Monthly Archives: August 2021

Why Elon Musks Starlink has set up a satellite base on a tiny island in the Irish Sea – CNBC

Posted: August 9, 2021 at 9:01 am

SpaceX owner and Tesla CEO Elon Musk poses as he arrives on the red carpet for the Axel Springer Awards ceremony, in Berlin, on December 1, 2020.

Britta Pedersen | AFP | Getty Images

LONDON Starlink, the space internet service created in 2015 by Elon Musk's space transportation firm, SpaceX, has set up a "ground station" on a tiny self-governing island in the Irish Sea to help it beam internet from satellites in low-Earth orbit to homes and offices.

Starlink's Isle of Man ground station, first reported by The Telegraph late last month, can be seen on the Starlink.sx website.

The government of the Isle of Man said Starlink has been working with local communications provider Bluewave, adding that the pair have together licensed some of the island's available spectrum.

Bluewave has a ground station just outside the capital of Douglas that can be seen on Google Maps. It acquired the site last year from SES Satellite Leasing. SES pulled out of the Isle of Man last summer.

The site boasts between four and eight radomes, according to a local source who works in the satellite industry that asked to remain anonymous as they're not permitted to discuss the matter. These are structural, weatherproof enclosures that protect a radar antenna, which sends and receives data transmissions.

"There is a nearly new vacant base station array here linked directly into data centers," said another source who works in the Isle of Man's tech industry, who asked to remain anonymous as they're not directly involved with the Starlink project. The source added that it has "an excellent horizon scan because being surrounded by sea it means there is nothing in the way."

Measuring 32 miles long and 13 miles wide, the Isle of Man is a British Crown dependency that sits in the middle of the Irish Sea roughly equidistant from England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales. Starlink already has bases in Buckinghamshire and Cornwall in England, and the Isle of Man base will enable the company to provide blanket internet coverage across Britain.

The island's location, spectrum and existing satellite infrastructure have all contributed to Starlink's decision, according to the two CNBC sources.

The first source, who received a Starlink kit in May, said the island has a "very efficient" telecoms regulator that's fast to issue relatively cheap licenses.

"Then of course, the Isle of Man is a low tax jurisdiction so [there is] very little overhead," they added. "Plus the nation has an adequacy agreement with the EU for GDPR compliance. All this makes the island a good place for satellite or data related services." GDPR is a set of data protection and privacy regulations introduced by the European Union in May 2018.

The island also has its own spectrum bands that are less busy than those used in the U.K.; the Isle of Man has just 85,000 inhabitants whereas the U.K. has around 70 million.

The Isle of Man Communications and Utilities Regulatory Authority confirmed to CNBC on Thursday that Starlink and Bluewave have been granted a license for "provision of services and location of associated equipment on the island."

A spokesperson for the island's Department for Enterprise told CNBC: "This is very exciting and positive news for the Island which will enable the deployment of satellite broadband service on-Island and further afield."

They added: "Locally, the licensing of available spectrum will provide more choice for local consumers and potential for further jobs within the Island's telecoms sector."

SpaceX did not immediately respond to a CNBC request for comment, while Bluewave declined to comment.

Starlink ultimately wants to provide the world with faster internet, starting by improving internet access in parts of the world that aren't currently served by broadband providers.

It allows people to connect to the internet via a satellite dish that is placed on or near a person's property. The internet is beamed down to the dish via a network of Starlink satellites that have been put into orbit by SpaceX and ground stations.

The company has said it plans to spend $10 billion putting 12,000 small satellites into low-Earth orbit that can beam high-speed, low-latency internet to the ground. It has launched 1,700 so far and the service is being used by 90,000 customers in 12 countries.

"You can assume they'll need lots of ground stations, in lots of places, to ensure uninterrupted coverage," Craig Moffett, an analyst at research firm MoffettNathanson, told CNBC.

"The satellites aren't yet equipped with fiber interlinks, so for now, they need to be in constant contact with the ground. That requires a tremendous number of ground stations," Moffett added.

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SpaceX to launch billboard satellite that plays ads and hopes people dont do something inappropriate – The Independent

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Elon Musks SpaceX will put a huge advertising satellite in the sky where companies can display logos and other promoted content.

The space company is working with a Canadian startup Geometric Energy Corporation (GEC) to launch the satellite on a Falcon 9 rocket, which will release the advertising platform before the rocket reaches the moon.

Samuel Reid, CEO and co-founder of GEC, told Business Insider that the satellite would be released in 2022. People and companies would buy tokens to locate and design a pixel on the screen.

