Over 170 million U.S.-born people who were adults in 2015 were exposed to harmful levels of lead as children, a new study estimates. The Associated Press reports: Researchers used blood-lead level, census and leaded gasoline consumption data to examine how widespread early childhood lead exposure was in the country between 1940 and 2015. In a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on Monday, they estimated that half the U.S. adult population in 2015 had been exposed to lead levels surpassing five micrograms per deciliter -- the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention threshold for harmful lead exposure at the time.

The scientists from Florida State University and Duke University also found that 90% of children born in the U.S. between 1950 and 1981 had blood-lead levels higher than the CDC threshold. And the researchers found significant impact on cognitive development: on average, early childhood exposure to lead resulted in a 2.6-point drop in IQ. The researchers only examined lead exposure caused by leaded gasoline, the dominant form of exposure from the 1940s to the late 1980s, according to data from the U.S. Geological Survey. Leaded gasoline for on-road vehicles was phased out starting in the 1970s, then finally banned in 1996.

During at least the first few months following a coronavirus infection, even mild cases of Covid-19 are associated with subtle tissue damage and accelerated losses in brain regions tied to the sense of smell, as well as a small loss in the brain's overall volume, a new British study finds. Having mild Covid is also associated with a cognitive function deficit. NBC: These are the striking findings of the new study led by University of Oxford investigators, one that leading Covid researchers consider particularly important because it is the first study of the disease's potential impact on the brain that is based on brain scans taken both before and after participants contracted the coronavirus. "This study design overcomes some of the major limitations of most brain-related studies of Covid-19 to date, which rely on analysis and interpretation at a single time point in people who had Covid-19," said Dr. Serena S. Spudich, a neurologist at the Yale University School of Medicine, who was not involved in the research.

The research, which was published Monday in Nature, also stands out because the lion's share of its participants apparently had mild Covid -- by far, the most common outcome of coronavirus infections. Most of the brain-related studies in this field have focused on those with moderate to severe Covid. Gwenaelle Douaud, an associate professor at the Nuffield Department of Clinical Neurosciences at Oxford and the paper's lead author, said that the excess loss of brain volume she and her colleagues observed in brain scans of hundreds of British individuals is equivalent to at least one extra year of normal aging. "It is brain damage, but it is possible that it is reversible," she said. "But it is still relatively scary because it was in mildly infected people."

"Every day, several petabytes of data are generated on the internet," says Kasra Tabatabaei, a researcher at the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology. "Only one gram of DNA would be sufficient to store that data."

So the Institute is now announcing the results of a project Tabatabaei worked on "to transform the double helix into a robust, sustainable data storage platform." CNET reports: Tabatabaei is the co-author of a new study, published in last month's edition of the journal Nano Letters... Essentially, the study team is the first to artificially extend the DNA alphabet, which could allow for massive storage capacities and accommodate a pretty extreme level of digital data.... DNA encodes genetic information with four molecules called nucleotides. There's adenine, guanine, cytosine and thymine, or A, G, C and T. In a sense, DNA has a four-letter alphabet, and different letter combinations represent different bits of data....

But what if we had a longer alphabet? Presumably, that'd give us a much deeper capacity. Following this line of thought, the team behind the new study artificially added seven new letters to the DNA repertoire.... "Instead of converting zeroes and ones to A, G, C and T, we can convert zeroes and ones to A, G, C, T and the seven new letters in the storage alphabet."
One of the study's co-principal investigators said their work "provides an exciting proof-of-principle demonstration of extending macromolecular data storage to non-natural chemistries, which hold the potential to drastically increase storage density in non-traditional storage media."

Two new studies involving tens of thousands of British men and women "found that, most of the time, people who ran and rode vigorously had larger brain volumes and lower risks for dementia than their less active peers," reports the New York Times. (Alternate URL here.)

