Is Aging an Accident of Evolution?

“Everyone has assumed we age by rust. But how do you explain animals that don’t age? Some tortoises lay eggs at the age of 100, there are whales that live to be 200 and clams that make it past 400 years.”

Stuart Kim, PhD, Stanford University professor of developmental biology and genetics

Prevailing theory of aging challenged by Stanford University Medical School researchers. Their discovery contradicts the prevailing theory that aging is a buildup of tissue damage similar to rust. The Stanford findings suggest specific genetic instructions drive the process. If they are right, science might one day find ways of switching the signals off and halting or even reversing aging.

“We were really surprised,” said Stuart Kim, who is the senior author of the research.

Kim’s lab examined the regulation of aging in C. elegans, a millimeter-long nematode worm whose simple body and small number of genes make it a useful tool for biologists. The worms age rapidly: their maximum life span is about two weeks.

Comparing young worms to old worms, Kim’s team discovered age-related shifts in levels of three transcription factors, the molecular switches that turn genes on and off. These shifts trigger genetic pathways that transform young worms into social security candidates.

The question of what causes aging has spawned competing schools, with one side claiming that inborn genetic programs make organisms grow old. This theory has had trouble gaining traction because it implies that aging evolved, that natural selection pushed older organisms down a path of deterioration. However, natural selection works by favoring genes that help organisms produce lots of offspring. After reproduction ends, genes are beyond natural selection’s reach, so scientists argued that aging couldn’t be genetically programmed.

The alternate, competing theory holds that aging is an inevitable consequence of accumulated wear and tear: toxins, free-radical molecules, DNA-damaging radiation, disease and stress ravage the body to the point it can’t rebound. So far, this theory has dominated aging research.

But the Stanford team’s findings told a different story. “Our data just didn’t fit the current model of damage accumulation, and so we had to consider the alternative model of developmental drift,” Kim said.

The scientists used microarrays—silicon chips that detect changes in gene expression—to hunt for genes that were turned on differently in young and old worms. They found hundreds of age-regulated genes switched on and off by a single transcription factor called elt-3, which becomes more abundant with age. Two other transcription factors that regulate elt-3 also changed with age.

To see whether these signal molecules were part of a wear-and-tear aging mechanism, the researchers exposed worms to stresses thought to cause aging, such as heat (a known stressor for nematode worms), free-radical oxidation, radiation and disease. But none of the stressors affected the genes that make the worms get old.

So it looked as though worm aging wasn’t a storm of chemical damage. Instead, Kim said, key regulatory pathways optimized for youth have drifted off track in older animals. Natural selection can’t fix problems that arise late in the animals’ life spans, so the genetic pathways for aging become entrenched by mistake. Kim’s team refers to this slide as “developmental drift.”

“We found a normal developmental program that works in young animals, but becomes unbalanced as the worm gets older,” he said. “It accounts for the lion’s share of molecular differences between young and old worms.”

Kim can’t say for sure whether the same process of drift happens in humans, but said scientists can begin searching for this new aging mechanism now that it has been discovered in a model organism. And he said developmental drift makes a lot of sense as a reason why creatures get old.

“Everyone has assumed we age by rust,” Kim said. “But then how do you explain animals that don’t age?”

Some tortoises lay eggs at the age of 100, he points out. There are whales that live to be 200, and clams that make it past 400. Those species use the same building blocks for their DNA, proteins and fats as humans, mice and nematode worms. The chemistry of the wear-and-tear process, including damage from oxygen free-radicals, should be the same in all cells, which makes it hard to explain why species have dramatically different life spans.

“A free radical doesn’t care if it’s in a human cell or a worm cell,” Kim said. …

via Is Aging an Accident of Evolution? -A Galaxy Classic.

Cool. I’d like to live to be about 500 years old. Lots to do.

Scotland: Nessie pops up to say ‘Allo

The cast of the UK stage adaptation of sitcom Allo ‘Allo got slightly more than they bargained for while cruising Loch Ness – catching a glimpse of what could be the elusive Loch Ness Monster on the ship’s sonar screen.

The sonar images reveal five Nessie-shaped images, which a trusted Loch Ness expert cannot explain.

The cast, including television series favourite Vicki Michelle, had been taking a break from performing at Eden Court Theatre last Thursday, when the spot was made.

