Carnivorous bladderwort genome reveals purpose of junk DNA: nothing

The newly mapped genome of a carnivorous underwater bladderwort plant may provide new clues into the existence of so-called "junk DNA," clues that point towards a surprising finding: junk DNA is not necessary for complex life.

The vast majority of humans' DNA is noncoding, in other words it doesn't code for proteins and serves no discernible function. Scientists have long argued over whether is is truly "junk" or has some purpose not yet known.

But in a paper published in Nature on Sunday, an international team of scientists has shown that the genome of Utricularia gibba, the highly complex carnivorous bladderwort plant, is only 3 per cent junk. The plant has deleted almost all of its noncoding DNA over the course of many generations.

The team argues that this shows that having huge amounts of junk DNA, as humans have, doesn't serve an evolutionary benefit. Some organisms may go about deleting their junk DNA, and others may beef up their junk DNA, depending on some internal bias. 

The bladderwort plant lives in freshwater ecosystems, and operates by pumping water from tiny "bladders" on its body, sucking prey in and the water returns. The plant has as many genes as plants like tomatoes or grapes, according to a press release announcing the findings, but the bladderwort's genome is much tinier on account of its tendency to delete its junk DNA.

"What that says is that you can have a perfectly good multicellular plant with lots of different cells, organs, tissue types and flowers, and you can do it without the junk. Junk is not needed," said Victor Albert, a University of Buffalo biological sciences professor, in a press release.

The study was led by Albert and Luis Herrera-Estrella, Director of LANGEBIO in Mexico, and has contributions from researchers in Singapore, Spain, China, and Germany.

 

Kate Allen is the Star's science and technology reporter. Find her on Twitter at @katecallen. 

Navigating through Antarctic ice. Watch this amazing time-lapse video

 

Here's an incredible time-lapse video of an icebreaker navigating through Antarctic ice.

The video is narrated by Cassandra Brooks, a doctoral student at Stanford University studying Antarctic Ocean policy.

Brooks condensed two months of footage of the Nathaniel B. Palmer icebreaker travelling through the Ross Sea in Antarctica into about five minutes for this stunning video. 

"Each day was a new stunning scene. The ice changing colour with the phases of the sun and seemingly growing thicker every day as the temperatures dropped and daylight decreased," Brooks told the Star.

Brooks and fellow research scientists were on the boat studying the Ross Sea ecosystem. The Ross Sea is "one of the last remaining stretches of ocean on Earth that has not been harmed by human activity," according to the Antarctic and Southern Ocean Coalition.

She blogged about her experiences on the Nathaniel B. Palmer, a National Science Foundation research cruise for the National Geographic's Ocean Views blog.
You can read her blog posts here.

"I would run up the bridge almost every day, sometimes multiple times a day and attach my GoPro to the railing outside in front of the bridge with a Joby Gorillapod. I have to thank my husband, photographer and filmmaker John Weller for sending me to the ice with the right gear and encouraging me to capture the scenes," Brooks said.

 

(A quick thanks to @Jeffdelviscio for tweeting this video.)

Lorianna De Giorgio is the Star's foreign web editor. Follow her on Twitter: @ldegiorgio

Native American tribe plans to dub Star Wars in Navajo

This 1977 publicity photo provided by 20th Century-Fox Film Corporation shows, from left, Harrison Ford, Carrie Fisher, and Mark Hamill in a scene from the film, Star Wars. 

A perennial question facing scientists and researchers is how to save endangered species, like plants or animals, and languages on the verge of extinction.

Now someone has come up with a unique idea, at least to save one language: to dub a classic Hollywood movie in it.

The largest Native American tribe in the United States is looking to dub Star Wars in Navajo to help preserve the native language.

A Reuters report says that fluent Navajo speakers have been invited for a casting call in Window Rock in northern Arizona to dub the roles of Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, Princess Leia and others.

Manuelito Wheeler, director of the Navajo Nation Museum, told Reuters that he first came up with the idea 13 years ago as a way to preserve the consonant-rich Navajo language, believed to be spoken by about 170,000 people, according to government figures.

“We thought this would be a provocative and effective way to help try to preserve the language and at the same time preserve the culture,” Wheeler told Reuters. “What better movie to do this than Star Wars?”

Wheeler said he believes the popular science fiction movie will resonate with the Navajo people with its universal theme of good versus evil.

