AMERICA HAS A GUN PROBLEM AS THESE HEADLINES FROM TODAY SHOW

2 killed, 1 injured in shooting at Texas A&M University-Commerce

2 women killed, child hurt in shooting at Texas dormitory

Officials: 15-year-old student athlete killed in Florida funeral shooting

Los Angeles 1 dead, 5 wounded in shooting on Greyhound bus in California
Two suspects in fatal Seattle shooting arrested in Las Vegas

 

In New York lab, centuries-old corals hold clues to climate shifts

PALISADES, N.Y. (Reuters) - Some 20 miles north of New York City, a team of scientists is searching for clues about how the environment is changing by studying organisms not usually found in the woods around here: corals.


In the labs of the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, a research unit of Columbia University overlooking the Hudson River, the scientists led by Professor Braddock Linsley pore over feet-long coral cores they extracted from far-away reefs.

For Linsley and his colleagues, corals are a precious repository of clues tmsnrt.rs/360ebeX about the past that may help predict future climate trends. They can also reveal how much and how fast environmental conditions have changed during a certain period of time.

Cores are the hard, stony part of a coral underneath the top of the colony - its skeleton. Much like trees, corals produce growth rings that record climatic conditions like seawater temperatures and rainfall as they grow.

In a lab room packed with boxes of coral samples, Linsley and a small team of colleagues cut the cores into slabs and then X-ray the slabs to reveal the annual growth bands.

Using dentist drills, they pulverize small pieces and run geochemical analyses of the coral dust to reconstruct changes in the temperature, salinity and acidity of the water around the coral on a monthly basis going back hundreds of years.

A school of fish swim above a staghorn coral colony as it grows on the Great Barrier Reef off the coast of Cairns, Australia October 25, 2019. REUTERS/Lucas Jackson
“It is years of lab work and a lot of frustration but once you get to that point, the final product is just so exciting because you’ve got this long dataset,” Linsley said.

Coral reefs develop over thousands of years and are vital to the survival and prosperity of countless marine species. They also curtail flood damage from storms and support human activities like fisheries.

As humans burn more fossil fuel - the biggest contributor to global warming - oceans absorb growing amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2).

Some of Linsley’s recent research on corals from the South Pacific island of Tonga suggests that increased seawater acidification caused by excess CO2 could lead to a decline in coral growth rates, endangering the wellbeing of entire reefs.

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Linsley, a tall and soft-spoken 60-year-old, grew up on the Connecticut coast, making dams in the sand and observing erosion on the beaches near the town of Guilford. He loved water and began his career studying ocean sediments and fossils.

His work on corals began after a chance encounter with a colleague who was visiting his girlfriend at the University of New Mexico - where Linsley was studying to get his PhD in the late 1980s - led to a collaboration.

“I was fascinated by the fact that the corals had these annual bands in them and you could potentially extract annual resolve records back several hundred years,” he said at his office in the leafy campus, papers and books scattered on his desk and photos of diving expeditions on the wall.

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Corals also brought him closer to the water and he had to learn how to dive, a perk of the job for Linsley.

By studying the environmental records derived from corals, the scientist is hoping to be able to shine a light on issues like the rate of surface ocean warming, ocean acidification and the impact on coral reef ecosystems worldwide.

But one thing is already evident, he said. Environmental changes are happening much more rapidly than in the last several thousand years and they are “clearly linked” to human activity.

Linsley’s childhood home in Connecticut – which he said now regularly battles encroaching waters - stood as a stark reminder.

“My children are 11 and 13. I think about in 50 years from now when I’m not here, what’s it going to be like,” he said.

China plans to issue biosafety certificates to domestic GM soybean, corn

BEIJING (Reuters) - China’s agriculture ministry said on Monday it plans to issue biosafety certificates to a domestically grown, genetically modified (GM) soybean crop and two corn crops, in a move toward commercializing GM grain production in the world’s top market.