The crew of the Jacobite Queen witnessed highly unusual readings on the ship’s sonar screen, somewhere between Dores and Urquhart Castle.

According to captain John Askew, it was the first-time in his 15-years working on the loch that he successfully picked up images of this kind on any of the Jacobite fleet’s sonar screens. The images have now been sent for scientific analysis.

An expert in sonar who has been studying Loch Ness since 1973 couldn’t explain the sighting.

“This has got me puzzled and has every appearance of a genuine sonar contact,” said Adrian Shine, of The Loch Ness Project. “The fact there’s five items on the screen can be explained, as a single object often appears again as an echo.

“This certainly adds to the Loch Ness mystery and will be the subject of further investigation.”

Vicki Michelle, who was aboard the boat as it traveled from Inverness to the historic Urquhart Castle, commented: “I went down to the boat’s cabin and caught an arch shape on the monitor, followed by four more. The whole cast had been hoping to see something on the trip and, if it was Nessie, that positive energy probably brought her out… or perhaps she’s just a fan of the show!

“In all seriousness, whether it was Nessie or not, we all definitely saw something on that monitor,” she added.

Recorded sightings of the Loch Ness Monster go back nearly 1,500 years, although many photographs of the legendary ‘Nessie’ taken in the past century have proved to be either hoaxes or simply optical illusions.

via Signs of the Times News for Thu, 28 May 2009.

Where, next to that flock of underwater birds?

The Ultimate Memory: New Computer System to Remain Viable for Billions of Years

Modern memory is built entirely around the now, and that’s not just a reflection on ADD-afflicted kids. The IT infrastructure of an entire planet is being built around the internet, the principle of instant and easy access – with the price that most modern memories degrade rather rapidly. Now some scientists are working on a system that can be read by computers but remain viable for billions of years.

The volatility of modern media leads many to make ridiculous false comparisons, pointing out how ancient records on vellum outlast modern disk drives. The fact that that was the only vellum to survive the destruction of an entire culture, or the way it was shielded by numbers, or how it was known to be important and protected from the start, seems to elude them. A more useful approach is to come up with a solution, and a team comprised of University of California, Berkeley and Penn State researchers have done just that.

Their gigayear storage solution is an iron nanoparticle sealed into a carbon nanotube. The particle can be shuttled back and forth along the tube by an electrical write signal, at its simplest providing a single bit but actually providing hundreds of possible storage positions. Even better, the value can be read by a blind resistance measurement – no fields, no interfering processes, no winding miles of incredibly vulnerable tape through winding motors (how did we ever do that?)

Lab testing suggests the system will retain its data for over a billion years. If that’s even remotely true we’ll have to restrict access to them as temporal weapons of mass destruction. Never mind human rebels or mechanical evil: any future race will be driven to inventing time travel and trying to wipe us out once they start digging up time capsules full of LOLCATS.

Gigayear storage http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/05/090525105418.htm

via The Ultimate Memory: New Computer System to Remain Viable for Billions of Years.

Google Holodeck Now Operational: Science Fiction in the News

The google holodeck is used by google engineers to test the usability of StreetView photos. It’s also a pretty cool tool to use, if you happen to be at the Google I/O conference in San Francisco this year.

Google’s version of a holodeck is a small room that is equipped with flat panel television displays turned 90 degrees. You stand in the middle and can see an almost completely circular view, based on the Google Street cam pictures available for that location.

via Google Holodeck Now Operational: Science Fiction in the News.

Don’t get in a flap, it’s just a cat with furry wings

Someone should tell the birds to look out – now cats are growing wings.

At least, this cat in the Chinese city of Chongqing in China appears to be.

Animal experts have been left baffled by the fluffy white moggy, who was born normal – but began growing wing-shaped appendages on either side of his spine when he was just a year old.

Some experts believe the bony ‘wings’ are in fact a freak mutation – a Siamese twin growing inside the kitty.

Others think the mutation may be genetic, caused by chemicals during his mother’s pregnancy.

Whatever the answer is, the cat does not seem to mind – with his owners even claiming he enjoys all the attention.

via Don’t get in a flap, it’s just a cat with furry wings | Mail Online.

Mysterious ‘ice circles’ in remote Siberian lake baffle scientists

This strange almost perfect ‘ice circle’ has appeared on a frozen lake in Siberia.

