Year: 2023

The discovery of DNA’s double helix structure 70 years ago opened up a world of new science — and also sparked disputes over who contributed what and who deserves credit. Much of the controversy comes from a central idea: that James Watson and Francis Crick — the first to figure out DNA’s shape — stole data from a scientist named Rosalind Franklin. Now, two historians are suggesting that while parts of that story are accurate — Watson and Crick did rely on research from Franklin and her lab without permission — Franklin was more a collaborator than just a victim. In an opinion article published Tuesday in the journal Nature, the historians say the two different research teams were working in parallel toward solving the DNA puzzle and knew more about what the other team was doing than is widely believed. “It’s much less dramatic,” said article author Matthew Cobb, a zoologist at the University of Manchester who is working on a biography of Crick. “It’s not a heist movie.” Photograph 51 The story dates back to the 1950s, when scientists were still working out how DNA’s pieces fit together. Watson and Crick were working on modeling DNA’s shape at Cambridge University. Meanwhile, Franklin — an expert in X-ray imaging — was studying the molecules at King’s College in London, along with a scientist named Maurice Wilkins. It was there that Franklin captured the iconic Photograph 51, an X-ray image showing DNA’s crisscross shape. Then, the story gets tricky. In …

The world record for the least sleep in a day among mammals goes to elephant seals, according to new research. …

Snake experts in South Africa say an energy crisis is partly to blame for a shortage of antivenom in sub-Saharan Africa that has left at least three people dead in the past three weeks. South Africa supplies antivenom to the region, but frequent power cuts have made it harder to store the refrigerated supplies. Vicky Stark reports from Cape Town, South Africa. Camera: Shadley Lombard  …

Scientists at New York University have untangled what they believe is the mystery behind the graying of hair. The discovery offers hope to individuals who spend considerable time and money at hair salons to ward off this evidence of aging, but hair colorists say they don’t think they will be put out of business. Aron Ranen reports from New York City. …

The first thing 11-year-old Mia Rodriguez says she did with her new prosthetic hands was draw a picture of a kitten. The Uruguayan girl, whose fingers never fully developed, put on the prosthetic hands and demonstrated the grasping movement she can now make. “Now I can hold the pencil with one hand. Before, I had to do it with both hands because my fist wouldn’t close,” she said, while her mother, Ana Van López, watched excitedly. Rodriguez received the prostheses from the Uruguayan Manos de Heroes foundation, which designs and prints hands and arms with 3D technology for children and adults across the South American country. Since 2020, the foundation has provided more than 100 free prostheses, most of them for families in vulnerable situations. Van Lopez, 28, lives with her partner and their four children in an abandoned factory in Salinas, about 40 kilometers (25 miles) from Montevideo, and her income comes from informal work such as selling firewood or pineapples. The family has a monthly income of about $200, or 8,000 pesos. “I am very grateful; I thought my daughter was the only one with this problem. She had never come across someone like her in the hospital or on the street. It’s very difficult for us,” said Lopez, who is trying to obtain a state disability benefit for the girl equivalent to a little more than $380, or 15,000 pesos a month. In addition, they receive a similar amount of state support, she said. Almost 16% of …

Ocean temperatures have spiked well above record levels in the last few weeks, and scientists are trying to figure out what it means and whether it forecasts a surge in atmospheric warming.  Some researchers think the jump in sea surface temperatures stems from a brewing and possibly strong natural El Nino warming weather condition plus a rebound from three years of a cooling La Nina, all on top of steady global warming that is heating deeper water below. If that’s the case, they said, ocean temperature records being broken this month could be the first of many heat marks to fall.  From early March to this week, the global average ocean sea surface temperature jumped nearly two-tenths of a degree Celsius (0.36 degree Fahrenheit), according to the University of Maine’s Climate Reanalyzer, a trusted climate science tool. That may sound small, but for the average of the world’s oceans — which is 71% of Earth’s area — to rise so much in that short a time, “that’s huge,” said University of Colorado climate scientist Kris Karnauskas. “That’s an incredible departure from what was already a warm state to begin with.”  Climate scientists have been talking about the warming on social media and among themselves. Some, like University of Pennsylvania’s Michael Mann, quickly dismiss concerns by saying it is merely a growing El Nino on top of a steady human-caused warming increase.  It has warmed especially off the coast of Peru and Ecuador, where before the 1980s most El Ninos began. …