Five tokens affecting the pixels are purchasable: Beta and Rho for the adverts placement on the screen, Gamma and Kappa for the colour and brightness, and XI for its duration. These tokens will be purchasable via cryptocurrencies.

"Im trying to achieve something that can democratize access to space and allow for decentralized participation," Mr Reid said. "Hopefully, people dont waste money on something inappropriate, insulting or offensive.

"There might be companies which want to depict their logo ... or it might end up being a bit more personal and artistic. Maybe Coca-Cola and Pepsi will fight over their logo and reclaim over each other, he said.

It is currently unclear how large the ads will be, how many ads will be shown at any one time, the environmental impact of bright advertising on local flora and fauna, and the energy use of the satellite. Neither SpaceX nor GEC responded to The Independents request for comment before time of publication.

GEC is also the group behind the satellite Doge-1, which Mr Musk said would be the first crypto in space and the first meme in space.

The satellite will "obtain lunar-spatial intelligence from sensors and cameras", according to CNN. "This is not a joke," Reid said, but refused to comment further.

Dogecoin has proven to be a fast, reliable, and cryptographically secure digital currency that operates when traditional banks cannot and is sophisticated enough to finance a commercial Moon mission in full," a press release sent in May 2021 read.

"It has been chosen as the unit of account for all lunar business between SpaceX and Geometric Energy Corporation and sets precedent for future missions to the Moon and Mars."

Since then, however, Elon Musks tweets generally seen as market-movers in the crypto space have failed to affect dogecoins performance.

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Inside the SpaceX Crew Dragon: Here’s How the Inspiration4 Crew Will Fly to Space – TIME

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Heres how you fly a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft: Climb aboard; strap yourself in; close the hatch; fly to space. The Dragon takes care of everything, so relax and enjoy the rideunless, of course, something goes wrong, and in space, something can always go wrong.

So heres how you prepare for that possibility: Spend months of 60-hour weeks in classrooms and simulators; master hundreds of pages of technical specs and procedures; learn the workings of dozens of systems and subsystems aboard the spacecraft; train for emergencies ranging from communications blackouts to navigation failures to on-board fires; and, not for nothing, spend a little time in a centrifuge and an altitude chamber, practicing for the g-forces youre going to have to endure and the possibility of depressurization.

Theres north of 60 procedures that range from normal contingency to emergency, says Jared Isaacman, the CEO of Shift4 Payments, an online payment service, who will be commanding the Inspiration4 mission in September, spending three days in orbit with three other civilian astronauts. In a multi-day mission there is a lot of time for a lot of things to go wrong. (TIME Studios is producing a documentary series on the Inspiration4 mission.)

Practicing for those eventualities aboard a Dragon requires a whole new kind of training, because by any measure, the new ship is not your daddys spacecraft. NASAs old Mercury, Gemini and Apollo capsules were very much designed with an airplane cockpit in mind. Their sheet metal instrument panels were studded with hundreds of switches, dials, lights and analog gauges. Their simple on-board computers were controlled by a mechanical keyboard. The commander flew those ships the same way youd fly a planewith a control stick determining velocity, attitude, altitude and direction.

The Dragons designers swept all of that away, replacing everythingincluding the control stickwith three large touch screens facing four side-by-side seats. Each screen is capable of calling up as many as 10 sets of displays, allowing the crew to focus on a particular set of systemsguidance, environmental, electrical, and more.

You have an overall systems page on the screen, and then you can drill down into individual pages as well, says Doug Hurley, the commander of the first crewed SpaceX mission, which launched in May of 2020. Theres a total of 25 to 30 individual pages, and SpaceX may have added some more since my flight. With any aircraft or spacecraft, you always iterate because it makes sense and its easy and will help the crew.

The seats in the Crew Dragon spacecraft are reconfigurable, allowing it to carry up to seven peoplethough four is typical for a NASA mission. Three large touchscreens replace the traditional instrument panel.

Courtesy SpaceX

Ideally, the spacecraft helps the astronauts so much that they have virtually nothing to do, with the ship operating entirely autonomously. And if the automation doesnt take care of a problem, then the ground is your next layer of defense, says Hurley, referencing SpaceX ground controllers who can problem-solve and issue commands to the spacecraft from the comfort of mission control. Only if the Dragon fails to look after itself and the ground staffers cant solve the problem would the astronauts take over.

Thats the case too when it comes to the most critical aspect of commanding the spacecraft: flying it. The Dragon features a full-time autopilot program, requiring no astronaut intervention. On Hurleys flight, he took over in the final stages of the spacecrafts approach to the International Space Station, steering the ship in all axes, flying above, below and to the left and right of the station. But the purpose of that exercise was just to prove that the manual systems worked.

