Daily Archives: March 4, 2017

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Evolution of bipedalism in ancient dinosaur ancestors: How ... Science Daily Paleontologists have developed a new theory to explain why the ancient ancestors of dinosaurs stopped moving about on all fours and rose up on just their two ... Researchers investigate evolution of bipedalism in ancient dinosaur ancestorsHeritageDaily all 8 news articles »

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Evolution of bipedalism in ancient dinosaur ancestors: How ... - Science Daily

Off his game ... Tom Hiddleston in Kong: Skull Island. Photograph: Warner Bros

Deep in the distant jungle the undergrowth stirs, the lagoons froth, the branches shake and a huge monster rears terrifyingly up on its haunches, blotting out the sun. Run for your lives! Its a 700 ft turkey, making squawking and gobbling noises and preparing to lay a gigantic egg.

This fantastically muddled and exasperatingly dull quasi-update of the King Kong story looks like a zestless mashup of Jurassic Park, Apocalypse Now and a few exotic visual borrowings from Miss Saigon. It gets nowhere near the elemental power of the original King Kong or indeed Peter Jacksons game remake; its something Ed Wood Jr might have made with a trillion dollars to do what he liked with but minus the fun. The film gives away the apes physical appearance far too early, thus blowing the suspense, the narrative focus is all over the place and the talented Tom Hiddleston is frankly off his game. Given no support in terms of script and direction, he looks stiff and unrelaxed and delivers lines with an edge of panic, like Michael Caine in The Swarm.

This is a Kong deprived of his kingship and his mystery, and even the title is a jumble, unsure of whether its the ape thats the star or maybe the island itself, seething with loads of huge animals, scaring the borrower-sized humans who have rashly dared enter this domain. It comes to us from director Jordan Vogt-Roberts known for his comedy before this and screenwriters Dan Gilroy, Max Borenstein, Derek Connolly and John Gatins. The script here feels like the umpteenth rewrite with almost all the humour and nuance chucked out to make sure it plays in non-English-language territories.

The time is the early 70s, just after the fall of Saigon, perhaps the latest plausible period in which technology would not have instantly alerted humanity to a primate of this size. Brainy scientists Bill Panda (John Goodman) and Houston Brooks (Corey Hawkins) get government funding for a top-secret mission to go to the remote Skull Island somewhere in south east Asia to investigate the rumoured big creature. They ask for military help and get it from bored soldier Lt Col Preston Packard (Samuel L Jackson) and his guys, eager for a redemptive challenge after the fiasco of Vietnam. This is one war were not gonna lose! Packard hollers, but hoists the white flag almost at once in the war against silliness and boredom.

On the civilian front, Mason Weaver (Brie Larson) is a tough, sexy photojournalist (a job that exists in the movies, not so much in real life) who senses the story of a lifetime, and Bill has also hired a tracker: former British special forces guy James Conrad (Hiddleston) whose alpha chops are established at the very beginning with a perfunctory fight in a bar. He wins. Kong himself is played in motion capture by that very interesting British actor Toby Kebbell who also plays Prestons trusted subordinate Maj Jack Chapman.

The ape is repeatedly and anti-climactically revealed. Almost at once, our attention is pointlessly split into the gung-ho adventures of the army types (Preston is trying to find his missing buddy) and James, Mason and their party who have become separated from the military and discover the islands startling human secret. They make an upriver journey in an entirely preposterous boat allegedly made from salvaged parts of a crashed plane.

The dramatic presence of Kong himself is muddled. The film tries to make him the islands noble-savage deity, the hairy good guy, as opposed to the huge baddie lizards who are scuttling around the place but are kept in check by the mighty Kong. The script makes a half-hearted joke about not knowing what to call these lizards; I suspect none of the writers could agree. How did we get from the 1933 King Kong to this? A theory of de-evolution is needed.

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Kong: Skull Island review only de-evolution can explain this zestless mashup - The Guardian

Prehistoric creatures dont come any more poignant than mammoths. I trace my own fascination with them back to elementary school where school fieldtrips and visits with my mom took me to a Los Angeles icon, the La Brea Tar Pits, where Columbian mammoth bones stuck in the tar (actually asphalt) were being pulled out, as they still are today.

