Scientists working at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in California announced last week that an X-ray analysis has revealed a chemical connection between birds and dinosaurs.

Placing a 150 million year old Archaeopteryx specimen labelled ‘Thermopolis’ under a bright X-ray beam, the researchers discovered that the ‘dinobird’s’ chemical remains lay hidden just below the surface of the fossil.

By analysing how hair-thin X-ray beams interacted with the fossil, then comparing it to the composition of the surrounding rock, the scientists found significantly different concentrations of several elements, proving that they belong to the animal itself.

SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

“People have never used a technique this sensitive on Archaeopteryx before,” said SLAC physicist Uwe Bergmann, who led the study. “Because the beam is so bright, we were able to see the teeniest chemical traces that nobody thought were there.”

From this they mapped the chemical composition of Thermopolis, which was published last week in the Proceedings of National Academy of Science. The results revealed that sections of the feathers are actually real fossilised material rather than mere impressions and contain phosphorous and sulphur – chemicals that are present in modern day birds.

“We talk about the physical link between birds and dinosaurs, and now we have found a chemical link between them,” said University of Manchester geochemist Roy Wogelius, corresponding author on the paper.

“In the fields of paleontology and geology, people have studied bones for decades. But this whole idea of the preservation of trace metals and the chemical remains of soft tissue is quite exciting.”

All ten Archaeopteryx specimens that have been discovered have undergone numerous different visual analyses and scans in the past, none of which revealed the hidden dinobird’s chemical remains.

“You would think after 150 years of study, we’d know everything we need to know about this animal,” said University of Manchester paleontologist Phil Manning. “But guess what – we were wrong.”

The new technique also provides an alternative method of analysing other fossil remains, potentially revealing new information about animals that have been extinct for a very long time.

“We’re able to read so much more into these organisms now using this technology – we’re literally touching ghosts,” said Wogelius. “Chemistry is the real key in the future of paleontology. It’s a paradigm shift.”

But the method does have its limitations. Only remains that have not been removed from their surrounding rock can be analysed this way because it is necessary to establish that elements belong to a specimen and have not been transferred from foreign sources.

Japanese Knotweed causes millions of pounds worth of damage to buildings and roads in Britain every year. If attempted, eradicating the weed using traditional methods would cost around £1.5 billion pounds. But scientists have Cab International think they have come up with a natural solution, a tiny psyllid from Japan. The bug, set to be released here this year, will be the first live agent introduced in Europe to control a weed…

Marketed as a solution to environmental degradation and our dependence on peak oil, biofuels once appeared a promising ‘green’, renewable energy source. Research bodies worldwide published data supporting biofuel use, claiming they can reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

As a result, governments have subsidised a biofuel boom, providing tax incentives to drive a global expansion. The aim? To create thousands of jobs and reinvent the economy of the developing world. The Malaysian biofuel industry provides a model illustration of this, employing over 570,000 workers within its palm oil industry and racking up more than £12 billion export earnings last year.

Yet biofuels have become increasingly unpopular; with sceptics blaming the industry for jeopardising, what the Royal Society recently described as “one of this century’s key global challenges,” food security.

A bus that is powered by biofuel

It’s not surprising. Covering an eighth of Malaysia, oil-palm trees are cultivated on over 4.5 million hectares of land. But supply has grown slowly, while demand has soared. The result? A 70 per cent jump in oil prices last year, leaving locals unable to afford oil-based consumables.

The problem is not restricted to Malaysia. Few people dispute there is a global food crisis. In the three decades leading up to 2005, world food prices fell by three-quarters, according to the Economist food prices index. Yet from 2005 it took only three years for prices to rise by 75 per cent, with many crops reaching record highs in 2009.

As a result, violent protests have plagued many developing countries. In 2008, Haiti made headline news after food riots spread across the country. Most Haitians earn no more than $2 a day and struggled to feed themselves as the prices of rice and beans rose by 50 per cent.

And with the added concerns of climate change and a growing global demand for meat and dairy products, economists warn that prices are set to rise further.

As the situation deteriorates, the debate over what role biofuel expansion has played in accelerating price rises has intensified. In July 2009, the World Bank released a report blaming US and EU biofuel policies for causing between 70 and 75 per cent of food price escalation.

“Without the increase in biofuels, global wheat and maize stocks would not have declined appreciably and price increases due to other factors would have been moderate,” the report said.

However a paper titled ‘Evaluating biofuels’ written around the same time by Tim Searchinger, Princeton University’s agricultural specialist, criticised the degree to which biofuels are accused.

“Biofuel critics…have probably exaggerated,” he said. “Crop prices are a small fraction of the retail food prices paid in grocery stores, and an even smaller fraction in restaurants.”

Still, he accepts the increase has had a detrimental impact on developing countries, “particularly on the roughly one billion people who live on $1 per day or less and who are likely to be already chronically malnourished,” he said.

Biofuel demand has rocketed recently, with one third of US maize crops now grown to satisfy it. And this is set to rise further as the Government and transport sectors are pressured to reach ‘green energy’ targets and continue to finance the industry.

