New Science/AAAS Webinar
Advances in addiction research: Applying genetic biomarkers to personalize treatments
Wednesday, June 3, 2015, at 9 a.m. Pacific, 12 noon Eastern, 5 p.m. UK, 6 p.m. Central Europe
Our experts will describe how the latest genotyping techniques are being applied to addiction research and personalized therapies.
Register TODAY: webinar.sciencemag.org
Produced by the Science/AAAS Custom Publishing Office and sponsored by Affymetrix and BioProcessing Solutions powered by RUCDR and BioStorage Technologies.
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Science
Weekly News
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| A roundup of the week’s top stories in Science:
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| In Brief |
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In science news around the world, the U.S. House of Representatives releases a bipartisan draft bill recommending a $10 billion budget increase for NIH, the 11 countries building the Square Kilometre Array chose a headquarters in the United Kingdom for the giant telescope, the Pan American Health Organization declares the Americas rubella-free, a researcher targeted by animal rights activists decides to give up his work on primates, and California sets ambitious new climate goals. Also, social scientist Dan Braha describes his research on Twitter data related to the riots in Baltimore, Maryland. And scientists discover uniquely stretchable nerves in the mouths of certain baleen whales.
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| In Depth |
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Astronomy
Ilima Loomis and Adrian Cho
In Hawaii, work on what would be one of the world’s largest optical telescopes has been halted by protests by Native Hawaiian groups. They say building the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) on the slopes of Mauna Kea, on Hawaii’s Big Island, would desecrate a sacred site. But the $1.2 billion project, led by an international consortium based in Pasadena, California, has also become embroiled in a long-running dispute over Hawaiian sovereignty. “It comes down to the fact that there is an occupation of Hawaii by the United States,” says Anne Keala Kelly, an independent filmmaker in Honolulu. Native groups say state officials had no right to issue permits for the project in March and say that research groups have mismanaged the mountain’s summit, which is already home to 13 telescopes. The dispute took a new turn on 30 April, when a state board that advocates for Native Hawaiians voted to rescind its earlier endorsement of the project. But the board rejected calls to oppose construction of the telescope outright, saying it wanted to retain a more neutral position in continuing negotiations over the TMT’s fate.
Evolution
Mitch Leslie
Researchers have debated whether eukaryotes—the group of relatively complex organisms that includes fungi, plants, and animals—are descendants of archaea or merely their close relatives. Newly discovered archaea from the bottom of the North Atlantic Ocean suggest that eukaryotes evolved from archaea. A genomic analysis of one of the organisms, called Loki, reveals that it is the most eukaryotelike prokaryote so far discovered. The study suggests that the ancestor of eukaroytes might have had an actin cytoskeleton and rudimentary internal structures composed of membranes.
Biomedical Research
Dennis Normile
After several years of planning, on 1 April Japan launched its Agency for Medical Research and Development (AMED). Many hope AMED will someday become the country’s version of the United States’ National Institutes of Health. Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is counting on AMED to move drugs and medical technologies from the bench to the clinic and the market. Japan has been weak in reaping the benefits of basic biomedical discoveries partly because governmental support for the field has been split among three ministries. But AMED has a long way to go before it will have the resources and clout of its U.S. counterpart. Although charged with advancing work in fields ranging from infectious diseases to cancer and brain science to rare maladies and regenerative medicine, AMED will control just $1.2 billion, a fraction of NIH’s $30 billion budget.