In the Ice Age, animals famously became trapped in the sticky stuff after mistaking such a pit for a watering hole. Outside the current spiffy Page Museum on the site, motorists along Wilshire Boulevard can still admire the same statuary group I recall from childhood visits, depicting a female mammoth trapped in the tar as an adult male and a younger mammoth, her family, look on helplessly. The idea of these great creatures, so out of place wandering what would one day be the Southern California of my childhood, gave me a melancholy sort of thrill.

Now scientists have upped the poignancy factor with a genetic description of the end of the race for mammoths. Their story played out on remote, frigid Wrangel Island, in the Arctic Ocean, where a group of perhaps 300 individuals survived, dwindling to an end as late as 2000 BC. In other words into historic times! They compared the genome of a mammoth from 45,000 years ago when the population was robust across northern Europe and Siberia, to an individual from 4,300 years ago, close to the last of its kind.

The evolution, or devolution, is heartbreaking. The Abstract from the research article in PLOS Genetics describes a population slowly falling victim to inbreeding:

Woolly mammoths (Mammuthus primigenius) populated Siberia, Beringia, and North America during the Pleistocene and early Holocene. Recent breakthroughs in ancient DNA sequencing have allowed for complete genome sequencing for two specimens of woolly mammoths (Palkopoulou et al. 2015). One mammoth specimen is from a mainland population 45,000 years ago when mammoths were plentiful. The second, a 4300 yr old specimen, is derived from an isolated population on Wrangel island where mammoths subsisted with small effective population size more than 43-fold lower than previous populations. These extreme differences in effective population size offer a rare opportunity to test nearly neutral models of genome architecture evolution within a single species. Using these previously published mammoth sequences, we identify deletions, retrogenes, and non-functionalizing point mutations. In the Wrangel island mammoth, we identify a greater number of deletions, a larger proportion of deletions affecting gene sequences, a greater number of candidate retrogenes, and an increased number of premature stop codons. This accumulation of detrimental mutations is consistent with genomic meltdown in response to low effective population sizes in the dwindling mammoth population on Wrangel island. In addition, we observe high rates of loss of olfactory receptors and urinary proteins, either because these loci are non-essential or because they were favored by divergent selective pressures in island environments. Finally, at the locus of FOXQ1 we observe two independent loss-of-function mutations, which would confer a satin coat phenotype in this island woolly mammoth.

The creamy, satiny white coat would have provided less warmth, and so you picture them succumbing, perhaps in some cases, to the elements.

The New York Times observes that the researchers found that many genes had accumulated mutations that would have halted synthesis of proteins before they were complete, making the proteins useless. They mention evolution only once, quoting Hendrik Poinar, an evolutionary geneticist at McMaster University, who notes, This is probably the best evidence I can think of for the rapid genomic decay of island populations.

Well, if this genomic decay isnt evolution at work, what is it? When actually observed in the world, as opposed to in the imagination of the Darwinist, this is how evolution tends to be: things falls apart, sometimes with consequences that spell the end of a species, as happened with the mammoths, or occasionally with beneficial results. Or things stay the same, thanks to natural selection weeding out deleterious mutations. Or they vary minimally, or vary a little more dramatically only, in the end, to revert to a mean when given the chance, as Tom Bethell describes in Darwins House of Cards.

What evolution is never seen doing is building complex structures new proteins, for example. That always lies beyond a distant horizon, strictly a matter as Bethell emphasizes of imaginative extrapolation. This theory simply cannot produce the goods it promises, try and try as it might. And that is poignant in its own way, if you think about it.

Image: Woolly mammoth, by Flying Puffin [CC BY-SA 2.0], via Wikimedia Commons.

Link:

Evolution in Action? The End of the Woolly Mammoth - Discovery Institute

March 3, 2017 Associate Professor David Ackerley. Credit: Victoria University

Research led by Associate Professor David Ackerley, director of Victoria's Biotechnology programme, has underpinned the development of a new form of chemotherapy that exclusively targets cancer cells.

A key goal of this chemotherapy is a more targeted treatment method that results in fewer side effects for cancer patients.

To achieve this goal, Associate Professor Ackerley and his team engineered enzymes that can transform a relatively safe and non-toxic compound (a "pro-drug") into a drug that is highly toxic to cancer cells.