However at a ‘Food not Fuel’ demonstration held in London last year, protestors warned that biofuels made from food crops cannot provide a sustainable energy source as the world population grows and requires feeding.

They focused on the recent incorporation of bioenergy into transport sectors such as the aviation industry, deeming it an exploitation of the poor to support rich lifestyles.

“The aviation industry know they have their secret weapon growing somewhere in the poor world and that is biofuels,” says John Stewart, spokesperson for Heathrow Association for the Control of Aircraft Noise. “Flying is largely a rich person’s game done at the expense of the poor. Land will be taken that is needed for food production in the poor world to grow biofuels.”

However the European Association for Bioindustries (EuropaBio) believes sceptics are concentrating on short-term disadvantages. As much of the developing world survives on agriculture, they defend biofuel production by taking into account the potential effects of climate change.

“Global warming could be considered more of a danger than biofuels,” it was stated in a report published by EuropaBio. “The development of biofuels will bring direct opportunities to developing countries because their production will create many local jobs,” it states.

Even though the biggest effects of biofuel expansion are felt in developing countries, the industry has also begun to revolutionise British farming. The National Farmers Union recognised the economic benefit of a UK farmer converting to biofuel production.

“The biofuels market allows farmers the opportunity to add value to crops that would otherwise be exported at minimum price,” they claim. “The additional production of high-protein feed also reduces the need for imports such as soya and maize from USA, Canada, Brazil and others.”

But the benefits of biofuel expansion could be limited to production. Food prices are now fuelling a rise in the average UK family’s shopping bill of £750 a year, taking its toll on low income families.

With an increasing proportion of land allocated to the production of biofuels it is easy to blame the industry for aggravating food insecurity. Yet biofuels have certainly served one purpose by revealing the fragility of our agricultural system.

The sheer number of farmers who have recently abandoned their crops and turned to biofuel production reveals the true extent of an economic hardship that may not have otherwise been exposed for years.

Whether or not biofuels have accelerated a food crisis, they have certainly highlighted the fact there is one. And now the correct treatment must be applied.

A draft sequence of the Neanderthal genome has provided a new insight into evolution – including evidence of interbreeding with ‘modern day’ humans.
Scientists at the University of California in Santa Cruz sequenced the genome after extracting the necessary DNA from 40,000 year-old Neanderthal bones.

The results support the theory that early modern humans interbred with Neanderthals shortly after they migrated from Africa. Consequently sections of Neanderthal DNA will still be present in non-Africans living today.

UCSC & Santa Cruz aerial view

Neanderthals coexisted with humans in Europe for thousands of years before they died out around 30,000 years ago.

Until recently, findings from fossils led some scientists to theorise that they interbred with Europeans, but the genome reveals a presence of a Neanderthal DNA signal in people from East Asia and Papua New Guinea – places Neanderthals never lived.

“The scenario is not what most people had envisioned,” said the paper’s first author, Richard Green. “We found the genetic signal of Neanderthals in all the non-African genomes, meaning that the admixture occurred early on, probably in the Middle East, and is shared with all descendants of the early humans who migrated out of Africa.”

Three billion nucleotides comprise the draft genome sequence, which was determined by analysing several Neanderthal bones, including three found in Vindiga Cave, Croatia.

The bones were so badly degraded that 95 per cent of the DNA extracted belonged to bacteria and other microorganisms. Consequently the scientists had to use special sequencing technology to extract the specific DNA.

Green admits the sequence is probably riddled with errors. Yet the team were able to compare it with human and chimpanzee genomes which enabled them to catalog genetic changes that are now present in a high frequency in modern humans.

“It sheds light on a critical time in human evolution since we diverged from Neanderthals,” Green said.

“What adaptive changes occurred in the past 300,000 years as we were becoming fully modern humans? That’s what I find most exciting. Right now we are still in the realm of identifying candidates for further study.”

One of the few ‘critically-endangered’ Javan rhinos left in Vietnam has just been found shot dead by poachers, according to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF).

Rangers discovered the rhino carcass just over two weeks ago within Cat Tien National Park, South Vietnam, but they believe it could have been killed more than three months ago.

Possibly the rarest large mammal on earth, authorities believe there are less than 60 Javan rhinos existing in the wild and under five of these can be found in Vietnam.

A Dutch hunter with a dead Javan Rhino in 1895

One of the park officials, Bach Thanh Hai, said that the rhino had been shot through the leg before poachers removed its horn.

Rhino horn, believed by some to have healing properties, used to be traded legally for use in Traditional Chinese Medicines and Javan rhino population numbers rapidly declined as a result.

But in 1975, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora made the international trade of Javan rhino products illegal.

Yet surveys have discovered that the horn fetches a price as high as $30,000 per kg on the black market, encouraging poachers to continue hunting the species.

“This is a devastating development for the long-term prospects of this critically-endangered species,” said Barney Long, WWF Senior Program Officer for Asian Species.