In space youve got to trust and verify, Hurley says. But theres no plans to do any more manual flying, unless theres a need for it from a systems failure kind of scenario.

Those failures do occur, and learning to fly the Dragon by hand can take some doing. Stripping out the control stick and replacing it with buttons on a touch screen may make for a more elegant spacecraft, but it also eliminates the most important physical connection a pilot has to their vehicle. Pilots using a stick never have to look at it because they operate by feel, but thats impossible with a touch screen that offers nothing by way of tactile response. When youre flying off soft keys on a touch screen its a totally different feel, and a lot of muscle memory is lost, says Isaacman, who is a licensed jet pilot and knows a thing or two about stick-and-rudder skills. There is that delay when you look at the screen and input a command before its executed, versus something instantaneous when you move the stick.

The Crew Dragon spacecraft before being mated to its Falcon 9 rocket (left); the Falcon's second stage is disposable, and the first stage returns to Earth, landing on a barge, to be refitted and reused.

Courtesy SpaceX/NASA

Then too, there are the kinds of emergencies that not only require on-site human intervention, but require it to be executed immediatelyand perfectly. Fires can and do break out aboard spacecraft; crew members on Russias Mir space station had to battle a blaze in 1997 when a fuel canister ignited. The biggest risk aboard Dragon is a fire caused by a battery overheating, and there are a lot of batteries aboard the shipnot only the spacecrafts own, but those that power the tablets, cameras and smartphones the crew members will carry.

There is also the risk of a spacecraft depressurization, requiring the crew to look for the breach, try to seal it off and scramble into their suits at the same time. A launch emergency may happen tooif, say, the second stage of the Falcon 9 rocket that carries the ship to space fails to separate from the Dragon and the commander has to manually execute the separation maneuver. The Dragons guidance system is also subject to failure, potentially causing the ships solar panels to slip out of alignment with the sun and requiring human intervention to set things right.

Finally, there are the overall risks raised by the simple number of days the Inspiration4 crew will spend in orbit. Crews heading for the space station fly there directly and are usually aboard within a day or so of launching. The Inspiration4 crew will be in orbit for three days, flying independently, without the security the giant station providesthe longest a U.S. space a U.S. crew has been aloft in a vehicle other than the station since the last shuttle stood down in 2011. Every day spent on their own is another day during which something can go wrong.

The Crew Dragon spacecraft and the Falcon 9 rocket a few days before the launch of Crew-1 Mission in Nov. 2020.

Courtesy SpaceX

Ideally, nothing goes wrong on any given missionand on the three crewed flights SpaceXs Crew Dragon has flown so far, the ideal has been the real. But space remains, ever and always, a dangerous place to go. Its for the Dragon designers to remove the riskand even the workfrom the equation. Its for the crew to be prepared if that equation does not add up.

I dont know that theres ever been a human spaceflight mission that did not have some anomaly, says Isaacman. People are telling us were making good progress. I think weve definitely arrived at the point where were ready and this is going to be a well-executed mission.

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Write to Jeffrey Kluger at jeffrey.kluger@time.com.

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SpaceX’s first all-civilian launch next month will be chronicled in a Netflix documentary – Business Insider

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Netflix is giving viewers a behind-the-scenes look at the historic launch of SpaceX's Inspiration4 mission in a brand new documentary series.

"Countdown: Inspiration Mission to Space" will be released in five parts. The first four episodes will premiere on September 6 and 13, with the rest of the series available September 14, 1 5, and 16 surrounding the launch day from Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Unlike Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic's spaceflights, which only touched the edge of space and returned to Earth minutes later, Inspiration will orbit the Earth for three days to raise funds and awareness for St. Jude Children's Hospital.

There will be four passengers on board the flight, including billionaire Jared Isaacman, the 38-year-old founder and CEO of Shift4 Payments, who will Lead and Command the craft, according to a press release. Hayley Arceneaux, a 29-year-old physician assistant at St. Jude and pediatric cancer survivor, will serve as the mission's Chief Medical Officer.

Dr. Sian Proctor, a 51-year-old professor of geosciences and two-time NASA astronaut candidate who long dreamed of going to space, will serve as pilot, and Chris Sembroski, a 41-year-old, former member of the U.S. Air Force who served in Iraq and now works as a Lockheed Martin engineer, will serve as mission specialist.

"The crew was selected to represent the four pillars of the mission: Leadership, Hope, Prosperity, and Generosity," Netflix said in a press release.

The documentary series will be directed and executive produced by Jason Hehir, the director of the Michael Jordan and Chicago Bulls documentary "The Last Dance" on Netflix.