FILE PHOTO: An employee picks out bad beans from a pile of soybeans at a supermarket in Wuhan, Hubei province April 14, 2014. REUTERS/Stringer/File Photo


China will grant the certificate to SHZD32-01 soybean developed by Shanghai Jiaotong University, provided there is no objection during a 15-day period soliciting public opinion, the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Affairs said in a statement.

If approved, it will become China’s first GM soybean crop to receive such a certificate, a first step toward commercialized production.

Dabeinong’s DBN9936 corn and double-stacked 12-5 corn developed by Hangzhou Ruifeng Biotech Co Ltd and Zhejiang University were also expected to receive the certificate.

Beijing has spent billions of dollars researching GM crops, but has held back from commercial production of any food grains because of consumer concerns about their safety.

China granted biosafety certificates to its first GM corn varieties and two domestic rice varieties in 2009, but has never moved to commercialize these crops.

Some in the industry believe Beijing’s most recent move could mean that China is ready to start commercialization of some domestic GM crops.

“This signifies the policy changes from the central government as China is moving to commercialize GMO corn,” said James Chen, chief financial officer of Origin Agritech Limited

“GMO corn commercialization would benefit Chinese farmers, especially those in northeastern China,” Chen said.

Origin Agritech received biosafety certificates for its phytase GM corn trait in 2009 and has several new varieties of GM corn in the pipeline for biosafety approval, including insect resistance and glyphosate tolerance double-stacked traits.

China has said it aims to push forward the commercialization of GM corn and soybeans by 2020. Beijing has long approved imports of these products.

“If the government actually issues the certificate, it will be significant progress,” said another source with a major developer of GM crop strains in China.

“But it really depends on whether the crops can be commercialized in the end,” added the source, who declined to be named as he was not authorized to speak to the media.

No eyes? No problem. Marine creature expands boundaries of vision


WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A cousin of the starfish that resides in the coral reefs of the Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico lacks eyes, but can still see, according to scientists who studied this creature that expands the boundaries of the sense of sight in the animal kingdom.

Researchers said on Thursday that the red brittle star, called Ophiocoma wendtii, is only the second creature known to be able to see without having eyes - known as extraocular vision - joining a single species of sea urchin.

It possesses this exotic capability thanks to light-sensing cells, called photoreceptors, covering its body and pigment cells, called chromatophores, that move during the day to facilitate the animal’s dramatic color change from a deep reddish-brown in daytime to a stripy beige at nighttime.



A red brittle star, Ophiocoma wendtii, is seen in this image released on January 2, 2020. Lauren Sumner-Rooney/Handout via REUTERS. A cousin of the sea star and sea cucumber, this species that lives among the coral reefs of the Caribbean is one of two known animals that lack eyes but still possess the ability to see.

Brittle stars, with five radiating arms extending from a central disk, are related to starfish (also called sea stars), sea cucumbers, sea urchins and others in a group of marine invertebrates called echinoderms. They have a nervous system but no brain.

The red brittle star - up to about 14 inches (35 cm) from arm tip to arm tip - lives in bright and complex habitats, with high predation threats from reef fish. It stays hidden during daytime - making the ability to spot a safe place to hide critical - and comes out at night to feed on detritus.

Its photoreceptors are surrounded during daytime by chromatophores that narrow the field of the light being detected, making each photoreceptor like the pixel of a computer image that, when combined with other pixels, makes a whole image. The visual system does not work at night, when the chromatophores contract.

“If our conclusions about the chromatophores are correct, this is a beautiful example of innovation in evolution,” said Lauren Sumner-Rooney, a research fellow at Oxford University Museum of Natural History who led the study published in the journal Current Biology.

Laboratory experiments indicated the brittle stars have rudimentary vision. Placed in a circular arena, they moved toward walls that were white with a black bar, suggestive of a daytime hiding place.

Another scenario showed they were not simply detecting brightness versus darkness. When they were presented with gray walls making it so no part of the arena was lighter or darker overall, they still moved toward the black stripe, which was centered on a white stripe so as to reflect the same amount of light as the gray.