"But if people exercised in areas with even moderate levels of air pollution, the expected brain improvements from exercise almost disappeared...." [F]or the first of the new studies, published in January in Neurology, researchers at the University of Arizona and University of Southern California pulled records for 8,600 middle-aged adults enrolled in the UK Biobank. A huge trove of health and lifestyle records, the Biobank holds information on about more than 500,000 British adults, such as their ages, home locations, socioeconomic status, genomes and extensive health data. Some of the participants also completed brain scans and wore activity monitors for a week to track their exercise habits.

The researchers focused on those who had worn a monitor, had a brain scan and, according to their trackers, often exercised vigorously, such as by running, which meant they breathed heavily during workouts. The heavier you breathe, the more air pollutants you draw in. The researchers also included some people who never worked out vigorously, for comparison. Using established air quality models, they then estimated air pollution levels where the people lived and, finally, compared everyone's brain scans.

As expected, vigorous exercise was linked, in general, to sturdy brain health. Men and women who lived and presumably worked out in areas with little air pollution showed relatively large amounts of gray matter and low incidence of white matter lesions, compared to people who never exercised hard. And the more they exercised, the better their brains tended to look. But any beneficial associations almost disappeared when exercisers lived in areas with even moderate air pollution. (Levels in this study were mostly within the bounds considered acceptable for health by European and American air quality standards.) Their gray matter volume was smaller and white matter lesions more numerous than among people living and exercising away from pollution, even if their workouts were similar.

Extending these findings in a second, follow-up study published this month in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, the same scientists repeated aspects of this experiment with another 35,562 older UK Biobank participants, comparing people's exercise habits, local pollution levels and diagnoses of dementia, if any. The data showed the more people exercised, the less likely they were to develop dementia over time — provided their local air was clear. When it was moderately polluted, though, they had an increased long-term risk of dementia, whether they exercised or not.
The Times also got this assessment of the studies from pollution researcher Pamela Lein, a professor of neurotoxicity at the University of California, Davis.

"The observation that air pollution negates the well-established beneficial effects of exercise on brain health is alarming and increases the urgency for developing more-effective regulatory policies" related to air quality.

"In a galaxy far, far away, two giant black holes appear to be circling each other like fighters in a galactic boxing ring," reports USA Today.

"Gravity is causing this death spiral, which will result in a collision and formation of a single black hole, a massive event that will send ripples through space and time." The collision itself happened eons ago — the two black holes are located about 9 billion light years from Earth. Scientists won't be able to document it for 10,000 years. Even so, there are imperceptible gravitational waves generated before the collision that are hitting us right now. These waves from the black holes' activity will increase, but will not affect Earth. However, they could help increase our understanding of how our universe has evolved.

Such supermassive black holes "are the most powerful and energetic objects in the universe and they have an enormous effect on the evolution of galaxies and stars," Tony Readhead, an astronomy professor at the California Institute of Technology, told USA TODAY. He is the co-author of the report by Caltech astronomers who detail the discovery in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, a peer-reviewed scientific journal. "If we want to understand the evolution of our universe we need to understand these objects," Readhead said....

Each of the black holes identified in this study has a mass amounting to hundreds of millions of times more than that of our sun, the researchers say. It took about 100 million years for the two objects to converge on their orbit, which has them at a distance of about 50 times that separating our sun and Pluto, NASA said. The two black holes are more than 99% of the way toward colliding, the agency said....

This is only the second pair of orbiting black holes identified by scientists, the researchers say. Space-time undulations from gravitational waves made by two colliding black holes 1.3 billion light-years away were recorded in 2015 by the National Science Foundation's Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: Just one pint of beer or average glass of wine a day may begin to shrink the overall volume of the brain, a new study has found, and the damage worsens as the number of daily drinks rises. On average, people at age 50 who drank a pint of beer or 6-ounce glass of wine (two alcohol units) a day in the last month had brains that appeared two years older than those who only drank a half of a beer (one unit), according to the study, which published Friday in the journal Nature. The brains of people that age who said they drank three alcohol units a day had reductions in both white and gray matter that looked as if they had added 3.5 years to the ages of their brains.