While scientists have ruled out UFO involvement, they are puzzled as to how the mysterious, 2.5mile-wide geological phenomenon has formed in Lake Baikal.

It was spotted at the southern edge of the lake while another was seen near the centre. The images were taken by astronauts aboard the International Space Station circling 220 miles above Earth.

They charted the progress of the circles when they first appeared on April 5 until April 27 when the ice was beginning to split apart.

‘Throughout April the circles are persistent,’ a Nasa spokesman said.

‘They appear when ice cover forms, and then disappear as ice melts. The pattern and appearance suggest that the ice is quite thin.’

Ice cover changes rapidly at this time of year on the Russian lake and can melt and freeze overnight. Scientists believe a spurt of warm water rose to the surface creating the distinctive pattern but are puzzled by the source of heat.

via Mysterious ‘ice circles’ in remote Siberian lake baffle scientists | Mail Online.

Meteor? Volcano? Hidden UFO?

Scientists find bacterial zoo thrives in our skin

There’s a zoo full of critters living on your skin — a bacterial zoo, that is. Consider your underarm a rain forest. Healthy skin is home to a much wider variety of bacteria than scientists ever knew, says the first big census of our co-inhabitants. And that’s not a bad thing, said genetics specialist Julia Segre of the National Institutes of Health, who led the research.

Sure they make your sneakers stinky, “but they also keep your skin moist and make sure if you get a wound that (dangerous) bacteria don’t enter your bloodstream,” she said. “We take a lot for granted in terms of how much they contribute to our health.”

People’s bodies are ecosystems, believed home to trillions of bacteria, fungi and other microbes that naturally coexist in the skin, the digestive tract and other spots. But scientists don’t have a good grasp of which microbes live where, much less which are helpful, even indispensable, in maintaining health. The NIH’s “Human Microbiome Project” aims to change that, recruiting healthy volunteers to learn what microbes they harbor so scientists can compare the healthy with diseases of microbes gone awry — from acute infections to mysterious conditions like psoriasis or irritable bowel syndrome.

The skin research, published in Friday’s edition of the journal Science, is part of that project. Scientists decoded the genes of 112,000 bacteria in samples taken from a mere 20 spots on the skin of 10 people. Those numbers translated into roughly 1,000 strains, or species, of bacteria, Segre said, hundreds more than ever have been found on skin largely because the project used newer genetic techniques to locate them.

Topography matters, a lot, the researchers reported. If a moist, hairy underarm is like a rain forest, the dry inside of the forearm is a desert. They harbor distinctly different bacteria suited to those distinctly different environments. In fact, the bacteria under two unrelated people’s underarms are more similar than the bacteria that lives on one person’s underarm and forearm.

Mom’s advice to wash behind your ears notwithstanding, that spot contained the least diverse bacteria — 19 species on average. The most diverse spot: the forearm, which averaged 44 species.

How many are supposed to live there? That’s not clear yet. Some certainly could be tourists, picked up as we go about our day. When researchers re-checked five of these volunteers a few months later, the bacteria in some spots — the moist nostril and groin, for example — proved pretty stable while other spots, including the forearm, had changed quite a bit.

via Scientists find bacterial zoo thrives in our skin – Yahoo! News.

Number of Homeowers Facing Foreclosure Rises

More homeowners than ever before are falling behind on their mortgage payments and sliding into foreclosure, according to figures released on Thursday, a sign that the country’s housing crisis is spreading through the ranks of previously stable borrowers.

About 5.4 million of the country’s 45 million home loans were delinquent or in some stage of the foreclosure process in the first three months of the year, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association. About 12.07 percent of all mortgages were delinquent or in foreclosure, up from 11.93 percent at the end of 2008.

Temporary halts on foreclosures imposed by lenders and mortgage underwriters have mostly ended, and banks are moving quickly against delinquent homeowners.

Housing specialists said the number of foreclosures would probably keep rising as more people lose their jobs or are forced to trade full-time work for part-time. Nearly six million jobs have been lost since the recession began a year and a half ago, and many economists expect the unemployment rate to rise to 10 percent from its current 8.9 percent.

More defaults by unemployed homeowners could shunt more houses onto an already saturated market, economists said, dragging prices down farther.