“It’s such an alien concept for us, as very visually driven animals, to conceive of how an animal might see its habitat without eyes, but now we know of two examples,” Sumner-Rooney added.

Reporting by Will Dunham; Editing by Sandra Maler

Oldest stuff on Earth found inside meteorite that hit Australia

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A meteorite that crashed into rural southeastern Australia in a fireball in 1969 contained the oldest material ever found on Earth, stardust that predated the formation of our solar system by billions of years, scientists said on Monday.

A scanning electron micrograph of a presolar silicon carbide grain, about 8 micrometers in its longest dimension, from a meteorite that crashed into Australia in 1969 is seen in this image released in Chicago, Illinois, U.S. January 13, 2020. Janaina N. Avila/Handout via REUTERS
The oldest of 40 tiny dust grains trapped inside the meteorite fragments retrieved around the town of Murchison in Victoria state dated from about 7 billion years ago, about 2.5 billion years before the sun, Earth and rest of our solar system formed, the researchers said.

In fact, all of the dust specks analyzed in the research came from before the solar system’s formation - thus known as “presolar grains” - with 60% of them between 4.6 and 4.9 billion years old and the oldest 10% dating to more than 5.6 billion years ago.

The stardust represented time capsules dating to before the solar system. The age distribution of the dust - many of the grains were concentrated at particular time intervals - provided clues about the rate of star formation in the Milky Way galaxy, the researchers said, hinting at bursts of stellar births rather than a constant rate.

“I find this extremely exciting,” said Philipp Heck, an associate curator at the Field Museum in Chicago who led the research published in the scientific journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“Despite having worked on the Murchison meteorite and presolar grains for almost 20 years, I still am fascinated that we can study the history of our galaxy with a rock,” Heck added.

The grains are small, measuring from 2 to 30 micrometers in size. A micrometer is a one-thousandth of a millimeter or about 0.000039 of an inch.

Stardust forms in the material ejected from stars and carried by stellar winds, getting blown into interstellar space. During the solar system’s birth, this dust was incorporated into everything that formed including the planets and the sun but survived intact until now only in asteroids and comets.

The researchers detected the tiny grains inside the meteorite by crushing fragments of the rock and then segregating the component parts in a paste they described as smelling like rotten peanut butter.

Scientists have developed a method to determine stardust’s age. Dust grains floating through space get bombarded by high-energy particles called cosmic rays. These rays break down atoms in the grain into fragments, such as carbon into helium.

These fragments accumulate over time and their production rate is rather constant. The longer the exposure time to cosmic rays, the more fragments accumulate. The researchers counted these fragments in the laboratory, enabling them to calculate the stardust’s age.

Scientists previously had found a presolar grain in the Murchison meteorite that was about 5.5 billion years old, until now the oldest-known solid material on Earth. The oldest-known minerals that formed on Earth are found in rock from Australia’s Jack Hills that formed 4.4 billion years ago, 100 million years after the planet formed.

Reporting by Will Dunham; Editing by Sandra Maler

Brain freeze: Russian firm offers path to immortality for a fee

Dmitriy Turlyun

SERGIYEV POSAD, Russia (Reuters) - When Alexei Voronenkov’s 70-year-old mother passed away, he paid to have her brain frozen and stored in the hope breakthroughs in science will one day be able to bring her back to life.
It is one of 71 brains and human cadavers - which Russian company KrioRus calls its “patients” - floating in liquid nitrogen in one of several metres-tall vats in a corrugated metal shed outside Moscow.

They are stored at -196 degrees Celsius (-320.8°F) with the aim of protecting them against deterioration, although there is currently no evidence science will be able to revive the dead.

“I did this because we were very close and I think it is the only chance for us to meet in the future,” said Voronenkov who intends to undergo the procedure, known as cryonics, when he dies.

The head of the Russian Academy of Sciences’s Pseudoscience Commission, Evgeny Alexandrov, described cryonics as “an exclusively commercial undertaking that does not have any scientific basis”, in comments to the Izvestia newspaper.

