Researchers are close to discover the factor that determined the evolution of life on Earth

Credit: klss/Shutter Stock

Modern science has advanced significantly over the last couple of decades. We’ve managed to answer several of the world’s most long-standing questions, but some answers have continued to elude today’s scientists, including how life first emerged from Earth’s primordial soup.

However, a collaboration of physicists and biologists in Germany may have just found an explanation to how living cells first evolved.

In 1924, Russian biochemist Alexander Oparin proposed the idea that the first living cells could have evolved from liquid droplet protocells.

He believed these protocells could have acted as naturally forming, membrane-free containers that concentrated chemicals and fostered reactions.

Aleksandr Oparin (right) and Andrei Kursanov in the enzymology laboratory, 1938 Credit: wikipedia

In their hunt for the origin of life, a team of scientists from the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems and the Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics, both in Dresden, drew from Oparin’s hypothesis by studying the physics of 'chemically active' droplets (droplets that cycle molecules from the fluid in which they are surrounded).

Unlike a 'passive' type of droplet - like oil in water, which will just continue to grow as more oil is added to the mix - the researchers realised that chemically active droplets grow to a set size and then divide on their own accord.

This behaviour mimics the division of living cells and could, therefore, be the link between the nonliving primordial liquid soup from which life sprung and the living cells that eventually evolved to create all life on Earth.

"It makes it more plausible that there could have been a spontaneous emergence of life from nonliving soup," said Frank Jülicher, co-author of the study that appeared in the journal Nature Physics in December.

It’s an explanation of "how cells made daughters," said lead researcher David Zwicker. "This is, of course, key if you want to think about evolution."


Add a droplet of life

Some have speculated that these proto-cellular droplets might still be inside our system "like flies in life’s evolving amber".

To explore that hypothesis, the team studied the physics of centrosomes, which are organelles active in animal cell division that seem to behave like droplets.

Zwicker modelled an 'out-of-equilibrium' centrosome system that was chemically active and cycling constituent proteins continuously in and out of the surrounding liquid cytoplasm.

The proteins behave as either soluble (state A) or insoluble (state B).  An energy source can trigger a state reversal, causing the protein in state A to transform into state B by overcoming a chemical barrier. 

As long as there was an energy source, this chemical reaction could happen.

"In the context of early Earth, sunlight would be the driving force," Jülicher said.

Odarin famously believed that lighting strikes or geothermal activity on early Earth could’ve triggered these chemical reactions from the liquid protocells.

This constant chemical influx and efflux would only counterbalance itself, according to Zwicker, when a certain volume was reached by the active droplet, which would then stop growing.

Typically, the droplets could grow to about tens or hundreds of microns, according to Zwicker’s simulations. That’s about the same scale as cells.

The next step is to identify when these protocells developed the ability to transfer genetic information.

Jülicher and his colleagues believe that somewhere along the way, the cells developed membranes, perhaps from the crusts they naturally develop out of lipids that prefer to remain at the intersection of the droplet and outside liquid.

Credit: Lucy Reading-Ikkanda/Quanta Magazine

As a kind of protection for what’s within the cells, genes could’ve begun coding for these membranes. But knowing anything for sure still depends on more experiments.

So, if the very complex life on Earth could have begun from something as seemingly inconspicuous as liquid droplets, perhaps the same could be said of possible extraterrestrial life?

In any case, this research could help us understand how life as we know it started from the simplest material and how the chemical processes that made our lives possible emerged from these.

The energy and time it took for a protocell to develop into a living cell, and the living cells into more complex parts, until finally developing into an even more complex organism is baffling.

The process itself took billions of years to happen, so it’s not surprising we need some significant time to fully understand it.

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• A new theory on the Creation of the Universe, disprove the Big Bang

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• NOBEL PHYSICS 2016. Nobel Prize winners are David DJ. Thouless, F. M. Duncan Haldane and J. Michael Kosterlitz

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Researchers have found another planet (Wolf 1061c) that can sustain life: Located just 14 light-years away

Credit: The Wolf 1061 system. Credit: UNSW Sydney

An exoplanet with the prime conditions for life could be located just 14 light-years away, scientists report, in one of the closest neighbouring solar systems to our own.