U.S. cigarette smoking dropped to another all-time low last year, with 1 in 9 adults saying they were current smokers, according to government survey data released Thursday. Meanwhile, electronic cigarette use rose, to about 1 in 17 adults. The preliminary findings from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are based on survey responses from more than 27,000 adults. Cigarette smoking is a risk factor for lung cancer, heart disease and stroke, and it’s long been considered the leading cause of preventable death. In the mid-1960s, 42% of U.S. adults were smokers. The rate has been gradually dropping for decades, due to cigarette taxes, tobacco product price hikes, smoking bans and changes in the social acceptability of lighting up in public. Last year, the percentage of adult smokers dropped to about 11%, down from about 12.5% in 2020 and 2021. The survey findings sometimes are revised after further analysis, and CDC is expected to release final 2021 data soon. E-cigarette use rose to nearly 6% last year, from about 4.5% the year before, according to survey data. The rise in e-cigarette use concerns Dr. Jonathan Samet, dean of the Colorado School of Public Health. Nicotine addiction has its own health implications, including risk of high blood pressure and a narrowing of the arteries, according to the American Heart Association. “I think that smoking will continue to ebb downwards, but whether the prevalence of nicotine addiction will drop, given the rise of electronic products, is not clear,” said Samet, who has …

The European Union’s environment agency on Wednesday urged member states to reduce pesticide use over concern that sales of harmful chemicals remain strong despite its effects on human health and biodiversity. The warning comes amid findings that one or more pesticides were detected above thresholds of concern at 22% of all monitoring sites in rivers and lakes across Europe in 2020, the European Environment Agency said. “From 2011 to 2020, pesticide sales in the EU-27 remained relatively stable at around 350,000 tonnes (tons) per year,” the EEA said in a new report, citing data from Eurostat. Pesticides are widely used in the agriculture sector but also in forestry, along roads and railways, and in urban areas such as public parks, playgrounds or gardens. The insecticide imidacloprid and the herbicide metolachlor showed the highest absolute number of above-threshold levels across Europe, primarily in northern Italy and northeastern Spain. In groundwater, the herbicide atrazine caused the most above-threshold levels, even though it has been banned since 2007. Dangers of pesticides Human exposure to chemical pesticides, primarily through food but also through the air in agriculture-intense regions, is linked to the development of cardiac, respiratory and neurological disease, as well as cancer, the report said. “Worryingly, all of the pesticides monitored … were detected in higher concentrations in children than in adults,” the EEA said. In a study conducted in Spain, Latvia, Hungary, Czech Republic and the Netherlands between 2014 and 2021, at least two pesticides were detected in the bodies of 84% …

Mars is Earth’s next-door neighbor in the solar system — two rocky worlds with differences down to their very core, literally. A new study based on seismic data obtained by NASA’s robotic InSight lander is offering a fuller understanding of the Martian deep interior and fresh details about dissimilarities between Earth, the third planet from the sun, and Mars, the fourth. The research, informed by the first detection of seismic waves traveling through the core of a planet other than Earth, showed that the innermost layer of Mars is slightly smaller and denser than previously known. It also provided the best assessment to date of the composition of the Martian core. Both planets possess cores comprised primarily of liquid iron. But about 20% of the Martian core is made up of elements lighter than iron — mostly sulfur, but also oxygen, carbon and a dash of hydrogen, the study found. That is about double the percentage of such elements in Earth’s core, meaning the Martian core is considerably less dense than our planet’s core — though more dense than a 2021 estimate based on a different type of data from the now-retired InSight. “The deepest regions of Earth and Mars have different compositions —  likely a product both of the conditions and processes at work when the planets formed and of the material they are made from,” said seismologist Jessica Irving of the University of Bristol in England, lead author of the study published this week in the journal Proceedings …

Food and Drug Administration regulators on Tuesday approved a first-of-a-kind drug for a rare form of Lou Gehrig’s disease, though they are requiring further research to confirm it truly helps patients. The FDA approved Biogen’s injectable drug for patients with a rare genetic mutation that’s estimated to affect less than 500 people in the U.S. It’s the first drug for an inherited form of ALS, or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a deadly disease that destroys nerve cells needed for basic functions like walking, talking and swallowing. Approval came via FDA’s accelerated pathway, which allows drugs to launch based on promising early results, before they’re confirmed to benefit patients. That shortcut has come under increasing scrutiny from government watchdogs and congressional investigators. The FDA is requiring Biogen to continue studying the drug in a trial of people who carry the genetic mutation but do not yet have ALS symptoms. ALS patients hope the decision could lay the groundwork for more expedited approvals to fight the disease, which affects 16,000 to 32,000 people in the U.S. The FDA has long used accelerated approval to speed the availability of drugs for cancer and other deadly conditions. The drug, tofersen, is designed to block the genetic messengers that produce a toxic form of protein that is thought to drive the disease in about 2% of ALS patients. Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Biogen will sell it under the brand name Qalsody. Patients receive three initial spinal injections of the drug over a two-week period, followed by a monthly …