It is “a fantasy speculating on people’s hopes of resurrection from the dead and dreams of eternal life”, the newspaper quoted him as saying.

Valeriya Udalova, KrioRus’s director who got her dog frozen when it died in 2008, said it is likely that humankind will develop the technology to revive dead people in the future, but that there is no guarantee of such technology.

KrioRus says hundreds of potential clients from nearly 20 countries have signed up for its after-death service.

It costs $36,000 for a whole body and $15,000 for the brain alone for Russians, who earn average monthly salaries of $760, according to official statistics. Prices are slightly higher for non-Russians.

The company says it is the only one in Russia and the surrounding region. Set up in 2005, it has at least two competitors in the United States, where the practice dates back further.

Voronenkov said he set his hopes on science. “I hope one day it reaches a level when we can produce artificial bodies and organs to create an artificial body where my mother’s brain can be integrated.”

KrioRus’ director Udalova argues that those paying to have dying relatives’ remains preserved are showing how much they love them.

“They try to bring hope,” she said. “What can we do for our dying relatives or the ones that we love? A nice burial, a photo album,” she said. “They go further, proving their love even more.”

Reporting by Dmitriy Turlyun; Writing by Tom Balmforth; Editing by Philippa Fletcher

Deep-sea microbe sheds light on primordial evolutionary milestone

Will Dunham

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A microorganism scooped up in deep-sea mud off Japan’s coast has helped scientists unlock the mystery of one of the watershed evolutionary events for life on Earth: the transition from the simple cells that first colonized the planet to complex cellular life - fungi, plants and animals including people.

A scanning electron microscopy image of the single-celled organism Prometheoarchaeum syntrophicum strain MK-D1 showing the cell with tentacle-like branching protrusions is seen in this image released at the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC) in Yokosuka, Japan on January 15, 2020. Hiroyuki Imachi, Masaru K. Nobu and JAMSTEC/Handout via REUTERS

Researchers said on Wednesday they were able to study the biology of the microorganism, retrieved from depths of about 1.5 miles (2.5 km), after coaxing it to grow in the laboratory. They named it Prometheoarchaeum syntrophicum, referring to the Greek mythological figure Prometheus who created humankind from clay and stole fire from the gods.

Prometheoarchaeum’s spherical cell - with a diameter of roughly 500 nanometers, or one-20,000th of a centimeter - boasts long, often branching tentacle-like appendages on its outer surface.

It is part of a group called Archaea, relatively simple single-cell organisms lacking internal structures such as a nucleus. Scientists have long puzzled over the evolutionary shift from such simple bacteria-like cells to the first rudimentary fungi, plants and animals - a group called eukaryotes - perhaps 2 billion years ago.

Based on a painstaking laboratory study of Prometheoarchaeum and observations of its symbiotic - mutually beneficial - relationship with a companion bacterium, the researchers offered an explanation.

They proposed that appendages like those of Prometheoarchaeum entangled a passing bacterium, which was then engulfed and eventually evolved into an organelle - internal structure - called a mitochondrion that is the powerhouse of a cell and crucial for respiration and energy production.

The solar system including Earth formed 4.5 billion years ago. The first life on Earth, simple marine microbes, appeared roughly 4 billion years ago. The later advent of eukaryotes set in motion evolutionary paths that led to a riotous assemblage of organisms over the eons like palm trees, blue whales, T. rex, hummingbirds, clownfish, shiitake mushrooms, lobsters, daisies, woolly mammoths and Marilyn Monroe.

“How we - as eukaryotes - originated is a fundamental question related to how we - as humans - came to be,” said microbiologist Masaru Nobu of Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, one of the leaders of the study published in the journal Nature.

Prometheoarchaeum is a member of a subgroup called Asgard archaea - named for the dwelling place of the gods in Norse mythology. Other members of this subgroup were retrieved from the frigid seabed near a hydrothermal vent system called Loki’s Castle, named after a Norse mythological figure, between Greenland and Norway.

The research on Prometheoarchaeum, Nobu said, indicates that the Asgard archaea are the closest living relatives to the first eukaryotes.