The genes encoding these enzymes are delivered to cancer cells using viruses or bacteria that are only able to replicate in tumours.

The pro-drug the team worked with is called PR-104A, and was developed by scientists at the University of Auckland, including Associate Professor Ackerley's collaborators on this study, Associate Professor Adam Patterson and Dr Jeff Smaill.

"The enzyme we started with was moderately active with PR-104A," says Associate Professor Ackerley. "However, this was purely by chancenature has never evolved enzymes to recognise these very artificial types of molecules.

"We reasoned that by mimicking evolution in the laboratoryby introducing random mutations into the gene encoding our target enzyme, then selecting the tiny minority of variants where chance mutations had improved activitywe might eventually achieve a more specialised enzyme that could more effectively activate PR-104A."

Not only is the team's artificially evolved enzyme significantly better at activating PR-104A within living cells, it also addresses another major problemhow to keep track of the microbes in patients to make sure they are only infecting cancerous cells.

"A unique aspect of our work is that our enzymes can also trap radioactive molecules called 'positron emission tomography (PET) probes'," says Associate Professor Ackerley. "We hope that this will allow a clinician to put a patient in a full body PET scanner to safely identify the regions where the microbes are replicating."

The team's research has been published in this month's edition of high-profile research journal Cell Chemical Biology, and has been supported by several New Zealand funding agencies including the Marsden Fund managed by the Royal Society of New Zealand, the Health Research Council of New Zealand and the New Zealand Cancer Society.

In ongoing work, Dr Smaill and Associate Professor Patterson have been developing more effective pro-drugs to partner with Associate Professor Ackerley's enzymes. The team has been collaborating with groups at the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom and Maastricht University in the Netherlands, aiming to progress the therapy into clinical trials in cancer patients.

Explore further: Wave of interest in new cancer therapy

More information: Janine N. Copp et al. Engineering a Multifunctional Nitroreductase for Improved Activation of Prodrugs and PET Probes for Cancer Gene Therapy, Cell Chemical Biology (2017). DOI: 10.1016/j.chembiol.2017.02.005

Using viruses and bacteria that normally cause disease to cure disease is an apparent contradiction, but its fundamental to the work being carried out by Dr. David Ackerley.

Colon cancer cells that are pretreated with an ingredient found in cruciferous vegetables are more likely to be killed by a cancer drug that is currently in development, found ETH scientists. This is one of only a few examples ...

To better understand how cancer initiates and spreads, Yale associate professor of pathology Qin Yan turned to the field of epigenetics, which examines changes in the expression of genes and proteins that do not affect the ...

Research at Victoria University of Wellington could lead to a new generation of antibiotics, helping tackle the global issue of 'superbugs' that are resistant to modern medicine.

Unprecedented images of cancer genome-mutating enzymes acting on DNA provide vital clues into how the enzymes work to promote tumor evolution and drive poor disease outcomes. These images, revealed by University of Minnesota ...

Scientists from Trinity College Dublin have uncovered a new class of compounds - glyconaphthalimides - that can be used to target cancer cells with greater specificity than current options allow.

A type of functional brain training known as neurofeedback shows promise in reducing symptoms of chemotherapy-induced nerve damage, or neuropathy, in cancer survivors, according to a study by researchers at The University ...

Research led by Associate Professor David Ackerley, director of Victoria's Biotechnology programme, has underpinned the development of a new form of chemotherapy that exclusively targets cancer cells.

Physicians currently have no targeted treatment options available for women diagnosed with an aggressive form of breast cancer known as triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC), leaving standard-of-care chemotherapies as a first ...

A new study by researchers at The Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center - Arthur G. James Cancer Hospital and Richard J. Solove Research Institute (OSUCCC - James) has identified a mechanism by which cancer cells ...

It's what's missing in the tumor genome, not what's mutated, that thwarts treatment of metastatic melanoma with immune checkpoint blockade drugs, researchers at The University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center report in ...

Anyone who uses an employee badge to enter a building may understand how a protein called ENL opens new possibilities for treating acute myeloid leukemia (AML), a fast-growing cancer of bone marrow and blood cells and the ...

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Mimicking evolution to treat cancer - Medical Xpress

New items, Evolution and Power Up mechanics explained with a flowchart.