A Japanese company tried to land its own spacecraft on the moon early Wednesday, but its fate was unknown as flight controllers lost contact with it moments before the planned touchdown.  Flight controllers peered at their screens in Tokyo, expressionless, as the minutes went by with still no word from the lander.  A webcast commentator urged everyone to be patient, as the controllers investigated what might have happened.  “Everyone, please give us a few minutes to confirm,” he urged.  If successful, the company ispace would be the first private business to pull off a lunar landing.  Only three governments have successfully landed on the moon: Russia, the United States and China. The spacecraft carried a mini lunar rover for the United Arab Emirates and a toylike robot from Japan designed to roll around in the moon dust. There were also items from private customers on board.  …

A Japanese space start-up will attempt Tuesday to become the first private company to put a lander on the Moon.    If all goes to plan, ispace’s Hakuto-R Mission 1 lander will start its descent towards the lunar surface at around 15:40 GMT.    It will slow its orbit some 100 kilometers above the Moon, then adjust its speed and altitude to make a “soft landing” around an hour later.    Success is far from guaranteed. In April 2019, Israeli organization SpaceIL watched their lander crash into the Moon’s surface.    ispace has announced three alternative landing sites and could shift the lunar descent date to April 26, May 1 or May 3, depending on conditions.    “What we have accomplished so far is already a great achievement, and we are already applying lessons learned from this flight to our future missions,” ispace founder and CEO Takeshi Hakamada said earlier this month.    “The stage is set. I am looking forward to witnessing this historic day, marking the beginning of a new era of commercial lunar missions.”    The lander, standing just over two meters tall and weighing 340 kilograms, has been in lunar orbit since last month.    It was launched from Earth in December on one of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rockets after several delays.    So far only the United States, Russia and China have managed to put a robot on the lunar surface, all through government-sponsored programs.    However, Japan and the United States announced last year that they would cooperate on a plan to put a …

The U.S. Space Force said on Monday that Elon Musk’s SpaceX was granted approval to lease a second rocket launch complex at a military base in California, setting the space company up for its fifth launch site in the United States.  Under the lease, SpaceX will launch its workhorse Falcon rockets from Space Launch Complex-6 at Vandenberg Space Force Base, a military launch site north of Los Angeles where the space company operates another launchpad. It has two others in Florida and its private Starbase site in south Texas.  A Monday night Space Force statement said a letter of support for the decision was signed on Friday by Space Launch Delta 30 commander Col. Rob Long. The statement did not mention a duration for SpaceX’s lease.  The new launch site, vacated last year by the Boeing-Lockheed joint venture United Launch Alliance, gives SpaceX more room to handle an increasingly busy launch schedule for commercial, government and internal satellite launches.  Vandenberg Space Force Base allows for launches in a southern trajectory over the Pacific Ocean, which is often used for weather-monitoring, military or spy satellites that commonly rely on polar Earth orbits.  SpaceX’s grant of Space Launch Complex-6 comes as rocket companies prepare to compete for the Pentagon’s Phase 3 National Security Space Launch program, a watershed military launch procurement effort expected to begin in the next year or so.  …