The researchers used a submersible research vessel to collect mud containing Prometheoarchaeum from the Omine Ridge off Japan in 2006. They studied it in the laboratory in a years-long process and watched it slowly proliferate after incubating the samples in a vessel infused with methane gas to simulate the deep-sea marine sediment environment in which it resides.

“We were able to obtain the first complete genome of this group of archaea ---30conclusively show that these archaea possess many genes that had been thought to be only found in eukaryotes,” Nobu said.

Prometheoarchaeum was found to be reliant on its companion bacterium.

“The organism ‘eats’ amino acids through symbiosis with a partner,” Nobu said. “This is because the organism can neither fully digest amino acids by itself, gain energy if any byproducts have accumulated, nor build its own cell without external help.”

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Did asteroid that hit Australia help thaw ancient 'snowball Earth'?


Will Dunham

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Scientists have identified Earth’s oldest-known impact crater, and in doing so may have solved a mystery about how our planet emerged from one of its most dire periods.

Researchers have determined that the 45-mile-wide (70-km-wide) Yarrabubba crater in Australia formed when an asteroid struck Earth just over 2.2 billion years ago. The collision occurred at a time when the planet was believed to have been encased in ice and the impact may have driven climate warming that led to a global thaw.

“Looking at our planet from space, it would have looked very different,” said isotope geology professor Chris Kirkland of Curtin University in Australia, one of the researchers in the study published in the journal Nature Communications. “... You would see a white ball not our familiar blue marble.”

The researchers suspect the region was covered in an ice sheet up to 3 miles (5 km) thick at the time. They calculated that the violent asteroid strike may have transformed immense amounts of ice into water vapor - sending perhaps 200 billion tons of it billowing into the atmosphere. It would have served as a greenhouse gas trapping heat in the atmosphere.
The researchers are wondering whether this thaw helped shepherd Earth into a climate more favorable for the simple microbes that inhabited the planet at the time to thrive and evolve, possibly making it a pivotal event in the history of life on Earth.

The planet descended into one of its two primordial “snowball Earth” periods 2.4 billion years ago amid a rise in oxygen in an atmosphere formerly dominated by methane and carbon dioxide. The asteroid, estimated at 4-1/2 miles (7 km) wide, landed at Yarrabubba in the state of Western Australia, coinciding with the end of the deep freeze.

“During the time of the Yarrabubba impact, life was more simple but did contain organisms like stromatolites, algal mounds that are still in existence today,” said study lead author Timmons Erickson, a NASA research scientist at the Johnson Space Center’s Astromaterials Research and Exploration Science division.

“It is curious to think of an asteroid impact shifting the Earth’s atmosphere to something more clement for life than a ‘snowball’ scenario,” Erickson added.

The researchers determined the crater’s age by examining tiny crystals of the minerals monazite and zircon formed in the asteroid impact.

Earth has been hit by space rocks many times since it formed 4.5 billion years ago. For example, an asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs 66 million years ago. But the inexorable movement of Earth’s tectonic plates and surface erosion have erased most of the oldest craters. Until now, the oldest-known impact crater was one in South Africa with a diameter of more than 120 miles (200 km) that formed just over 2 billion years old.

The other “snowball Earth” period lasted from 700 million to 600 million years ago.

Reporting by Will Dunham; Editing by Sandra Maler

Chilean scientists scramble to save last of desert frogs from extinction

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https://www.reuters.com/video/?videoId=OVBY8FOFB&jwsource=cl

SANTIAGO (Reuters) - When Chilean scientists last year discovered 14 Loa water frogs struggling to survive in a nearly dry river bed in the country’s northern desert, the clock began ticking.

They believed these to be among the last of the species.

The tiny, dark-spotted amphibians, Telmatobius dankoi, had long persisted against all odds in a tiny creek in Chile’s Atacama desert, the world’s driest. But pollution and habitat destruction outside Calama, a fast-growing mining city of 180,000, has pushed the frogs to the brink, scientists say.