One alcohol unit is 10 milligrams or 8 grams of pure alcohol. That means 25 milligrams or a single shot of liquor is one unit; a 16-ounce can of beer or cider is two units; and a standard 6-ounce glass of wine (175 milligrams) is two units. The brains of nondrinkers who began consuming an average of one alcohol unit a day showed the equivalent of a half a year of aging, according to the study. In comparison, drinking four alcohol units a day aged a person's brain by more than 10 years. "The report analyzed data from more than 36,000 people who took part in the UK Biobank study, which houses in-depth genetic and health information on more than 500,000 middle-aged adults living in the United Kingdom," report CNN.

"People in the study had provided information on the number of drinks they had each week in the previous year and had undergone an MRI brain scan. Researchers compared their scans with images of typical aging brains and then controlled for such variables as age, sex, smoking status, socioeconomic status, genetic ancestry and overall head size."

Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin have identified a previously unknown structure of the protein that's responsible for making edits to the wrong sections of DNA. After some tweaking, they were able to reduce the likelihood of off-target mutations by 4,000 times. New Atlas reports: CRISPR tools use certain proteins, most often Cas9, to make precise edits to specific DNA sequences in living cells. This can involve cutting out problematic genes, such as those that cause disease, and/or slotting in beneficial ones. The problem is that sometimes the tool can make changes to the wrong parts, potentially triggering a range of other health issues. And in the new study, the UT researchers discovered how some of these errors can happen. Usually, the Cas9 protein is hunting for a specific sequence of 20 letters in the DNA code, but if it finds one where 18 out of 20 match its target, it might make its edit anyway. To find out why this occurs, the team used cryo-electron microscopy to observe what Cas9 is doing when it interacts with a mismatched sequence.

To their surprise, they discovered a strange finger-like structure that had never been observed before. This finger reached out and stabilized the DNA sequence so the protein could still make its edit. Having uncovered this mechanism, the team tweaked this finger so that it no longer stabilized the DNA, instead pushing away from it. That prevents Cas9 from editing that sequence, making the tool 4,000 times less likely to produce off-target mutations. The team calls the new protein SuperFi-Cas9. The research was published in the journal Nature.

After years of zooming through deep space, a presumed leftover piece of a Chinese rocket slammed into the Moon today, just as space tracking experts expected it would. From a report: At least, it should have hit the Moon around 7:30AM ET this morning, as long as the law of gravity has not changed. The collision brings an end to the rocket's life in space and likely leaves a fresh new crater on the Moon that may be up to 65 feet wide. The now-expired rocket has caused quite a buzz this past month. First of all, the vehicle was never intended to crash into the Moon, making it a rare piece of space debris to find its way to the lunar surface by accident. Additionally, there was some confusion over its identity, with various groups trying to nail down exactly where the rocket came from.

Originally, space trackers thought it was a leftover piece of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket that had launched a weather satellite back in 2015. But after careful analysis, various groups of space trackers confirmed that the rocket was likely leftover from the launch of China's Chang'e 5-T1 mission -- a flight that launched in 2014 to test out technology needed to bring samples back from the Moon. That mission, launched on a Chinese Long March 3C rocket, sent a spacecraft looping around the Moon in an attempt to see if China could send a vehicle to the Moon and then bring it back to Earth. Given the flight profile of the Chang'e 5-T1 mission and the tracking of the mystery object, astronomers are fairly certain that a chunk of the Long March 3C rocket has remained in an extremely elongated orbit around Earth ever since, only to find its way to the far side of the Moon.