New research suggests that a planet circling the star Wolf 1061 falls within what's called the star's habitable zone - making it one of the most likely neighbouring candidates for a planet that supports life.

This artist's concept illustrates a young, red dwarf star surrounded by three planets. Credit: wikipedia

"The Wolf 1061 system is important, because it is so close, and that gives other opportunities to do follow-up studies to see if it does indeed have life," says lead researcher Stephen Kane from San Francisco State University.

There are three planets orbiting Wolf 1061, but the planet Wolf 1061c is of particular interest.

Discovered in 2015, and with an estimated mass that's more than four times Earth's mass, Wolf 1061c is located right in the middle of Wolf 1061's habitable zone: the region where a planet's distance from its host star makes conditions suitable for liquid water and other life-supporting elements.

Our own Solar System runs by the same rules: conditions on Earth are just right for liquid water, whereas Mars is too cold.

To investigate whether Wolf 1061c might offer the same kind of habitability, the researchers analysed seven years of luminosity data from its host star and ran calculations of the exoplanet's orbit to figure out what the temperature and pressure on the surface could be.


The findings add weight to previous speculation that Wolf 1061c could be habitable – but just because the exoplanet is within a habitable zone, that doesn't necessarily mean it's one like Earth's.

The new data suggest that Wolf 1061c could have an atmosphere similar to what Venus had in its earliest days, meaning that any liquid water on the planet might not stick around for long. 

Previous research has suggested that high temperatures caused excessive water evaporation on Venus, and the newly formed water vapour in the atmosphere increased temperatures even further - a process known as a runaway greenhouse effect.

Now, the team thinks the same thing could be happening on Wolf 1061c, which is "close enough to the star that it's looking suspiciously like a runaway greenhouse", says Kane.

In addition, Wolf 1061c's orbit of its star varies much more quickly than Earth's orbit of the Sun, which would lead to chaotic climate changes such as a rapidly encroaching ice age (or warm phase).

So, is there life on Wolf 1061c?

We don't yet know, and to find out, we'll need more detailed measurements than what we have so far. To that end, Kane says NASA's James Webb telescope is one of the ways we'll be able to learn more about the exoplanet in the future.

Wolf 1061c Credit: Centauri Dreams

The telescope is launching next year, and its advanced optics should be able to reveal the atmospheric conditions on Wolf 1061c, and give us a better idea about whether water (and life) could really exist there.

Meanwhile, scientists from METI - the Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence organisation - are also interested in Wolf 1061c, and have been keeping a close eye on the exoplanet as they try to reach out to any alien life that might exist beyond our Solar System.

"I'm not holding my breath that we'll ever find evidence of life on Wolf 1061c," METI president Doug Vakoch told Rae Paoletta at Gizmodo.

"But the fact that there's a roughly Earth-like planet in the habitable zone of a star so close to our own Solar System is a good omen as we continue our search for life on other planets."

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• 10 fascinating planets outside the Solar System

• The newfound alien world named HD 131399Ab

• Mars could support extraterrestrial life. A new image published by the European Space Agency shows the place that would have hosted life

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A tremendous wealth of the Vikings was discovered on a small island in the Baltic Sea. The entire Swedish was much poorer

Riches found on the island of Gotland. Credit: Gabriel Hildebrand / The Royal Coin Cabinet

Stratification did increase on the island as time passed, though. Archaeologists have found that, throughout the ninth and tenth centuries, silver hoards were distributed throughout Gotland, suggesting that wealth was more or less uniformly shared among the island’s farmers. But around 1050, this pattern shifted. “In the late eleventh century, you start to have fewer hoards overall, but, instead, there are some really massive hoards, usually found along the coast, containing many, many thousands of coins,” says Jonsson. This suggests that trading was increasingly controlled by a small number of coastal merchants.

This stratification accelerated near the end of the Viking Age, around 1140, when Gotland began to mint its own coins, becoming the first authority in the eastern Baltic region to do so. “Gotlandic coins were used on mainland Sweden and in the Baltic countries,” says Majvor Östergren, an archaeologist who has studied the island’s silver hoards. Whereas Gotlanders had valued foreign coins based on their weight alone, these coins, though hastily hammered out into an irregular shape, had a generally accepted value. More than eight million of these early Gotlandic coins are estimated to have been minted between 1140 and 1220, and more than 22,000 have been found, including 11,000 on Gotland alone.