The frog’s tragic predicament has now unleashed a new effort in Chile to save them.

Scientists rushed the ailing frogs by plane to Santiago, where late last year they sought to recreate their habitat in Santiago’s Metropolitan Zoo.

“Our principal aim was to save them from extinction,” said Felipe Sotomayor, the zoo’s deputy director.

Zoo researchers were forced to start from scratch, first adding minerals to distilled water until they achieved a chemical composition similar to that of the Loa frog’s native habitat.

“There wasn’t a lot of research around how this animal lived in the wild and so we had to extrapolate much of the information from its relatives,” Sotomayor said.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) considers the frog to be “critically endangered,” but acknowledges more research is needed to understand their habitat and save them from extinction.

The frog’s range is restricted to just 10 sq. km (3.9 sq. mi), a tiny oasis of water and reeds amid a sprawling Chilean desert of parched sand and rock.

“The first stage was to save the lives of these animals,” said Osvaldo Cabeza, the zoo’s herpetology supervisor.

Thirteen of the frogs survived in their newly created home in Santiago. One perished.

Now, Cabeza says the scientist’s focus has shifted to encouraging the survivor’s to feed and reproduce in captivity, the frog’s last chance for survival.

“We’re lucky to have these frogs so that we can send out a warning cry for conservation,” Sotomayor says. “Clearly we’re doing something wrong and we don’t have much room for error.”

Reporting by Santiago Bureau and Reuters TV, writing by Dave Sherwood, Editing by Franklin Paul

Singapore's Shiok Meats hopes to hook diners with lab-grown shrimp

SINGAPORE (Reuters) - Shiok Meats, a Singapore-based start-up whose name means very good in local slang, aims to become the first company in the world to bring shrimp grown in a laboratory to diners’ plates.

Demand for meat substitutes is booming, as consumer concerns about health, animal welfare and the environment grow. Plant-based meat alternatives, popularized by Beyond Meat Inc and Impossible Foods, increasingly feature on supermarket shelves and restaurant menus.

But so-called clean meat, which is genuine meat grown from cells outside the animal, is still at a nascent stage.

More than two dozen firms are testing lab-grown fish, beef and chicken, hoping to break into an unproven segment of the alternative meat market, which Barclays estimates could be worth $140 billion by 2029.

Shiok grows minced meat by extracting a sample of cells from shrimp. The cells are fed with nutrients in a solution and kept at a temperature of 28 degrees Celsius (82 degrees Fahrenheit), which helps them multiply.

The stem cells become meat in four to six weeks.

One kg (2.2 lb) of lab-grown shrimp meat now costs $5,000, says Chief Executive Sandhya Sriram. That means a single ‘siu mai’ (pork and shrimp) dumpling typically eaten in a dim sum meal would cost as much as $300, using Shiok’s shrimp.

Sriram, a vegetarian, hopes to cut the cost to $50 per kg by the end of this year by signing a new low-cost deal for nutrients to grow the meat cells and expects it will fall further as the company achieves scale.

Shiok is backed by Henry Soesan

to, chief executive of Philippines’ Monde Nissin Corp, which owns British meat substitute firm Quorn. It wants to raise $5 million to fund a pilot plant in Singapore to sell to restaurants and food suppliers.

“We are looking at next year, so we might be the first ever company to launch a cell-based meat product in the world,” Sriram said. Shiok still needs approval from the city-state’s food regulator.

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Cell-based meat companies also face the challenge of consumer perception of their product.

Any alternative means of making animal protein without harming the environment are positive, but more studies are needed to understand any negative consequences of producing cellular protein, said Paul Teng, a specialist in agritechnology innovations at Nanyang Technological University.

In Singapore, some consumers said they would give lab-grown meat a shot.

“I am willing to try,” said 60-year-old Pet Loh, while she shopped for shrimp in a Singapore market. “I may not exactly dare to eat it frequently, but I don’t mind buying and trying it because the animals in the oceans are declining.”

Reporting by Aradhana Aravindan and Travis Teo in Singapore; Editing by Christian Schmollinger