President Biden's surgeon general formally requested that the major tech platforms submit information about the scale of Covid-19 misinformation on social networks, search engines, crowdsourced platforms, e-commerce platforms and instant messaging systems. From a report: A request for information from the surgeon general's office demanded that tech platforms send data and analysis on the prevalence of Covid-19 misinformation on their sites, starting with common examples of vaccine misinformation documented by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The notice asks the companies to submit "exactly how many users saw or may have been exposed to instances of Covid-19 misinformation," as well as aggregate data on demographics that may have been disproportionately exposed to or affected by the misinformation. The surgeon general, Dr. Vivek Murthy, also demanded information from the platforms about the major sources of Covid-19 misinformation, including those that engaged in the sale of unproven Covid-19 products, services and treatments.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: This week, the US Air Force Research Laboratory released a video on YouTube that didn't get much attention. But it made an announcement that is fairly significant -- the US military plans to extend its space awareness capabilities beyond geostationary orbit, all the way to the Moon. "Until now, the United States space mission extended 22,000 miles above Earth," a narrator says in the video. "That was then, this is now. The Air Force Research Laboratory is extending that range by 10 times and the operations area of the United States by 1,000 times, taking our reach to the far side of the Moon into cislunar space."

The US military had previously talked about extending its operational domain, but now it is taking action. It plans to launch a satellite, likely equipped with a powerful telescope, into cislunar space. According to the video, the satellite will be called the Cislunar Highway Patrol System or, you guessed it, CHPS. The research laboratory plans to issue a "request for prototype proposals" for the CHPS satellite on March 21 and announce the contract award in July. The CHPS program will be managed by Michael Lopez, from the lab's Space Vehicles Directorate. (Alas, we were rooting for Erik Estrada).

This effort will include the participation of several military organizations, and it can be a little confusing to keep track of. Essentially, though, the Air Force lab will oversee the development of the satellite. The US Space Force will then procure this capability for use by the US Space Command, which is responsible for military operations in outer space. Effectively, this satellite is the beginning of an extension of operations by US Space Command from geostationary space to beyond the Moon. [...] So why is US Space Command interested in expanding its theater of operations to include the Moon? The primary reason cited in the video is managing increasing space traffic in the lunar environment, including several NASA-sponsored commercial missions, the space agency's Artemis program, and those of other nations. Another strategic element includes the ability to detect space objects, such as those placed into cislunar space by other governments, that could swing around the Moon and potentially come back to attack a U.S. military satellite in geostationary space.

"I think that's far fetched, but it is feasible from a physics perspective and would definitely exploit a gap in their current space domain awareness," said Brian Weeden, director of program planning for the Secure World Foundation. "I think they are far more concerned about that than any actual threats in cislunar space because the US doesn't have any military assets in cislunar space right now."

SpaceX launched 47 satellites and landed the returning rocket on Thursday morning (March 3). Space.com reports: A two-stage Falcon 9 rocket carrying 47 Starlink internet satellites launched from Kennedy Space Center in Florida Thursday at 9:35 a.m. EST (1435 GMT). About nine minutes later, the Falcon 9's upper stage came back to Earth for a vertical landing on the SpaceX droneship Just Read the Instructions, which was stationed in the Atlantic Ocean a few hundred miles off the Florida coast. The successful landing was the 11th for the booster, tying a SpaceX rocket reuse record. [...] Thursday's launch was the sixth Starlink mission of the year already for SpaceX. You can watch the Falcon 9 launch via NASASpaceflight on YouTube.

Russia has decided to stop supplying rocket engines to the United States in retaliation for its sanctions against Russia over Ukraine. Reuters reports: "In a situation like this we can't supply the United States with our world's best rocket engines. Let them fly on something else, their broomsticks, I don't know what," [Dmitry Rogozin, head of the state space agency Roscosmos, said on state Russian television]. According to Rogozin, Russia has delivered a total of 122 RD-180 engines to the U.S. since 1990s, of which 98 have been used to power Atlas launch vehicles. Roscosmos will also stop servicing rocket engines it had previously delivered to the U.S., Rogozin said, adding that the U.S. still had 24 engines that would now be left without Russian technical assistance.

Russia has earlier said it was suspending cooperation with Europe on space launches from the Kourou spaceport in French Guiana in response to Western sanctions over Ukraine. Moscow has also demanded guarantees from British satellite company OneWeb that its satellites would not be used for military purposes. OneWeb, in which the British government has a stake, said on Thursday it was suspending all launches from Russia's Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. Rogozin said Russia would now focus on creating dual-purpose spacecraft in line with the needs of Roscosmos and the Defence Ministry.