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Curiosity, SpaceX, and Time Crystals: this week in science news – TechRadar

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This week was a pretty eventful one in science news, full of record-breaking rockets, a major anniversary for a remarkably vain robot on Mars (we kid, we kid. We love you Curiosity!), and Google claiming that it used its quantum computer to flagrantly violate one of the basic principles of physics.

Boeing unfortunately suffered another frustrating setback with its Starliner capsule, further delaying its second attempt at reaching the International Space Station. Speaking of which, ISS astronauts bid farewell to the Russian-made Pirs module as it safely burned up in the Earth's atmosphere and were kind enough to record this human "shooting star" for us critters down below.

Read on to learn more about all the exiting news you might have missed this week in the world of science.

NASA's highly photogenic Curiosity rover celebrated its ninth year on the red planet this week, sending out a trademark selfie in celebration.

The intrepid rover touched down in Gale Crater on the Martian surface in the late evening hours of August 5, 2012 (NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory is in California, so the landing occurred on August 6, 2012 EDT). Since then, it has travelled more than a dozen miles across the Martian surface, even ascending nearly half a kilometer up the slope of Mount Sharp in the crater's center, making science with every turn of its many wheels. Here's to another year of science and many more to come!

As SpaceX prepares to return astronauts to the Moon in 2024, it is assembling some of the most advanced spacefaring vessels ever, including the largest rocket ever assembled. This week, SpaceX tested the stacking and mating of its Starship spacecraft with the Super Heavy rocket booster that will help carry it into its first orbital flight later this year. The two combined for a total height of 395 feet, beating out the previous record-holder, the Apollo program's Saturn V rocket, which stands at 363 feet.

SpaceX rival Boeing, meanwhile, suffered another frustrating setback this week in its efforts to get it's Starliner capsule off the ground and docked with the International Space Station (ISS). After last week's launch had to be postponed when an accidental misfire of a docked Russian capsule rotated the ISS and altered its trajectory it's fine now...we hope? Boeing and United Launch Alliance detected an unexpected "valve position indication" during a pre-launch check, and the launch was scrubbed until engineers can track down the problem. This puts Boeing even further behind SpaceX, something that's gotta sting for the venerable spaceflight pioneer.

Astronauts aboard the International Space Station recorded the fiery end of the Russian-made Pirs module as it (safely) burned up in Earth's atmosphere.

The timelapse video shows the module turning into a "shooting star" of sorts, a fitting send off after its service in pursuit of science and discovery.

Finally, this week saw the science world trying to wrap their brains around a paper published by Google researchers late last week that claims to show its quantum computer, Sycamore, created a scalable "time crystal" using qubits that complete violate the second law of thermodynamics and the principle of time translation symmetry. What this development means is still unclear, since something like this isn't supposed to ever happen, so we'll have to wait for peer review to do its thing and confirm results from Google's scientists. If they do, maybe Sycamore can show us how to divide by zero, while it's at it.

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SpaceX is Breaking Records with This Newly Assembled Rocket Ship in Texas – ktemnews.com

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Historic Moments in Texas

August 6th, we got a live view of something very historical happening. Livestreams of what's going down at theSpaceXStarbase facility in South Texas aired as people around the globe watched in anticipation.

The city of Boca Chica plays host to a SpaceX facility that is breaking records and making history happen. Engineers and workers completed the stacking of their massive SpaceX Starship.

The Starship stands alone at 165 feet, and the Super Heavy rocket adds another 230 feet making the massive vehicle just about 400 feet tall, make it the BIGGEST rocket ever assembled.

The bottom part of the rocket is the Super Heavy rocket. This piece is what is going to get the rocket soaring into space. It contains 29 raptor engines. That is a whole lot of power, which is necessary for a rocket that plans to reach the moon and Mars in its very first orbital test flight.

The Starship is the second part of the rocket. It sits on top of the Super Heavy rocket and is what will eventually carry cargo and passengers.

All of this went down Friday, August 6th, and Texas got to get in on this historic assembly. The record-breaking rocketship was assembled in the great state of Texas.

While the ship was assembled on August 6th, there is speculation that Elon Musk was aiming for the previous day, August 5th. On his personal Twitter page, Musk tweeted, "Winds are too high today. Looks like wind speed will be low enough to stack early tomorrow morning."

While the Starship and Super Heavy rocket assembly are complete, this massive rocket will not be launched just yet. SpaceX still has a couple of measurements they need to go through to get this rocket fully finished and ready.

According to MSN, the Super Heavy rocket "must pass several pressurization and engine tests before lifting off." Aside from that, "SpaceX is also waiting on anenvironmental review of Starship's launch operationsbeing performed by the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration."