By Chris Tapsell Published 03/03/2017

Once you've started collecting enough Pokmon, you'll want to turn your attention to evolving and Powering Up to discover new creatures and make them strong enough to defend and capture Gyms. It's a surprisingly complicated decision to make, now that we know more about how complex Pokmon Go can be, so we'll start at the beginning by explaining how the evolution process works and what you should be paying attention to, before talking about when you should evolve and when you should Power Up those Pokmon.

The higher the CP, the more powerful a Pokmon will be in battle. As you play and collect Pokemon, you'll discover that not every capture has the same CP level. You can read on what CP means in Pokemon Go and how to get the highest values for your team, but in short, CP is one of the most important factors when it comes to fighting, and aside from collecting it's likely the driving force behind your desire to Power Up or evolve.

Because of those complexities surrounding your Pokmon's CP, Powering Up and evolving is more than just a case of picking the one with the highest CP and throwing your Stardust and Candy at it until you run dry. As you'll see below, sometimes you should Power Up your Pokmon first, sometimes you should evolve it first, sometimes both, and sometimes you should leave it alone.

Powering up and evolving Pokmon requires in-game resources known as Stardust and Candy. Stardust is a shared resource you receive for each Pokmon you catch, for storing Pokmon at Gyms and leveling up, while Candy is an item specific to that species - so Pikachu Candy, Pidgey Candy and so on. We've assembled some quick tips on how to get Candy in Pokmon Go here, plus how to get Stardust easily to strengthen your Pokmon.

In short, the more Pokmon of one type you catch, the more Candy you get to power up and evolve that species in its family, so it's well worth catching those low level Pidgeys to get that eventual Pidgeot evolution. Remember you can use in-game radar to locate and catch the Pokemon nearby, as well as discover Pokemon Type by location using real-world habitats.

As well as using Candy to evolve creatures, as part of the Gen 2 update certain evolutions - for existing and new Pokemon - also require a special item to evolve into certain forms. These are:

All of these are received from spinning PokStops. Their drop rate is incredibly low - ourselves including others online report one dropping per several hundred spins - but the good news is getting a 7 day Daily Bonus streak will almost certainly get you one. Further reports suggest a second 7 day Daily Bonus won't get you one, so the frequency of these aren't certain, but it's still worth going for them (and spinning PokStops in general) to better your chances.

There are several important points worth bearing in mind for when you're looking to Power Up your Pokmon:

As with Powering Up, there are some important things to bear in mind for evolving your Pokmon.

We've decided to put together a flowchart, which should hopefully clear up what is a fairly complicated decision-making process for you! All the information you need is here - such as an IV calculator, CP and IVs explained, and a list of the best Pokmon in Pokmon Go - if you need it. Beneath the chart are the rules we've applied, but in text form.

You should Power Up your Pokmon if:

Want more help with Pokmon Go's Gen 2 update? Our list of new Gen 2 Johto Pokmon can teach you where to find each one, what you need to know about new Pokmon Go Berries, Special Items to evolve Pokmon such as King's Rock, Sun Stone, Up-Grade, Dragon Scale and Metal Coat, and how to get Eevee evolutions Umbreon, Espeon, and updated Egg distances and best Pokmon charts, as well as other Pokmon Go tips, tricks, cheats and guides.

You should evolve your Pokmon if:

You should avoid Powering Up your Pokmon if:

You should avoid evolving your Pokmon if:

Essentially, the Power Up and evolving decisions that you make depend on what you want to achieve. For the collectors it's fairly simple - just evolve the Pokmon whose evolutions are particularly rare - but for those interested in getting the absolute most out of their Pokmon's battling capabilities, it's certainly less so.

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Pokmon Go - How to evolve using Special Items, their drop rates, and when to evolve or Power Up your Pokmon - Eurogamer.net

NBCNews.com

The Evolution and Collapse of the Biggest Ponzi Scheme in Florida History NBCNews.com The Evolution and Collapse of the Biggest Ponzi Scheme in Florida History. Fri, Mar 03. How did Scott Rothstein go from one of the most recognized names in Florida's legal and political circles to the mastermind behind a $1.4 billion Ponzi scheme? and more »

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The Evolution and Collapse of the Biggest Ponzi Scheme in Florida History - NBCNews.com