Researchers have a new view of HR 6819: two stars, one of them a "vampire." From a report: Astronomers who thought they had discovered a black hole on our cosmic doorstep have said they were mistaken, instead revealing they have found a two-star system involving a stellar "vampire." The system, known as HR 6819 in the constellation Telescopium, was in the headlines in 2020 when researchers announced it contained a black hole. At just 1,000 light years from Earth, it was the closest yet found to our planet. At the time the team behind the work said the presence of a black hole was necessary to make sense of the movement of two stars in the system, suggesting a black hole and one star orbited each other while the second star moved in a wider orbit. Now the researchers say they were mistaken: the black hole does not exist.

Dietrich Baade, an emeritus astronomer at European Southern Observatory (ESO) and a co-author of the work, said just one blob of light was previously detected, containing the hallmarks of two stars. Since both stars are of similar brightness and the same age, they would normally have the same mass and would whirl each other around with similar, high velocity. "Since we saw that only one of the stars was whirled around at high velocity by some massive object, which we didn't see, we assumed this unseen massive object to be a third body, namely a black hole," he said.

sciencehabit shares a report from Science.org: Physicists in Australia have programmed a quantum computer half a world away to make, or at least simulate, a record-size time crystal -- a system of quantum particles that locks into a perpetual cycle in time, somewhat akin to the repeating spatial pattern of atoms in an actual crystal. The new time crystal comprises 57 quantum particles, more than twice the size of a 20-particle time crystal simulated last year by scientists at Google. That's so big that no conventional computer could simulate it, says Chetan Nayak, a condensed matter physicist at Microsoft, who was not involved in the work. "So that's definitely an important advance." The work shows the power of quantum computers to simulate complex systems that may otherwise exist only in physicists' theories.

[Philipp Frey and Stephan Rachel, theorists at the University of Melbourne] performed the simulation remotely, using quantum computers built and run by IBM in the United States. The qubits, which can be set to 0, 1, or 1 and 0 at once, can be programmed to interact like magnets. For certain settings of their interactions, the researchers found, any initial setting of the 57 qubits, such as 01101101110 ..., remains stable, returning to its original state every two pulses, the researchers report today in Science Advances. [...] Whereas more than 100 researchers worked on the Google simulation, Frey and Rachel worked alone to perform their larger demonstration, submitting it to the IBM computers over the internet. "It was just me, my graduate student, and a laptop," Rachel says, adding that "Philipp is brilliant!" The entire project took about 6 months, he estimates. The demonstration isn't perfect, Rachel says. The flipping pattern ought to last indefinitely, he says, but the qubits in IBM's machines can only hold their states long enough to simulate about 50 cycles. Ultimately, the stabilizing effect of the interactions might be used to store the state of a string of qubits in a kind of memory for a quantum computer, he notes, but realizing such an advance will take -- what else? -- time.

As Ukrainian researchers have feared for their lives and careers after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, mathematicians have been grappling over what to do about a prominent mathematical conference that was set to be held in Saint Petersburg, Russia, in July. From a report: The International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) is "the largest and most significant conference on pure and applied mathematics as well as one of the world's oldest scientific congresses," according to the Web site of the 2022 conference. The meeting, which is run by the Germany-based International Mathematical Union (IMU), is held only once every four years. When the nine-day 2018 ICM was held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, it drew 10,506 attendees.

On Saturday conference organizers announced the event would be fully virtual and hosted outside of Russia this year. The executive committee of the meeting released a statement saying, "We strongly condemn the actions by Russia. Our deepest sympathy goes to our Ukrainian colleagues and the Ukrainian people. Given this situation, it is impossible for the IMU to host the ICM and the GA [general assembly] as traditional in-person events in Russia." The Fields Medal -- one of the most prestigious honors in mathematics -- is traditionally awarded at the event. According to the recent decision, this year's prize ceremony and general assembly will be held in person but at an undecided location outside of Russia.

