We Are Awake

In a new study published in  Nature , a group of scientists at Harvard have successfully stored a GIF— yes, like a moving meme — into live bacteria ( E. coli  to be specific). It's a weird idea, but scientists have actually been using the genetic wondertool known as CRISPR or "clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats" for  data storage parlor tricks  for some time. CRISPR, explained in a bit more depth  here , makes all sorts of wild things possible and people are rightfully excited about it. Those revelations are often reserved for geneticists and health researchers, but the Harvard experiment and others like it demonstrate CRISPR's utility even beyond its vast, untapped potential in the world of medicine. As a very short primer, CRISPR-associated proteins (in this instance, specifically proteins known as Cas1 and Cas2) act as a DNA version of a computer's Ctrl-X tool, allowing scientists to pinpoint specific segments of DNA, cut th...

Indian scientists have discovered Saraswati, a large supercluster of galaxies located in the direction of the constellation Pisces, and at a distance of 4,000 million light years away from Earth. A team of astronomers from the Inter-University Centre for Astronomy and Astrophysics (IUCAA) and Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER), Pune, and members of two other Indian universities, have discovered this supercluster of galaxies.  Supercluster is a chain of galaxies and galaxy clusters, bound by gravity, often stretching to several hundred times the size of clusters of galaxies, consisting of tens of thousands of galaxies. This newly-discovered Saraswati supercluster, extends over a scale of 600 million light years and may contain the mass  equivalent of over 20 million billion suns. The discovery will be published in the latest issue of The Astrophysical Journal, the premier research journal of the American Astronomical Society....

Disliking people who are different is a learned behaviour, according to a new University of British Columbia study. The finding builds on previous research that showed even toddlers as young as three years old have negative associations with people different than them and prefer people of their own language, racial, and cultural groups. But UBC developmental psychology researcher Anthea Pun found one year olds in her study showed no expectations, good or bad, toward people who are different than them. “Cleary, they are not born with this bias to expect bad things from certain people,” she said. She measured 456 babies’ expectations by recording their attention spans over several repetitions of a puppet show – the longer they kept watching, the more surprised they were. Researchers found babies expected puppets that spoke their language – in this case, English – to act kind and were surprised when the puppets were mean. In contrast, babies showed no difference in atten...

China  is fast catching up as a global economic forum, while the public perception around the world, including India, is that the US still remains at the top, according to a new survey in 38 countries.  The survey shows "in seven of the 10  European Union  nations, China is considered the leading economic power (it is tied with the US for top spot in Italy)."  However, India continues to believe US is the world's leading economy. In fact, 41% of Indians have an unfavourable view of China, and just 26% have a more positive image of it.  India is joined by Japan, parts of Asia and  Latin America  in rooting for the Americans even as most of Russia believes China is the economic leader. Interestingly, "China leads the US by a two-to-one margin in Australia - a longtime US ally, but also a country whose top trading partner is China."  A median of 42 per cent say the US is the world's leading economy, while 32 per cent name China,...

A TRILLION-ton iceberg which has broken free from Antarctica will do nothing to raise the world’s sea levels. But it has changed the face of the southern continent forever. “The iceberg weighs more than a trillion tonnes, but it was already floating before it calved away so has no immediate impact on sea level,” a Swansea University research team said. It will likely be named A68. The massive ice cube is twice the size of the Australian Capital Territory, four times the size of London and twice the size of Luxembourg. It is about 350 metres thick. The iceberg is more than one and a half times the size of Adelaide (3258 square kilometres), a third of the size of Brisbane (15,826 square kilometres) and more than half the size of Melbourne (9990 square kilometres). The 5800 sq km block of ice is not the largest to have ‘calved’ from Antarctica: an 11,000sq km ‘berg’ was seen to break loose from the Ross Ice Shelf in 2000. The new berg itself is destined to crumble i...

KASHGAR: Worshippers quietly passed through metal detectors as they entered the central mosque in China's far western city of Kashgar under the stern gaze of stone-faced police officers. The increasingly strict curbs imposed on the mostly  Muslim Uighur population have stifled life in the tense  Xinjiang  region, where beards are partially banned and no one is allowed to pray in public. For years, the square outside the mosque in Kashgar was packed with teeming crowds as worshippers jostled for space to unroll their prayer rugs and celebrate the end of Ramzan. But no longer. This year, an eerie silence hung over the plaza outside the imposing prayer hall as devotees gathered to mark the end of a month of fasting -- the lowest turnout in a generation according to residents. Authorities declined to comment on the numbers. But local businessmen said the government had used the multiple checkpoints encircling the city to prevent travellers to Kashgar from join...

A 21-year-old man has become the first in Britain to give birth after he put his sex transition on hold to get pregnant by a sperm donor. Hayden Cross, who made headlines around the world earlier this year when he announced he was pregnant by a sperm donor, has given birth to a girl. Cross told The Sun that daughter Trinity-Leigh is his "angel". Cross gave birth by caesarean. The girl was born on June 16 at Gloucestershire Royal Hospital. He had been living legally as a man for three years and was already part-way through hormone treatment to transform from a woman to a man. But the full transition was paused after the UK's state- funded National Health Service (NHS) refused to carry out a 4,000-pounds process to freeze his eggs – which he hoped would enable him to have children in the future. The former supermarket worker instead found a sperm donor via Facebook and became successfully pregnant. "She's perfect in every way...she is so goo...

Many scientists say it's abundantly clear that Earth is entering its sixth mass-extinction event, meaning three-quarters of all species could disappear in the coming centuries. That's terrifying, especially since humans are contributing to this shift. But that's not even the full picture of the "biological annihilation" people are inflicting on the natural world, according to  a study published Monday  in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Gerardo Ceballos, an ecology professor at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, and his co-authors, including well-known Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich, cite striking new evidence that populations of species we thought were common are suffering in unseen ways. "What is at stake is really the state of humanity," Ceballos told CNN. Their key findings: Nearly one-third of the 27,600 land-based mammal, bird, amphibian and reptile species studied are shrinking in terms o...