -- but discrete -- metrics. The former is exactly what it sounds like: the number of footfalls in a given period, while the latter is the resulting linear distance. While both should be absolute numbers, they'll differ from person to person based on height and stride.
But take nothing for granted. Yes, a taller person should be able to cover a fixed distance with fewer steps. But depending on his or her pace (say, an active run versus a casual walk), the number of steps in a given mile or kilometer can also vary for an individual.
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Environmental News
California Farmers Offer Concession in Drought
By JENNIFER MEDINA
LOS ANGELES — Faced with the increasing likelihood that the state will significantly cut their water allotment as a way to deal with the punishing drought, farmers in California’s Sacramento and San Joaquin river delta are offering to give up a quarter of the water they have considered guaranteed for more than a century. In exchange for the voluntary reduction, the farmers are asking the state for a promise of no additional cutbacks beyond the 25 percent.
The state has already mandated unprecedented across-the-board restrictions for residents throughout the state.
If state officials approve the farmers’ offer, the concession will be the first of its kind among the farmers who rely on water from the delta to irrigate their crops and have fiercely protected their Gold Rush-era rights to do so.
Gov. Jerry Brown has drawn considerable ire in the weeks since he announced mandatory cuts on urban water use for exempting farmers from his orders. Agriculture uses about 80 percent of the water consumed in the state in a normal year, a figure that has been widely cited by city dwellers who resent the imbalance. But many farmers in the state — who supply a substantial amount of the nation’s fresh produce — have already seen their surface water allotment diminish drastically or even entirely and are instead relying on pumping water from the ground.
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California investigates nine-mile oil slick
BBC
Clean-up crews are working around the clock as investigators look into how tens of thousands of gallons of oil spewed into the sea off Santa Barbara.
More than 7,000 gallons (31,800 litres) of oil have been mopped from the spill - a fraction of the 20,000 gallons officials say spilled into the sea after a pipe burst on Tuesday.
Federal officials are to excavate the pipe to find clues to how it ruptured.
The company responsible for the pipeline has publicly apologised.
Up to 105,000 gallons spilled over a period of three hours on Tuesday - the majority of the oil remained on land.
More than 300 federal, state and local responders are now on the scene.
California Governor Jerry Brown declared a state of emergency on Wednesday to help the state "quickly mobilise all available resources".
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Medical News
Intuitive control of robotic arm using thoughts alone
University of Southern California - Health Sciences
Paralyzed from the neck down after suffering a gunshot wound when he was 21, Erik G. Sorto now can move a robotic arm just by thinking about it and using his imagination.
Through a clinical collaboration between Caltech, Keck Medicine of USC and Rancho Los Amigos National Rehabilitation Center, the now 34-year-old Sorto is the first person in the world to have a neural prosthetic device implanted in a region of the brain where intentions are made, giving him the ability to perform a fluid hand-shaking gesture, drink a beverage, and even play "rock, paper, scissors," using a robotic arm.
Neural prosthetic devices implanted in the brain's movement center, the motor cortex, can allow patients with paralysis to control the movement of a robotic limb. However, current neuroprosthetics produce motion that is delayed and jerky--not the smooth and seemingly automatic gestures associated with natural movement. Now, by implanting neuroprosthetics in a part of the brain that controls not the movement directly but rather our intent to move, Caltech researchers have developed a way to produce more natural and fluid motions.
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Fine particulate air pollution linked to risk of childhood autism
University of Pittsburgh Schools of the Health Sciences
Exposure to fine particulate air pollution during pregnancy through the first two years of a child's life may be associated with an increased risk of the child developing autism spectrum disorder (ASD), a condition that affects one in 68 children, according to a University of Pittsburgh Graduate School of Public Health investigation of children in southwestern Pennsylvania.
The research is funded by The Heinz Endowments and published in the July edition of Environmental Research.
"Autism spectrum disorders are lifelong conditions for which there is no cure and limited treatment options, so there is an urgent need to identify any risk factors that we could mitigate, such as pollution," said lead author Evelyn Talbott, Dr.P.H., professor of epidemiology at Pitt Public Health. "Our findings reflect an association, but do not prove causality. Further investigation is needed to determine possible biological mechanisms for such an association."
Dr. Talbott and her colleagues performed a population-based, case-control study of families with and without ASD living in six southwestern Pennsylvania counties. They obtained detailed information about where the mothers lived before, during and after pregnancy and, using a model developed by Pitt Public Health assistant professor and study co-author Jane Clougherty, Sc.D., were able to estimate individual exposure to a type of air pollution called PM2.5.
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Space News
Most luminous galaxy in universe discovered
University of Leicester
A remote galaxy shining brightly with infrared light equal to more than 300 trillion suns has been discovered using data from NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE. The galaxy, which belongs to a new class of objects recently discovered by WISE -- nicknamed extremely luminous infrared galaxies, or ELIRGs -- is the most luminous galaxy found to date.
"We are looking at a very intense phase of galaxy evolution," said Chao-Wei Tsai of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, lead author of a new report appearing in the 22 May issue of The Astrophysical Journal. "This dazzling light may be from the main growth spurt in the size of the galaxy's black hole"
Professor Andrew Blain, from the University of Leicester's Department of Physics and Astronomy, has been involved with WISE since its inception in 2001, and has been responsible for examining and validating the data from the WISE telescope. He is a co-author of the new report into this discovery.
The galaxy, known as WISE J224607.57-052635.0, may have a behemoth black hole at its belly, gorging itself on gas.
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Planet Earth Flag Designed to Place on Other Planets
by Elizabeth Howell, Space.com
A Swedish university student has created a design for an “International Flag of Planet Earth” that could be planted on alien worlds during future human exploration missions.
The student project, which Oskar Pernefeldt undertook for a bachelor’s degree in fine arts at Beckmans College of Design in Stockholm, features several interlocked white circles on a blue background. (See more views of the International Flag of Planet Earth.)The flag is intended to remind people that we all share planet Earth, regardless of nationality, Pernefeldt said.
“Current expeditions in outer space use different national flags depending on which country is funding the voyage. The space travelers, however, are more than just representatives of their own countries. They are representatives of planet Earth,” Pernefeldt wrote on his project’s website.
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Odd News
Emoticons may signal better customer service ;)
Penn State
Online customer service agents who use emoticons and who are fast typists may have a better chance of putting smiles on their customers' faces during business-related text chats, according to researchers.
In a study, people who text chatted with customer service agents gave higher scores to the agents who used emoticons in their responses than agents who did not use emoticons, said S. Shyam Sundar, Distinguished Professor of Communications and co-director of the Media Effects Research Laboratory. The customers also reported that agents who used emoticons were more personal than agents who used a profile picture with their responses.
According to Sundar, while emoticons may seem too casual or even too silly to play a role in formal communications, the study shows that they can play an important role in professional and business communications.
"The emoticon is even more powerful than the picture, though classic research would say that the richer the modality -- for instance, pictures and videos -- the higher the social presence," said Sundar, who worked with Eun Kyung Park, a researcher at Sungkyunkwan University in South Korea. "But the fact that the emoticon came within the message and that this person is conveying some type of emotion to customers makes customers feel like the agent has an emotional presence."
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