Most people know someone who has stubbornly resisted catching Covid, despite everyone around them falling sick. Precisely how they do this remains a mystery, but scientists are beginning to find some clues. From a report: The hope is that identifying these mechanisms could lead to the development of drugs that not only protect people from catching Covid, but also prevent them from passing it on. Phoebe Garrett is not the only challenge trial participant to have avoided becoming infected. Of the 34 who were exposed to the virus, 16 failed to develop an infection (defined as two consecutive positive PCR tests) -- although around half of them transiently tested positive for low levels of the virus, often several days after exposure.

Possibly, this was a reflection of the immune system rapidly shutting down an embryonic infection. "In our previous studies with other viruses, we have seen early immune responses in the nose that are associated with resisting infection," said Prof Christopher Chiu at Imperial College London, who led the study. "Together, these findings imply that there is a struggle between the virus and host, which in our 'uninfected' participants results in prevention of infection taking off." Some of them also reported some mild symptoms, such as a stuffy nose, sore throat, tiredness, or headache -- although, since these commonly occur in everyday life, they may have been unrelated to virus exposure.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times, written by Wudan Yan: Kristin Aquilino, a scientist at the University of California, Davis, knows that expectations are just disappointments in disguise. Over the last decade, she has led the school's white abalone captive breeding program, which aims to bring the marine mollusk back from the brink of extinction. Last June, she and her colleagues drove snails kept in captivity at Davis down the California coast to Cabrillo Marine Aquarium in Los Angeles. Others were dropped off at labs and aquariums around Southern California; all told, this was the largest spawning attempt of white abalone to date. But when she tried to get them in the mood with what she calls a love potion -- a mix of seawater with hydrogen peroxide -- the snails languished in their tanks occasionally emitting bubbles, but no eggs or sperm. After four hours, Dr. Aquilino called it off. (Simultaneous attempts at the other sites also failed.) "It sucks," she said. "There's a lot of human effort involved, but there's no way they'll spawn today."

After fishermen depleted 99 percent of white abalone from the wild in the 1970s, the sea snails are hanging on by a slimy thread. Despite the urgency of breeding these and other endangered aquatic snails to reintroduce to the wild, propagating more of them in a lab is still a guessing game, Dr. Aquilino says. Now, a study published Thursday in the journal Frontiers in Marine Science offers an improved tool for determining which abalone will be reproductive. The technique, using noninvasive ultrasound, a decades-old medical technology, could raise the prospects of successful captive breeding efforts and ultimately help restore endangered abalone in the wild. [...] For Dr. Aquilino, the method offers a glimmer of hope. "When I first saw the ultrasound images of my kids, I saw the future of my family," she said. "When I see the ultrasound images of these abalone, I see the future of an entire species." [...]

Sara Boles, a postdoctoral researcher working with Dr. Gross, discovered a way to perform ultrasounds on the abalone without taking them out of their tanks by holding the device up to their sticky feet. This quickly produced clear images of their swollen or flaccid gonads on a laptop appended to the ultrasound probe. In the new study, Dr. Boles and her colleagues examined over 200 abalone and scored the thickness of their gonads on a scale of 1 to 5 to determine which are likely to spawn. With the ultrasound images, the gonad comes into focus: The stomach appears as a dark, cone-shaped item, and the slightly lighter gonad surrounds it. For now, these images can provide an easy way to score animals, but Dr. Gross and his colleagues want to verify if gonad thickness also correlates with reproductive success. Already, Dr. Boles has used the ultrasound to help Dr. Aquilino in her white abalone breeding efforts. Last spring, after Dr. Aquilino had already visually scored the animals, Dr. Boles brought the ultrasound to her lab. Of the eight white abalone that Dr. Boles rated highest after the ultrasound exam, five spawned; some snails with slightly lower ratings did, too. The method is already helping researchers revise their methods of assessing which abalone are most ready to reproduce.