The project was given the go-ahead about 18 months ago.

Endangered languages are on the brink of extinction. According to UNESCO, a language is endangered when parents no longer teach it to their children and it is no longer used in everyday life.

A language is considered nearly extinct when it is spoken by only a few elderly native speakers.

UNESCO lists 577 languages as critically endangered.

RELATED: Dying languages: scientists fret as one disappears every 14 days

Raveena Aulakh is the Star's environment reporter. She is intrigued by climate change and its impact, now and long-term, and wildlife. Follow her on Twitter @raveenaaulakh

DroneShield: a device that alerts you to nearby UAVs

An unmanned U.S. Predator drone flies over Kandahar Air Field, southern Afghanistan, en route to a target in Pakistan. (Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP file photo). 

Drones have lots of fun, non-murderous uses. And the vast majority of the unmanned aerial vehicles humming across Canada's skies these days are of the former variety: homemade vessels piloted by harmless dorks who just want to tinker with techy toys.

Still, it's not unreasonable to fret over whether your neighbour's teenage son is hovering a tiny, camera-equipped spy plane anywhere in the vicinity of your bedroom window.

Enter DroneShield, an as-yet-unbuilt device that detects nearby drones. We came across this via Noah Shachtman, of Wired's national security blog Danger Room.

DroneShield, according to its IndieGoGo funding page, would contain a microphone that picks up the acoustic signatures of UAVs. By testing the signatures of known drones against its database, it would filter out other noises like lawnmowers and leafblowers.

The device could even tell you what kind of drone is nearby.

The team behind the technology, according to their website, "has over 20 years of combined experience working on science and engineering projects including machine learning and acoustic signal processing.  We have advanced degrees in engineering and computer science, including MIT and UMD graduates, and a proven track record of finishing projects on time and within budget for our customers."

The project still has a ways to go: as of Tuesday at noon, they had raised $94 of their $3,500 goal.

Click here to read more about drones on thestar.com. 

Kate Allen is the Star's science and technology reporter. Find her on Twitter at @katecallen.

Chemistry professor to face trial over burning death of researcher

Sheharbano "Sheri" Sangji (centre) at her graduation from Pomona College in 2008, just months before she suffered fatal burns in a lab accident at UCLA. The professor in charge of the lab, Patrick Harran, has been ordered to stand trial and face three felony counts related to her death. (CREDIT: SHERISANGJI.COM)

On December 29, 2008, a 23-year-old UCLA research assistant named Sheharbano "Sheri" Sangji was performing an experiment with t-butyl lithium, a compound that bursts into flames spontaneously if exposed to air. 

Sangji had only just graduated that spring and for the past three months had been working in the laboratory of Patrick Harran, an accomplished UCLA chemistry professor.  

Mid-afternoon that day, as Sangji using a syringe to drawing the t-butyl lithium, the compound made contact with the air, bursting into flames. She suffered devastating burns and died 18 days later in hospital.

On Friday, Harran, the chemistry professor, was ordered to stand trial and face three felony labour-code violations. The Nature news blog reports that "as far as anyone knows," this is the first time a scientist has faced trial after an accident at a U.S. academic lab. 

According to media reports from the court, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Lisa Lench said that "This is not the run of the mill case, not the run of the mill crime." But she dismissed Harran's defence lawyer's argument that while Sangji's death was a tragedy, it was not a crime.

Lench found that there was sufficient cause to proceed. If found guilty, he could go to jail for 4.5 years.

The case has stunned some in the science community, and is being closely watched. 

"If you told me this was going to happen, close to 4-and-a-half years later, I would have never believed it," one chemistry blogger wrote. 

Sangji's family had very different expectations.

"As Sheri’s family, friends, and loved ones, while we grieve for our loss, we live with the knowledge that had UCLA and Patrick Harran followed the law, Sheri’s suffering and death could have been avoided. We request the District Attorney to continue his pursuit of justice, and prevent other families from such a devastating loss," Sangji's sister wrote before Friday's decision.

UCLA chancellor Gene Block released this statement on Friday, after Harran was ordered to stand trial.

"The accident that took Sheri Sangji's life was a terrible tragedy for our campus, and I can't begin to imagine the devastation to her family. We must remember, however, that this was an accident, not a crime. Patrick Harran is a talented and dedicated faculty member, and our support for him is unwavering. Ever since the accident, UCLA has been working to enhance lab safety, and we will continue that work in the years ahead."