“We’re still caught in this vicious cycle,” said Patrick Newport, an economist at IHS Global Insight. “These numbers were horrible, and they’re going to get worse. This problem’s going to be with us for a while.”

The wave of employment-driven foreclosures could pose new challenges to the administration as it tries to stabilize falling housing values and keep up to nine million families in their homes.

via Number of Homeowers Facing Foreclosure Rises – NYTimes.com.

Fossil Ida: extraordinary find is ‘missing link’ human evolution

Scientists have discovered an exquisitely preserved ancient primate fossil that they believe forms a crucial “missing link” between our own evolutionary branch of life and the rest of the animal kingdom.

The 47m-year-old primate – named Ida – has been hailed as the fossil equivalent of a “Rosetta Stone” for understanding the critical early stages of primate evolution.

The top-level international research team, who have studied her in secret for the past two years, believe she is the most complete and best preserved primate fossil ever uncovered. The skeleton is 95% complete and thanks to the unique location where she died, it is possible to see individual hairs covering her body and even the make-up of her final meal – a last vegetarian snack.

“This little creature is going to show us our connection with the rest of all the mammals; with cows and sheep, and elephants and anteaters,” said Sir David Attenborough who is narrating a BBC documentary on the find. “The more you look at Ida, the more you can see, as it were, the primate in embryo.”

“This will be the one pictured in the textbooks for the next hundred years,” said Dr Jørn Hurum, the palaeontologist from Oslo University’s Natural History Museum who assembled the scientific team to study the fossil. “It tells a part of our evolution that’s been hidden so far. It’s been hidden because the only [other] specimens are so incomplete and so broken there’s nothing almost to study.” The fossil has been formally named Darwinius masillae in honour of Darwin’s 200th birthday year.

It has been shipped across the Atlantic for an unveiling ceremony hosted by the mayor of New York Michael Bloomberg today. There is even talk of Ida being the first non-living thing to feature on the front cover of People magazine.

She will then be transported back to Oslo, via a brief stop at the Natural History Museum in London on Tuesday, 26 May, when Attenborough will host a press conference.

Ida was originally discovered by an amateur fossil hunter in the summer of 1983 at Messel pit, a world renowned fossil site near Darmstadt in Germany. He kept it under wraps for over 20 years before deciding to sell it via a German fossil dealer called Thomas Perner. It was Perner who approached Hurum two years ago.

via Fossil Ida: extraordinary find is ‘missing link’ human evolution | Science | guardian.co.uk.

Religion can’t explain this, yet there it is, physical proof of evolution. Science wins. Can we move on now?

Close-up Look at Black Hole Reveals Feeding Frenzy

Astronomers are getting a close-up look at a cosmic eating machine: a spinning black hole that devours the mass equivalent of two Earths per hour, verging on the limit of its feeding ability.

Supermassive black holes can weigh as much as a billion suns or more and are thought to reside at the centers of most, if not all, large galaxies. Their gravity is so powerful it traps even light, making black holes invisible. Their presence is inferred by watching the motions of stars and gas around them, along with the radiation that’s generated in their frenzied vicinities.

The behemoth of interest in the new close-up study, which will be published in the May 28 issue of the journal Nature, lies at the center of a distant active galaxy known as 1H0707-495. Using data from the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton observatory, astronomers analyzed X-rays emitted during the black hole’s feeding frenzy.

As matter swirls in toward a black hole, gravity makes it travel at significant fractions of light-speed. That generates X-rays and other radiation that can give astronomers information about the spin of the black hole and its size, among other details.

In this case, the astronomers say they are tracking matter that’s within twice the radius of the black hole itself.

Specifically, the XMM-Newton detections suggested the galaxy’s core is much richer in iron than the rest of the galaxy. In addition, there was a time lag of 30 seconds between changes in the X-ray light observed directly and those seen in its reflection from the disk. From this delay, the astronomers estimate the black hole weighs about 3 million to 5 million solar masses – modest by supermassive black hole standards.

The team will continue to track the galaxy and map out the accreting process of this supermassive black hole. Far from being a steady process, like muddy water slipping down a plughole, a feeding black hole is a messy eater.

“Accretion is a very messy process because of the magnetic fields that are involved,” said study scientist Andrew Fabian of the University of Cambridge.

via Close-up Look at Black Hole Reveals Feeding Frenzy – Yahoo! News.