Women have left marks on everything from entertainment and music to space exploration, athletics, and technology. Each passing year and new milestone makes it clear both how recent this history-making is in relation to the rest of the country, as well as how far we still need to go. The resulting timeline shows that women are constantly making history worthy of best-selling biographies and classroom textbooks; someone just needs to write about them.

Scroll through to find out when women in the U.S. and around the world won rights, the names of women who shattered the glass ceiling, and which country's women banded together to end a civil war.

LOOK: 100 years of American military history

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The Secret History of Corn And Its Jumping Genes Revealed in Its Genome – SciTechDaily

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This ear of corn was grown and analyzed by Nobel Prize-winning Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) geneticist Barbara McClintock decades ago. From her observations, she surmised that parts of the corn genome jumped from one location to another, generating a great deal of genetic diversityin this case many different colors of kernels. CSHL researchers expanded on her work by sequencing the genomes of multiple corn strains, mapping even the mobile portions of the genome. Credit: CSHL Library & Archives

Humans adapt through language and culture, passing down knowledge from one generation to the next. Corn plants cant talk, so they solve the problem of adaptability in a different way: they use jumping genes to shuffle the genetic deck over generations. Jumping genesnow called transposonswere discovered by Nobel Prize-winning Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) geneticistBarbara McClintockin the 1940s. Decades later, CSHL scientists are still expanding on her work.Doreen Ware, a CSHL adjunct professor and research scientist at the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) and her colleagues, published genome sequences from 26 different strains of corn in the journalScience. The genomes describe a large portion of the genetic diversity found inmodern corn plants, including transposons and genes that regulate desired crop traits.

CSHL Adjunct Professor and USDA research scientist Doreen Ware in a cornfield at CSHLs Uplands Farm. Credit: Ware lab/CSHL

Corn has been bred to grow in various climates of the world, from temperate to tropical, and from highlands to lowlands. Ware says:

Humans have brains. Our main adaptive component is our ability to transfer culture and knowledge, right? And thats how we deal with our environment. A plants strategy is to have a fluid genome. They have a very intimate relationship with these transposons, where they use them to bring in new genetic diversity so that they can deal with these events because they cant run away. Theyre not going to go into the house, and theyre not going to move water to them.

Ware and her colleagues, including CSHL Professor & HHMI InvestigatorRob Martienssenand CSHL ProfessorW. Richard McCombie, mapped thefirst corn genomein 2009; they have been filling in gaps ever since. Like a continental landscape, genomic maps have areas that are full of features (like well-mapped cities), whereas others are more like deserts (vast and uncharted). With recent techniques, the team of scientists charted difficult stretches of the genome, even the deserts. These complete genomes allow researchers to locate and study bothimportant crop genesand the nearby regions that regulate their use. Ware notes, we had little access to the regulatory architecture of corn before.

The new collection reveals how the corn genome was shuffled over time. Ware says:

These genomes provide us a footprint of that life history. Different strains have experienced different environments. For example, some came from tropical environments, others experienced particular diseases, and all those selective pressures leave a footprint of that history.

Corn is one of the most common agricultural staples in the world, with more than366 million metric tonsgrown in the US from 2018 to 2019. Equipped with more detailed maps of the corn genome, scientists have a head start in developing crops for a rapidly changing climate. Ware explains, The Midwest is not going to have the same temperature profile twenty years from now. The genomes provide broader insights into corn genetics, and this, in turn, can be used to start optimizing corn to grow in future environments.

Reference: De novo assembly, annotation, and comparative analysis of 26 diverse maize genomes by Matthew B. Hufford, Arun S. Seetharam, Margaret R. Woodhouse, Kapeel M. Chougule, Shujun Ou, Jianing Liu, William A. Ricci, Tingting Guo, Andrew Olson, Yinjie Qiu, Rafael Della Coletta, Silas Tittes, Asher I. Hudson, Alexandre P. Marand, Sharon Wei, Zhenyuan Lu, Bo Wang, Marcela K. Tello-Ruiz, Rebecca D. Piri, Na Wang, Dong won Kim, Yibing Zeng, Christine H. OConnor, Xianran Li, Amanda M. Gilbert, Erin Baggs, Ksenia V. Krasileva, John L. Portwood II, Ethalinda K. S. Cannon, Carson M. Andorf, Nancy Manchanda, Samantha J. Snodgrass, David E. Hufnagel, Qiuhan Jiang, Sarah Pedersen, Michael L. Syring, David A. Kudrna, Victor Llaca, Kevin Fengler, Robert J. Schmitz, Jeffrey Ross-Ibarra, Jianming Yu, Jonathan I. Gent, Candice N. Hirsch, Doreen Ware and R. Kelly Dawe, 6 August 2021, Science.DOI: 10.1126/science.abg5289

The project was a multi-institutional effort with researchers at CSHL, USDA, University of Georgia, Iowa State University, University of Minnesota, and Corteva Agriscience. The new collection of genomes is available online athttp://maize-pangenome.gramene.org/.