The governing body of UCLA was also originally charged along with Harran. But last July those charges were dropped in a plea deal that saw the university accept responsiblity for the conditions at the lab when Sangji died, set up a $500,000 scholarship in her name and strengthen its lab safety policies. The school had already examined and strengthened its safety policy and also paid tens of thousands in fines. 

A date for Harran's trial has not yet been set, the Nature blog reports.

Kate Allen is the Star's science and technology reporter. Find her on Twitter at @katecallen.

 

Massive elephant bird egg fetches over $100K at auction

(AP Photo/Matt Dunham, File)

A massive, partly fossilized egg laid by a now-extinct elephant bird has sold for more than double its estimate at a London auction.

Christie’s auction house said Wednesday that the foot-long, nearly nine-inches in diameter egg fetched 66,675 pounds ($101,813). It had been valued at 20,000 to 30,000 pounds pre-sale, and was sold to an anonymous buyer over the telephone after about 10 minutes of competitive bidding.

Elephant birds were wiped out several hundred years ago. The oversized ovum, laid on the island of Madagascar, is believed to date back before the 17th century.

Flightless, fruit-gobbling elephant birds resembled giant ostriches and could grow to be 11 feet high (3.4 metres). Christie’s says their eggs are 100 times the size of an average chicken’s.

- AP

VIDEO: Stunning NASA video shines light on the sun

This stunning video by NASA details three years of the sun in three minutes.

"In the three years since it first provided images of the sun in the spring of 2010, NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory has had virtually unbroken coverage of the sun's rise toward solar maximum, the peak of solar activity in its regular 11-year cycle. This video shows those three years of the sun at a pace of two images per day.

SDO’s Atmospheric Imaging Assembly captures a shot of the sun every 12 seconds in 10 different wavelengths. The images shown here are based on a wavelength of 171 angstroms, which is in the extreme ultraviolet range and shows solar material at around 600,000 kelvins (about 1.08 million F). In this wavelength it is easy to see the sun’s 25-day rotation as well as how solar activity has increased over three years," NASA says on its website.

Meet the man behind global warming

Guy Callendar wrote a paper in 1938 that confirmed for the first time that the Earth was heating up. (Photo courtesy: University of East Anglia in England)

In April 1938, British amateur climatologist Guy Stewart Callendar wrote a paper that confirmed for the first time that the Earth is warming up. It helped kick start research into one of the world’s biggest scientific conundrums.

That happened exactly 75 years ago.

Scientists in England are marking this anniversary with a new research paper looking at the legacy of Callendar’s landmark findings.

Callendar’s contribution was fundamental, said Ed Hawkins of the National Centre for Atmospheric Science at the University of Reading  and one of the authors of the study. Callendar is still relatively unknown, but in terms of the history of climate science, his paper is a classic, said Hawkins.

A steam engineer and inventor, Callendar developed the theory that linked rising carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere to global temperatures, something that did not reach the mainstream of public consciousness until the 1980s.

(He was an enthusiastic amateur who made all the calculations in his spare time, by hand, without the use of computers.)

Despite groundbreaking discovery, Callendar did not receive widespread acclaim when he first published his work, Hawkins added.

“People were sceptical about some of Callendar’s results, partly because the build-up of CO2 in the atmosphere was not very well known and because his estimates for the warming caused by CO2 were quite simplistic by modern standards,” Hawkins said in a statement.

Callendar’s estimates for the amount of observed warming have stood the test of time and agree remarkably well with more modern analysis of the same period, said Hawkins.

"On increasing global temperatures: 75 years after Callendar" will be published in the Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society -- the same journal in which Callendar’s paper was first published.

Callendar died in 1964.

Raveena Aulakh is the Star's environment reporter. She is intrigued by climate change and its impact, now and long-term, and wildlife. Follow her on Twitter @raveenaaulakh

Just how powerful was Superstorm Sandy?

Large waves generated by Superstorm Sandy crash into Jeanette's Pier in Nags Head, N.C. Researchers reported recently that earthquake sensors located as far away as the Pacific Northwest detected the storm’s energy as it surged toward the New York metropolitan region last October. (AP)

Earthquakes shake the Earth. So do tornadoes or mine collapses, though on a lesser scale. When Superstorm Sandy hit the U.S. on Oct. 30, it threw out such energetic microseisms that made most of the U.S. feel like it was being rocked by a 2 to 3-magnitude earthquake, says recently released research.