“This loss is symbolic of the grim situation facing Vietnam’s many endangered species, including rhinos, elephants, tigers and the saola.”

Conservationists are now debating whether or not the Vietnamese population of Javan rhino has any chance of survival. Some say that the population could [still recover][ Go to WWF page on recovery], while others are arguing that rhinos will need to be introduced from the Indonesian population.

Scientists at the Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) may have developed a new treatment for malaria after finding a way to lock the parasites within infected blood cells and potentially trapping the disease.

New research suggests a cure for malaria is possible

The research aimed to discover how to block the invasion of healthy cells by malaria parasites, but this inadvertent twist could offer a different drug target for fighting one of the world’s most common and lethal diseases.

Malaria, a mosquito-borne infectious disease affects nearly half a billion people each year and has built a resistance to numerous treatments. But HSPH scientists have located a protein in the parasite that enables it, and its offspring, to escape from infected human red blood cells and rapidly invade healthy cells. Removing this protein confines the parasites to infected cells.

Manoj Duraisingh, Assistant Professor of immunology and infectious diseases at HSPH, was excited by the new discovery. “It was a surprise that this protein kinase, which we thought would be involved in red blood cell invasion, turns out to be essential for the parasite getting out of the cell.”

This is the first time a protein critical for parasite egress from red blood cells has been located using genetic techniques. But also this particular protein happens to be absent in humans. Consequently it is possible that a drug developed to target that protein could provide a safe treatment for people.

The research demonstrates the effectiveness of a new tool that the team used to locate numerous proteins from the kinase family and other signalling pathways at different stages through a malaria infection.

“We have a malaria genome of about 6,000 genes,” said Duraisingh. We now “need a means of prioritising specific gene candidates for further drug development.”

The HSPH team also developed another tool during the study – ‘Mature Invasive Parasites’ – that could prove extremely valuable in future research.

“One of the experiments mechanically releases the parasites, which have matured into virulent and invasive forms,” Duraisingh said. “People have been trying to get viable parasites in this form for study. This is a great resource for vaccine studies.”

Researchers at the University of Newcastle have successfully created three-parent IVF embryos in an endeavour to prevent the transmission of rare genetic disorders in mothers.

The technique aims to eradicate the faulty DNA within the mitochondria of egg cells, which cause serious disorders prevalent in around one in 6,500 births.

New IVF technique could eradicate faulty DNA

It has support from The Muscular Dystrophy Campaign, Medical Research Council and Wellcome Trust.

The introduction of a second woman’s egg cell, within which the nuclei of both sperm and egg of the original donors are placed, results in the embryo containing both parents’ genes plus a small amount of mitochondrial DNA from the donor egg.

“This is a very exciting development with immense potential to help families at risk from mitochondrial diseases,” said Prof. Turnbull. “We have no way of curing these diseases at the moment, but this technique could allow us to prevent the diseases occurring in the first place. It is important that we do all we can to help these families and give them the chance to have healthy children, something most of us take for granted.”

However, such a groundbreaking development does not exist without controversy. The manipulation of embryos to this extent for reproductive purposes is still unlawful in the UK and the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) allows research only under a strict licence preventing scientists from culturing these embryos for more than a few days.

Alongside legal concerns, a further hurdle for any future application of the technique in IVF clinics is also the ethical minefield surrounding scientific intervention in the creation of human life. The safety and efficacy of such a technique would need to be tested on healthy human embryos. According to researcher Jun-Ichi Hayashi of the University of Tsukuba in The Scientist, this would be “impossible” due to the associated ethical issues.

Despite the regulatory opposition to this technique, the researchers are continuing to develop studies, which they hope will prove the safety of the procedure. The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act was, after all, designed to accommodate unforeseen developments and contains provisions for future advancements in fertility treatments to be permitted by the Secretary of State.

The chance of detecting extra terrestrial life is now greater than ever before, Lord Martin Rees told scientists two weeks ago at a Royal Society conference in London. The meeting discussed current developments in the search for alien life and its consequences for science and society.

Lord Rees, President of the society, claims that with new technology it will now be possible to detect earth-like planets orbiting other stars, focusing the search for extra terrestrials.

“Were we to find life, even the simplest life, elsewhere that would clearly be one of the great discoveries of the 21st Century”, he said.

He told the audience that if life was discovered in outer space he suspected it would be in intelligent forms that we would not be able to conceive.

“There could be forms of intelligence beyond human capacity, beyond as much as we are beyond a chimpanzee”, he said.

However Dr Lewis Dartnell, astrobiologist and author of the book ‘Life in the Universe’, thought that the difference between humans and aliens could be starker than this, as intelligent life would  have evolved somewhere in the galaxy over the last four or five billion years.

“It would not even be the comparison between chimpanzees and humans, it would be between humans and something we possibly could not even conceive, and maybe will not even be able to recognise.”

“If we come across an intelligent species they would appear like Gods to us,” explains Dartnell. “They would have such advanced technology we would not be able to distinguish it from magic.”