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Whole-genome sequencing of Schistosoma mansoni reveals extensive diversity with limited selection despite mass drug administration – Nature.com

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Whole-genome sequencing of Schistosoma mansoni reveals extensive diversity with limited selection despite mass drug administration - Nature.com

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MIT Researchers Devised a Way To Program Memories Into Bacterial Cells by Rewriting Their DNA – SciTechDaily

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MIT researchers have devised a way to program memories into bacterial cells by rewriting their DNA more efficiently. Credit: MIT News, iStockphoto

Technique for editing bacterial genomes can record interactions between cells, may offer a way to edit genes in the human microbiome.

Biological engineers at MIT have devised a new way to efficiently edit bacterial genomes and program memories into bacterial cells by rewriting their DNA. Using this approach, various forms of spatial and temporal information can be permanently stored for generations and retrieved by sequencing the cells DNA.

The new DNA writing technique, which the researchers call HiSCRIBE, is much more efficient than previously developed systems for editing DNA in bacteria, which had a success rate of only about 1 in 10,000 cells per generation. In a new study, the researchers demonstrated that this approach could be used for storing memory of cellular interactions or spatial location.

This technique could also make it possible to selectively edit, activate, or silence genes in certain species of bacteria living in a natural community such as the human microbiome, the researchers say.

With this new DNA writing system, we can precisely and efficiently edit bacterial genomes without the need for any form of selection, within complex bacterial ecosystems, says Fahim Farzadfard, a former MIT postdoc and the lead author of the paper. This enables us to perform genome editing and DNA writing outside of laboratory settings, whether to engineer bacteria, optimize traits of interest in situ, or study evolutionary dynamics and interactions in the bacterial populations.

Timothy Lu, an MIT associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science and of biological engineering, is the senior author of the study, which was published on August 5, 2021, in Cell Systems. Nava Gharaei, a former graduate student at Harvard University, and Robert Citorik, a former MIT graduate student, are also authors of the study.

For several years, Lus lab has been working on ways to use DNA to store information such as memory of cellular events. In 2014, he and Farzadfard developed a way to employ bacteria as a genomic tape recorder, engineering E. coli to store long-term memories of events such as a chemical exposure.

To achieve that, the researchers engineered the cells to produce a reverse transcriptase enzyme called retron, which produces a single-stranded DNA (ssDNA) when expressed in the cells, and a recombinase enzyme, which can insert (write) a specific sequence of single-stranded DNA into a targeted site in the genome. This DNA is produced only when activated by the presence of a predetermined molecule or another type of input, such as light. After the DNA is produced, the recombinase inserts the DNA into a preprogrammed site, which can be anywhere in the genome.

That technique, which the researchers called SCRIBE, had a relatively low writing efficiency. In each generation, out of 10,000 E. coli cells, only one would acquire the new DNA that the researchers tried to incorporate into the cells. This is in part because the E. coli have cellular mechanisms that prevent single-stranded DNA from being accumulated and integrated into their genomes.

In the new study, the researchers tried to boost the efficiency of the process by eliminating some of E. colis defense mechanisms against single-stranded DNA. First, they disabled enzymes called exonucleases, which break down single-stranded DNA. They also knocked out genes involved in a system called mismatch repair, which normally prevents integration of single-stranded DNA into the genome.

With those modifications, the researchers were able to achieve near-universal incorporation of the genetic changes that they tried to introduce, creating an unparalleled and efficient way for editing bacterial genomes without the need for selection.

Because of that improvement, we were able to do some applications that we were not able to do with the previous generation of SCRIBE or with other DNA writing technologies, Farzadfard says.

In their 2014 study, the researchers showed that they could use SCRIBE to record the duration and intensity of exposure to a specific molecule. With their new HiSCRIBE system, they can trace those kinds of exposures as well as additional types of events, such as interactions between cells.

As one example, the researchers showed that they could track a process called bacterial conjugation, during which bacteria exchange pieces of DNA. By integrating a DNA barcode into each cells genome, which can then be exchanged with other cells, the researchers can determine which cells have interacted with each other by sequencing their DNA to see which barcodes they carry.

This kind of mapping could help researchers study how bacteria communicate with each other within aggregates such as biofilms. If a similar approach could be deployed in mammalian cells, it could someday be used to map interactions between other types of cells such as neurons, Farzadfard says. Viruses that can cross neural synapses could be programmed to carry DNA barcodes that researchers could use to trace connections between neurons, offering a new way to help map the brains connectome.