The shaking was detected across much of the U.S.

Scientists at the University of Utah presented these findings at the Seismological Society of America’s annual meeting in Salt Lake City last week.

“We detected seismic waves created by the oceans waves both hitting the East Coast and smashing into each other,” with the most intense seismic activity recorded when Sandy turned toward Long Island, New York and New Jersey, Keith Koper, director of the University of Utah Seismograph Stations, said in a statement.

Researchers said they were able to track the hurricane by looking at how the microseisms — relatively small seismic waves — were generated. As the storm turned west-northwest, the seismometers lit up with powerful winds and the storm surge caused massive damage.

The shaking was partly caused by waves hitting the East Coast, but much more by waves colliding with other waves in the ocean, setting up “standing waves” that reach the seafloor and transmit energy to it, researchers said.

The microseisms generated by Sandy were detected by Earthscope, a National Science Foundation-funded array of about 500 portable seismometers that were first placed in California in 2004.

READ MORE: Sandy victims feared photos lost forever — they were wrong

Raveena Aulakh is the Star's environment reporter. She is intrigued by climate change and its impact, now and long-term, and wildlife. Follow her on Twitter @raveenaaulakh

How common are fertilizer explosions?

Firefighters conduct a search and rescue of an apartment building destroyed Wednesday by an explosion at a fertilizer plant in West, Texas on Thursday. (AP Photo/LM Otero)

The explosion at a fertilizer plant in Waco, Texas Wednesday night was unique in the way that all disasters that claim unique human lives are, especially as it comes after the horrific bombings in Boston, making this a very bad week for the U.S.

But fertilizer explosions have happened before, and certainly aren't a dwindling threat given the booming petroleum-based fertilizer industry. (Most modern fertilizer is made of ammonium nitrate, which is highly flammable under the right conditions.) The Guardian, in lickety-split time, has produced an excellent data-based spread on its website that breaks down the multi-billion dollar fertilizer industry and lists pasts accidents, a chart sortable by fatality and by other factors.

Explosions of the accidental variety, The Guardian points out, include a 1947 accident in Texas in which the SS Grandcamp, a ship carrying ammonium nitrate and docked at the Texas City harbour,  violently blew up. That is still the worst industrial accident in U.S. history: it killed 581 people and injured 3,500. 

Other accidental explosions include the 2004 explosion of a cargo train in North Korea that killed at least 160 people and fertilizer plant explosions in Germany and Belgium.

But fertilizer is also a common ingredient in intentional bombings. The 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, an act of domestic terrorism that killed 168 people, involved a rented truck and bags of fertilizer. One of the worst episodes of violence during the Northern Irish "troubles" involved a fertilizer car bomb that exploded in the town of Omagh in 1998, killing 29 people.

Closer to home, the Toronto 18 terrorist plot would have involved fertilizer bombs had it been carried through -- two of the conspirators were unloading what they thought was ammonium nitrate when the RCMP descended in a planned sting, arresting the pair. (They later pled guilty to terrorism charges).

The Waco explosion has sent the fertilizer industry into PR overdrive, as this "talking points and facts" document provided on the website of The Fertilizer Institute, a Washington D.C.-based lobby group, can attest. They point out that fertilizer is relied on by farmers the world over (a problem deserving of another blog post, or perhaps a whole book, at a later date, though the TFI would never put it that way.)

As the document points out, petroleum-based fertilizer is made by combining nitrogen with hydrogen from natural gas. That creates "anhydrous ammonia," which is technically not a flammable substance on its own but will catch on fire with a "strong ignition" source, especially if combined with other flammable materials.

Global agriculture is so dependent on fertilizer products to maximize crop output that some academics speak of "peak fertilizer" rather than "peak oil." In other words, when we finally tap the world's finite supply of petroleum, our biggest problem will be creating food, not driving cars. 

Check out the Guardian's full data spreadsheet here.

READ MORE: Texas fertilizer plant explosion: Rescue crews search for survivors; up to 15 dead, 160 injured

Kate Allen is the Star's science and technology reporter. Find her on Twitter at @katecallen