A spacecraft around Mars has sent back the most detailed photos yet of the red planet’s little moon.  The United Arab Emirates’ Amal spacecraft flew within 100 kilometers (62 miles) of Deimos last month, and the close-up shots were released Monday. Amal — Arabic for Hope — got a two-for-one when Mars photobombed some of the images. It was the closest a spacecraft has been to Deimos in almost a half-century.  The spacecraft also observed the little explored far side of the odd-shaped, cratered moon, just 15 kilometers by 12 kilometers by 12 kilometers (9 miles by 7 miles by 7 miles.)  SEE ALSO: A related video by VOA’s Arash Arabasadi Mars’ other moon, Phobos, is almost double that size and better understood since it orbits much closer to Mars — just 6,000 kilometers (3,700 miles) away, the closest of any planet’s moon in our solar system.  Deimos’ orbit around Mars stretches 23,000 kilometers (14,000 miles) out. That’s close to the inner part of the spacecraft’s orbit — “which is what made observing Deimos such a compelling idea,” said the mission’s lead scientist Hessa al-Matroushi.  “Phobos has got most of the attention up until now — now it’s Deimos’ turn!” she added in an email.  Al-Matroushi and other scientists with the UAE Space Agency said these new images indicate Deimos is not an asteroid that got captured in Mars’ orbit eons ago, the leading theory until now. Instead, they say the moon appears to be of Martian origin — perhaps from …

An intense solar storm has the northern lights gracing the skies farther south than usual.  A blast of superhot material from the sun late last week hurled scorching gases known as plasma toward Earth at about 3 million kph, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said Monday.  Earth felt the brunt of the storm Sunday, according to NOAA, with forecasters warning operators of power plants and spacecraft of the potential for disruption.  “I don’t want any expectations of these green curtains moving back and forth” so far south, said Bill Murtagh, program coordinator at the NOAA Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder, Colorado.   Auroras were reported across parts of Europe and Asia. In the U.S., skygazers took in the sights from northern states such as Wisconsin and Washington, but also states farther south, including Colorado, California, New Mexico and even Arizona — mostly a reddish glow instead of the typical green shimmer.  Although conditions have eased, auroras might still be visible as far south as South Dakota and Iowa late Monday and early Tuesday if skies are dark.  The farther north, the better the chance of a show as the energized particles interact with the atmosphere closer to Earth, according to Murtagh. The farther south, the curvature of the Earth cuts off the possibility for the most dazzling scenes as the particles interact higher in the atmosphere.  Murtagh said light pollution in Boulder prevented him from seeing the auroras Sunday night. But there could be more opportunities as the solar …

Scientists said Monday they have developed the first mobile printer that can produce thumbnail-sized patches able to deliver mRNA COVID-19 vaccines, hoping the tabletop device will help immunize people in remote regions. While many hurdles remain and the 3D printer is likely years away from becoming available, experts hailed the “exciting” finding. The device prints 2-centimeter-wide patches that each contain hundreds of tiny needles that administer a vaccine when pressed against the skin. These “microneedle patches” offer a range of advantages over traditional jabs in the arm, including that they can be self-administered, are relatively painless, could be more palatable to the vaccine-hesitant and can be stored at room temperature for long periods of time. The popular mRNA COVID-19 vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna need to be refrigerated, which has caused distribution complications — particularly in developing countries that have condemned the unequal distribution of doses during the pandemic. The new printer was tested with the Pfizer and Moderna jabs, according to a study in the journal Nature Biotechnology, but the goal of the international team of researchers behind it is for it to be adapted to whatever vaccines are needed. Robert Langer, co-founder of Moderna and one of the study’s authors, told AFP that he hoped the printer could be used for “the next COVID, or whatever crisis occurs.”  Ana Jaklenec, a study author also from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said the printer could be sent to areas such as refugee camps or remote villages to “quickly immunize …

Nine European countries held a summit on Monday aimed at scaling up wind power generation in the North Sea, spurred by the fallout from the war in Ukraine and the push for renewables.  “We’ve seen over the past months what the impact is if you are too dependent on outsiders for the supply of energy,” said Belgian Prime Minister Alexander De Croo, who hosted the meeting in the coastal town of Ostend.  The leaders of EU members France, Germany, Ireland, Denmark, the Netherlands and Luxembourg, along with European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen, attended the summit.  Norway and Britain also participated, with the latter represented by UK Energy Security Secretary Grant Shapps.  In a joint op-ed published in Politico, the leaders of the nine nations emphasized the need to build more offshore wind turbines “to reach our climate goals, and to rid ourselves of Russian gas, ensuring a more secure and independent Europe.”  Several leaders pointed to the need also to ensure security of offshore wind farms and their interconnectors, in the wake of recent reports of a Russian spy ship in the North Sea and last year’s sabotage of the Nord Stream gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea.  De Croo said North Sea infrastructure, including turbines and undersea cables “are prone to sabotage or to espionage” and the topic was “an extremely important one” at the summit. The summit’s collective goal, stated by all the leaders, is to boost offshore wind power generation to 120 gigawatts by 2030 …