We are using DNA as the mechanism to record spatial information about the interaction of bacterial cells, and maybe in the future, neurons that have been tagged, Farzadfard says.

The researchers also showed that they could use this technique to specifically edit the genome of one species of bacteria within a community of many species. In this case, they introduced the gene for an enzyme that breaks down galactose into E. coli cells growing in culture with several other species of bacteria.

This kind of species-selective editing could offer a novel way to make antibiotic-resistant bacteria more susceptible to existing drugs by silencing their resistance genes, the researchers say. However, such treatments would likely require several years more years of research to develop, they say.

The researchers also showed that they could use this technique to engineer a synthetic ecosystem made of bacteria and bacteriophages that can continuously rewrite certain segments of their genome and evolve autonomously with a rate higher than would be possible by natural evolution. In this case, they were able to optimize the cells ability to consume lactose consumption.

This approach could be used for evolutionary engineering of cellular traits, or in experimental evolution studies by allowing you to replay the tape of evolution over and over, Farzadfard says.

Reference: Efficient retroelement-mediated DNA writing in bacteria by Fahim Farzadfard, Nava Gharaei, Robert J. Citorik and Timothy K. Lu, 5 August 2021, Cell Systems.DOI: 10.1016/j.cels.2021.07.001

The research was funded by the National Institutes of Health, the Office of Naval Research, the National Science Foundation, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the MIT Center for Microbiome Informatics and Therapeutics, the NSF Expeditions in Computing Program Award, and the Schmidt Science Fellows Program.

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Levantines and Arabians have different origins, Middle East genomic study finds – Haaretz

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Apparently, it is so: Anatomically modern humans have been leaving Africa for almost a quarter million years, but they all went extinct until an exit around 50,000 to 60,000 years ago. A new study of genomes in the Middle East shores up this hypothesis, finding no trace of the early humans in any of the genomes tested.

One of the routes out of Africa for hominins going back 2 million years, and later, for humans too, was the Levant, Iraq and Arabia. Indeed, researchers have found evidence of human and hominin exits in various places, including Israel and Saudi Arabia: stuff like the odd bone or a batch of stone tools.

The prevailing belief is that the groups taking part in the earliest migrations went extinct (though not before encountering other hominins in Eurasia). Then about 50,000 to 60,000 years ago, anatomical humans left Africa and survived. They met and mixed with Neanderthals and heavens knows who else, and begat modern humanity.

This belief that the early exiters did not survive is now bolstered by an international team led by Mohamed Almarri of the Wellcome Genome Campus in Britain. In their study, published in Cell, they looked at the genomic history of the Middle East and concluded that present-day populations in Arabia, the Levant including Israel, and Iraq have no signals from those early modern humans.

We used a new whole genome sequencing technology to study human populations from the Levant [Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Israel and the West Bank], Iraq and Arabia, and we reconstruct the population history of the region from over 125,000 years ago up to the last millennium, Almarri says. We show how changes in lifestyle and climate have affected the demography of human populations in the region.

How does one test latter-day DNA for signals older than 60,000 years? By the density of mutations, he explains: The more mutations there are, the older the segments will be.

Thats a generalization; some genetic sequences are more evolutionarily conserved than others. If you check the sequence for the protein ubiquitin, it will be the same from a human to a tree frog and obviously, for earlier humans. But if a given segment has a ton of mutations (that didnt kill the bearer), we may assume its old.

Also, obviously modern humans didnt descend from newly-created beings who sprang up some 60,000 years ago; we will have some very, very ancient DNA. But, Almarri explains, when a population expands, the migrants are a tiny percent of the original population. The same would have applied to the African exit.

And indeed, genomic studies of todays non-African populations show a genetic bottleneck around that time, Almarri says. Non-Africans all descend from exiters around 50,000 to 60,000 years ago and are much less genetically diverse than sub-Saharan Africans, who suffered no bottleneck.

The Neanderthals and the Levantines

Moving on, Levantines and Iraqis share the same Neanderthal signals as Eurasians, the team found. Arabians on the other hand have less Neanderthal DNA.

The reason apparently lies in origins. Levantines have more ancestry (than Arabians) from Europe and Anatolia. The Arabians have more ancestry (than Levantines) from Africans, who didnt mix with Neanderthals, and from Natufians, who were the prehistoric inhabitants of the Levant, including Israel.

The Natufians were prehistoric peoples living about 11,000 to 16,000 years ago in what is today Israel, Jordan and Lebanon. Its possible that they also reached Arabia, but their remains havent been found.