By combining CRISPR technology with a protein designed with artificial intelligence, it is possible to awaken individual dormant genes by disabling the chemical "off switches" that silence them. Researchers from the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle describe this finding in the journal Cell Reports. Phys.Org reports: The new technique controls gene activity without altering the DNA sequence of the genome by targeting chemical modifications that help package genes in our chromosomes and regulate their activity. Because these modifications occur not in, but on top of genes, they are called epigenetic, from the Greek epi "over" or "above" the genes. The chemical modifications that regulate gene activity are called epigenetic markers. Scientists are particularly interested in epigenetic modifications because not only do they affect gene activity in normal cell function, epigenetic markers accumulate with time, contribute to aging, and can affect of the health of future generations as we can pass them on to our children.
[...]
In the new paper, [the researchers] show that by using this technique, they were able to block PRC2 and selectively turn on four different genes. They were also able to show they could transdifferentiate induced pluripotent stem cells to placental progenitor cells by simply turning on two genes. Finally, the researchers were able to show how the technique can be used to find the location of specific PRC2-controlled regulatory regions from where individual genes are activated. The location of many of these are unknown. In this case, they identified a promoter region -- called a TATA box -- for a gene called TBX18. Although current thinking is that these promotor regions are close to the gene, within in 30 DNA base pairs, they found for this gene the promoter region was more than 500 base pairs away.

Low-tech approach can quintuple yield and slash need for soil pesticide. An anonymous reader shares a report: Potato cyst nematodes are a clever pest. These microscopic worms wriggle through the soil, homing in the roots of young potato plants and cutting harvests by up to 70%. They are challenging to get rid of, too: The eggs are protected inside the mother's body, which toughens after death into a cyst that can survive in the soil for years. Now, researchers have shown a simple pouch made of paper created from banana tree fibers disrupts the hatching of cyst nematodes and prevents them from finding the potato roots. The new technique has boosted yields fivefold in trials with small-scale farmers in Kenya, where the pest has recently invaded, and could dramatically reduce the need for pesticides. The strategy may benefit other crops as well.

"It's an important piece of work," says Graham Thiele, a research director at the International Potato Center who was not involved with the study. But, "There's still quite a lot of work to take it from a nice finding to a real-life solution for farmers in East Africa," he cautions. Soil nematodes are a problem for many kinds of crops. For potatoes, the golden cyst nematode (Globodera rostochiensis) is a worldwide threat. Plants with infected, damaged roots have yellowish, wilting leaves. Their potatoes are smaller and often covered with lesions, so they can't be sold. In temperate countries, worms can be controlled by alternating potatoes with other crops, spraying the soil with pesticides, and planting varieties bred to resist infection. These approaches aren't yet feasible in many developing countries, in part because pesticides are expensive and resistant varieties of potatoes aren't available for tropical climates. In addition, small-scale farmers, who can make decent money selling potatoes, are often reluctant to rotate their planting with less valuable crops.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NewAtlas: A new kind of milk will soon hit US shelves but it isn't some plant-based product designed to resemble dairy milk. Instead it is made from whey proteins produced by microflora engineered to spit out exactly the same proteins found in milk from a cow. The unique cow-free milk is the first product from Betterland foods, a new company looking to create novel and sustainable food products. Betterland is working on the cow-free milk with Perfect Day, a company formed in 2014 by two vegans looking to find a way to produce tastier animal-free dairy products.

Perfect Day's big innovation was identifying whey protein as the key element in dairy products that could only be produced by an animal. Every other element could be found elsewhere. So Perfect Day scientists engineered a type of fungus to produce cow whey proteins through a process called precision fermentation. Creating a cow-free whey protein is only the first step in the journey to getting novel animal-free dairy products to supermarket shelves. A series of ice creams using the whey proteins were the first products using Perfect Day's proteins to reach commercial shelves, but according to Ryan Pandya, co-founder of Perfect Day, a cow-free dairy milk was always the main goal. "The two new products are a whole milk and an extra creamy milk," adds the report. "The milk contains eight grams of protein and has 67 percent less sugar than conventional cow milk. It is also lactose and cholesterol free."

While the cow-free milk "will likely still trigger allergic responses" for individuals allergic to dairy, the company argues this new type of milk may be vegan friendly because their whey protein technically isn't an animal product.