Paleontology
Michael Balter
The first birds arose from dinosaur ancestors about 150 million years ago, but what happened after that has not been clear. The earliest known bird, Archaeopteryx, was probably a poor flier and an evolutionary dead end. But spectacular finds of early birds from northeastern China over the past 15 years or so have started to fill in some of the gaps. These fossils had shown that by 125 million years ago, birds had split into two main groups: one that led to modern birds and another that went extinct at the end of the Cretaceous period 66 million years ago—along with all other dinosaurs. This week, researchers from China report in Nature Communications the discovery of the earliest known relative of modern birds, a 130-million-year-old species they have named Archaeornithura meemannae. These two very well preserved fossils—including the feathers—provide important new insights into how modern birds arose, because the details of their skeletons show that they were waders like today’s plovers. This strongly suggests that modern birds evolved in an aquatic environment. Archaeornithura also appears to have been a very able flier, indicating that this key feature behind the success of the modern bird lineage arose very early. The finds push the origins of modern birds back more than just 5 million years, however, because they were already so specialized for wading that these features—including the ability to engage in skillful, wing-powered flight—must have evolved millions of years earlier.
Genomics
Elizabeth Pennisi
Scientists have known for years that the genome is riddled with sequences that control gene activity and is not just made up of genes. This extra layer of complexity has hampered searches for the genetic basis of diseases and for drugs that would target just the DNA at fault. In the past few months, however, several major research consortia have delivered what amount to users’ manuals for the genome, mapping the locations of thousands of those switches, the specific genes they control, and where in the body they are turned on or off. The latest and arguably boldest of these big biology efforts has now analyzed genetic material gleaned from more than 100 people who had died just hours before. Together with three other projects, the Genotype-Tissue Expression project provides some hope that this complexity can eventually be understood.
Food Security
Erik Stokstad
In the far south of Italy, olive trees are falling victim to the devastating bacterium Xylella fastidiosa. In spite of control efforts, the disease is spreading north, ringing alarms across Europe. In January, the European Food Safety Authority warned of yield losses and rising costs from control measures. Italy declared its first national emergency for a plant disease. Workers are clearing sick trees and host plants such as oleander. This month, they will begin spraying insecticides to control the primary vector of the disease, the spittlebug Philaenus spumarius. These insects are common across Europe and abundant in olive groves. Genetic markers suggest the pathogen arrived in ornamental coffee plants and oleander exported from Costa Rica to Europe. Last week, an E.U. advisory committee recommended that the European Commission ban imports of ornamental coffee plants from Costa Rica and Honduras.
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| Feature |
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Jon Cohen
Raymond Schinazi, an unusual academic/entrepreneur hybrid, has had his hand in the development of five lifesaving drugs that have come to market—and he’s still going. An organic chemist based at Emory University in Atlanta who has helped start several biotech companies, Schinazi has made hundreds of millions of dollars from the drugs, which treat HIV and hepatitis B and help cure hepatitis C. He specializes in nucleoside and nucleotide analogs that trip up viruses, a strategy once dismissed by many drug developers as too dangerous. His accomplishments have won high praise from his admirers, but, inevitably enough, his remarkable success brought on a tangle of lawsuits, increased scrutiny, and a few fallouts with longtime collaborators. “When you’re very successful,” he says, “people are very jealous.”
Ingfei Chen
A devastating cattle disease endemic in California’s foothill country causes pregnant heifers to lose their fetuses in the third trimester, killing an estimated 5% to 10% of the state’s annual beef calf “crop”—a loss of 45,000 to 90,000 animals. The veterinary drug industry has largely ignored it, concentrating on bigger markets. And researchers have long struggled to find a cause or a cure. But after years of sleuthing, they identified the tick-borne pathogen, which belongs to a class of soil microbes better known for their swarming, gliding behavior than for causing disease. And by stitching together funding and collaborations, the scientists have developed a promising vaccine and are now testing it in thousands of heifers.
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New Science/AAAS Webinar
Advances in addiction research: Applying genetic biomarkers to personalize treatments
Wednesday, June 3, 2015, at 9 a.m. Pacific, 12 noon Eastern, 5 p.m. UK, 6 p.m. Central Europe
Our experts will describe how the latest genotyping techniques are being applied to addiction research and personalized therapies.
Register TODAY: webinar.sciencemag.org
Produced by the Science/AAAS Custom Publishing Office and sponsored by Affymetrix and BioProcessing Solutions powered by RUCDR and BioStorage Technologies.
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Science and the future 