Also, present-day Africans are believed to have a contribution from Neanderthals after all, a very small one, conferred by early humans who trekked in reverse from Europe back to Africa after mixing with Neanderthals.

Anyway, the Arabians of today apparently didnt arise from early Levantine farmers but from Natufian hunter-gatherers who preceded these farmers and Africans, the study shows. Nor do the findings support the theory that Levantine farmers later replaced the indigenous Arabian population.

It bears stressing that human fossil remains are incredibly rare; from the deep prehistoric past Saudi Arabia has so far produced one finger bone from 85,000 years ago, but it has also produced tools that may have been special to humans (as opposed to other hominins) from 125,000 years ago. In Israel there are a lot more very ancient human remains, starting with the 200,000-year-old jawbone found in Misliya, and there are more when you get to the Natufian period but theyre still very rare.

Desertification and population collapse

Another difference the genomic analysis indicated relates to the Neolithic Revolution the invention of agriculture.

But here it bears stressing that the Middle East, Arabia and North Africa werent always baking-hot deserts. Sometimes, depending on planetary orbital cycles, they greened. Hippos and crocodiles cavorted in lakes and rivers, and hominins and later, modern humans could comfortably roam.

When the Neolithic Revolution the gradual transition from a life of hunting and gathering to agriculture and animal husbandry began over 10,000 years ago, Arabia and the Sahara were in such a lush period. The Arabian Desert as we know it today, the biggest sand desert in the world, didnt exist. It began to form sometime between 6,000 to 8,000 years ago. (That might help explain the paucity of prehistoric human remains.)

The Neolithic Revolution drove a massive population increase in the Levant and Iraq, but not in Arabia. The team even postulates that the small population groups of ancient Arabians may have perpetuated or descended from the local epipaleolithic hunting-gathering groups.

But as the Arabian Desert was forming, about 6,000 years ago its population imploded. The same would happen in the Levant about 4,200 years ago, commensurate with an intense aridification event.

We find that prehistorical aridification and desertification events have resulted in population crashes a few thousands of years ago, the team says a warning for today, with all due respect to desalination technology.

Say it in Semitic

Current-day peoples the team studied in the Levant, Arabia and Iraq turned out to form distinct core clusters: Populations from the Levant and Iraq (Lebanese, Syrians, Jordanians, Israeli Druze, and Iraqi Arabs) clustered together. The Iraqi Kurds clustered with central Iranians.

The Arabians (Emiratis, Saudis, Yemenis and Omanis) clustered with Bedouin who are from Israel, too. These samples were collected by the Human Genome Diversity Project and were sequenced by us, Almarri notes.

Fascinatingly, both the Iraqi Kurds and Iranians, who clustered together, speak Indo-Iranian languages Kurdish isnt Arabic or Semitic, its Indo-Iranian. All the other people sampled in the study speak Arabic, a Semitic language.

The clustering patterns we find reflect the historical ancestries present in modern-day populations. In the Levant [and Iraqi Arabs], all the populations we tested have higher Anatolian-like ancestry, which is much rarer in Arabia. Arabian populations in contrast have higher Natufian-like ancestry, Almarri says.

Apropos language, the team also suggests that a Bronze Age population in the Levant (meaning from about 5,000 years ago) plausibly was responsible for spreading Semitic languages to Arabia and East Africa.

A glass of milk and thou

Marc Haber of the University of Birmingham notes that the study detected positive selection for lactose digestion the ability to drink and eat dairy products without experiencing socially repulsive and painful consequences.

In the last 8,000 years this variant increased to a frequency of 50 percent in Arabians, coinciding with the transition from a hunter-gatherer to herder-gatherer lifestyle. This variant is much rarer in the Levant, and almost absent outside the region, Haber says.

For this study, researchers at the Wellcome Sanger Institute collected 137 samples from people in eight Middle Eastern populations for sequencing. The genomic data was then analyzed at Wellcome Sanger and the University of Birmingham to look for variations in the genomes that could help map out human evolution from 100,000 years ago to today, the researchers explain.

It bears adding that apparently the domestication of the sheep, goats and cows wasnt driven by a desire to exploit their milk but to eat the whole animal, instead of hunting for toothsome herbivores.

What have we learned? That we thrived after the advent of agriculture but were brought low by climate change. That we did not thrive in the Arabian Desert but did when it was wetter and greener. Did we do that?

We did not the greening and aridification of North Africa and Arabia were due to planetary cycles, not human impact. Today Arabia contains the largest sand desert in the world (though not the largest desert), but by the next time the cycle swings and the area should, theoretically, turn green again, it may not happen, and thats on us.

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