Since the first organisms appeared on Earth approximately 3.8 billion years ago, life on the planet has had some close calls. In the last 500 million years, Earth has undergone five mass extinctions, including the event 66 million years ago that wiped out the dinosaurs. And while most scientists agree that a giant asteroid was responsible for that extinction, there’s much less consensus on what caused an even more devastating extinction more than 185 million years earlier.
The end-Permian extinction occurred 252.2 million years ago, decimating 90 percent of marine and terrestrial species, from snails and small crustaceans to early forms of lizards and amphibians. “The Great Dying,” as it’s now known, was the most severe mass extinction in Earth’s history, and is probably the closest life has come to being completely extinguished. Possible causes include immense volcanic eruptions, rapid depletion of oxygen in the oceans, and — an unlikely option — an asteroid collision.
Method cuts testing time from a day or more to less than an hour.
by Matthew Chin
Read more: UCLA engineers develop faster method to detect bacterial contamination in coastal waters
Researchers develop novel strategy to probe 'genetic haystack'
by Mark Wheeler
In ongoing work to identify how genes interact with social environments to impact human health, UCLA researchers have discovered what they describe as a biochemical link between misery and death. In addition, they found a specific genetic variation in some individuals that seems to disconnect that link, rendering them more biologically resilient in the face of adversity.
Perhaps most important to science in the long term, Steven Cole, a member of the UCLA Cousins Center for Psychoneuroimmunology and an associate professor of medicine in the division of hematology-oncology, and his colleagues have developed a unique strategy for finding and confirming gene–environment interactions to more efficiently probe what he calls the "genetic haystack."
Read more: UCLA study finds genetic link between misery and death
Eric Kandel on how our brains manage data, and are changed by it
by Steve Bradt
“If you remember anything about this lecture, it’s because genes in your brain will be altered,” Noted neuroscientist Eric Kandel told those attending his Monday afternoon lecture at Harvard. The Columbia University professor, who shared the 2000 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine for his studies on memory then said, “If you remember this tomorrow, or the next day, a week later, you will have a different brain than when you walked into this lecture.
New Harvard research casts doubt on the old adage, “All you need to run is a pair of shoes.”
Scientists have found that people who run barefoot, or in minimal footwear, tend to avoid “heel-striking,” and instead land on the ball of the foot or the middle of the foot. In so doing, these runners use the architecture of the foot and leg and some clever Newtonian physics to avoid hurtful and potentially damaging impacts, equivalent to two to three times body weight, that shod heel-strikers repeatedly experience.
Read more: Barefoot Running Easier on Feet than Running Shoes
Scientists have long pondered the seeming contradiction that taking broad-spectrum antibiotics over a long period of time can lead to severe secondary bacterial infections. Now researchers from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine may have figured out why.
The investigators show that "good" bacteria in the gut keep the immune system primed to more effectively fight infection from invading pathogenic bacteria. Altering the intricate dynamic between resident and foreign bacteria – via antibiotics, for example – compromises an animal’s immune response, specifically, the function of white blood cells called neutrophils.
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