Managing Mars: Who Has a Right To It’s Resources?
By Spandan DashBMSIS Young Scientist Program Humans have long been fascinated by the huge Cosmos above us. Perhaps this fascination has been best put to words by Carl Sagan in his influential book, Cosmos: “The Cosmos is all that is or was or ever will be. Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us — there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation, as if a distant memory, of falling from a height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries.” It is no wonder that contemplating our existence in relation to the Cosmos has continued ever since the first human stared up in amazement and curiosity of what might lie high above. Unsurprisingly, we have even tried to reach the planets and stars to search for life beyond our home. As we learn more about our world and its inhabitants, we’ve…
Can You Teach an Old Gene New Tricks?
By Grishma GuptaBMSIS Young Scientist Program Evolution explains how living things change over successive generations, giving rise to diversity. Across the evolutionary history of Earth, the formation, changes, and extinction of species have been observed. Even though evolution happens very slowly, we see evidence of its action in the shared traits among seemingly unrelated species at the macroscopic and the genetic level. LUCA (Last Universal Common Ancestor) is the most recent common ancestor of all life forms on Earth, and is hypothesized to have lived 3.5 to 3.8 billion years ago. LUCA is said to be a single-celled organism with ring-shaped DNA floating freely within the cell, just like a tiny modern bacteria. The phylogenetic tree shows how LUCA gave rise to two types of simple cells – bacteria and archaea. After that, generations and generations of evolution led to the variety of multicellular organisms we see today in nature.…
Copper Content of Ancient Egyptian Ink May Help Us (Literally) Piece Together Egyptian History
Modern pen and paper has an ancient ancestor – ink and papyrus. Around 5,000 years ago, ancient Egyptians invented arguably one of the most important tools of civilized life, and their technology allowed people to communicate across vast distances for the first time. They cleverly harnessed the soot produced from the manufacturing of copper-containing ores to create the black ink color. Naturally, this idea quickly spread around the world to places like ancient Greece and Rome, which changed the world forever. An ancient Egyptian library, Tebtunis Temple, hosts a few small cellars where hundreds of papyrus manuscripts from the 1st – 3rd centuries were discovered. Due to poor preservation, most manuscripts are incomplete. Libraries around the world, including Berlin, Cairo, Heidelberg, Turin, and Copenhagen, host collections and displays of these fragile papyrus fragments. It was presumed that carbon-based inks were used until the 4th or 5th centuries, after which time…
Edible Food Packaging May Cut Down on Waste
Have you ever been pre-occupied and taken a bite out of something, only to get a mouthful of plastic wrap or paper lining? Well in the future, that bite could be as edible and maybe as delicious as the food itself! The world currently uses and throws away tons of plastic every day, for example, the US alone creates more than 32 million tons of plastic waste per year. The vast majority of these plastics are neither biodegradable nor renewable. The term biodegradable means that over time, bacteria or other living organisms can break the object down into components that can be used again by other living things. Since plastics are not biodegradable, once you throw away your plastic bag or cling wrap, it will take up space in a landfill or the ocean forever, and the resources put into making that plastic will have been wasted. Modern plastics are…
Skulls of Dinosaurs Give Clues About Their Diets
The term “Darwin’s finches” was first used in 1936 to describe a group of birds from the Galápagos Islands. One of the key differences between each species of finch was the drastic difference in beak size and its effect on what the bird eats. For example, a bird with a very long beak can access seeds and nectar that a short-beaked bird cannot. It turns out that the same trends used to categorize the diets of Darwin’s finches can be applied to the fossil record as well. It is especially true in dinosaurs whose skulls reveal changes in dietary preference. . According to a recent paper, an oviraptor called Gigantoraptor shows evidence of a beak that has not only adapted to eating plant matter but has also evolved to prefer a specific type of plant-based diet. Oviraptors are an extinct group of theropod dinosaurs that were closely related to birds.…
New Knowledge on Viral Infections and Bone Fractures
A quarter of patients who are infected with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) in the United States are also infected with Hepatitis C virus (HCV). When a person is infected with more than one virus, it is called a co-infection. Co-infected individuals have greater health problems than if they were just infected with just HIV or just HCV. Previous research has shown that people infected with both HIV and HCV have an increased risk of bone fractures and poorer bone health than people who are infected with just HIV. However, scientists do not yet know why. Low bone density is a common reason why people break bones, but people with HIV and HCV co-infections don’t necessarily have lower bone density than those infected with either virus alone. So, researchers at the VA North Texas Health Care System and the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas attempted to figure out…
Transparent Brains Are Science, Not Fiction
Stanford University The innately curious nature of the human race is likely not a surprise to most of us. The saying “curiosity killed the cat” is a phrase we hear a lot. It may seem to imply that curiosity is a bad thing. However, this assumption is soon corrected upon learning the punchline of this colloquial phrase: “curiosity killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back”. Indeed, in a deeper sense, our curiosity and wonder may be the distinctive feature setting humans apart from other animals. The constant quest for “why” and “what ifs” has brought the world inventions such as airplanes, vaccines, and MRIs. In a similar vein, researchers at Stanford University asked: can we render organs, such as the brain, transparent, and how would that be accomplished? At first, this may seem a strange goal. Of all the questions to pursue, why would one aim to turn tissue…