(Nanouschka Myrberg Burström)An example of one of the earliest silver coins minted on Gotland (obverse, left; reverse, right) dates from around 1140.

Gotland is thought to have begun its coinage operation to take advantage of new trading opportunities made possible by strife among feuding groups on mainland Sweden and in western Russia. This allowed Gotland to make direct trading agreements with the Novgorod area of Russia and with powers to the island’s southwest, including Denmark, Frisia, and northern Germany. Gotland’s new coins helped facilitate trade between its Eastern and Western trading partners, and brought added profits to the island’s elite through tolls, fees, and taxes levied on visiting traders. In order to maintain control over trade on the island, it was limited to a single harbor, Visby, which remains the island’s largest town. As a result, the rest of Gotland’s trading harbors, including Fröjel, declined in importance around 1150.

Gotland remained a wealthy island in the medieval period that followed the Viking Age, but, says Carlsson, “Gotlanders stopped putting their silver in the ground. Instead, they built more than 90 stone churches during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.” Although many archaeologists believe that the Gotland Vikings stashed their wealth in hoards for safekeeping, 

Carlsson thinks that, just as did the churches that were built later, they served a devotional purpose. In many cases, he argues, hoards do not appear to have been buried in houses but rather atop graves, roads, or borderlands. Indeed, some were barely buried at all because, he argues, others in the community knew not to touch them. “These hoards were not meant to be taken up,

” he says, “because they were meant as a sort of sacrifice to the gods, to ensure a good harvest, good fortune, or a safer life.” 

In light of the scale, sophistication, and success of the Gotland Vikings’ activities, these ritual depositions may have seemed to them a small price to pay.

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This fascinating periodic table shows the origin of each atom in the human body. "We are made of stardust"

Credit: Jennifer Johnson

Here’s something to think about: the average adult human is made up of 7,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (7 octillion) atoms, and most of them are hydrogen - the most common element in the Universe, produced by the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago.

The rest of those atoms were forged by ancient stars merging and exploding billions of years after the formation of the Universe, and a tiny amount can be attributed to cosmic rays - high-energy radiation that mostly originates from somewhere outside the Solar System.

As astronomer Carl Sagan once said in an episode of Cosmos, "The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of stardust."

To give you a better idea of where the ingredients for every living human came from, Jennifer A. Johnson, an astronomer at the Ohio State University, put together this new periodic table that breaks down all the elements according to their origin:

Jennifer Johnson

To keep things relevant for the human body, Johnson explains that she cut a number of elements from the bottom section.

"Tc, Pm, and the elements beyond U do not have long-lived or stable isotopes. I have ignored the elements beyond U in this plot, but not including Tc and Pm looked weird, so I have included them in grey," Johnson explains on her blog with the Sloan Digital Sky Survey.

The new periodic table builds on work Johnson and her colleague, astronomer Inese Ivans from the University of Utah, did back in 2008 - a project born out of equal measures of frustration and procrastination.

"This is what happens when you give two astronomers, who are tired of reminding everyone about which elements go with which process on a periodic table, a set of markers, and time when they should have been listening to talks," Johnson admits.

The periodic table works by identifying the six sources of elements in our bodies, and breaks them down into the processes in the Universe that can give rise to new atoms: Big Bang fusion; cosmic ray fission; merging neutron stars; exploding massive stars; dying low mass stars; and exploding white dwarf.

The way the corresponding colours fill up the boxes of elements shows roughly how much of that element is the result of the various cosmic events.

So you can see that elements like oxygen (O), magnesium (Mg), and sodium (Na), resulted from gigantic explosions of massive stars called supernovae, which occur at the end of a star's life, when it either runs out of fuel, or accumulates too much matter.

The incredible amount of energy and neutrons this releases allows elements to be produced - a process known as nucleosynthesis - and distributed throughout the Universe.

Old favourites like carbon (C) and nitrogen (N), on the other hand, exist mostly thanks to low-mass stars ending their lives as white dwarfs. 

Strange elements boron (B) and beryllium (Be), and some isotopes of lithium (Li) are unique in their origins, because they're the result of high-energy particles called cosmic rays that zoom through our galaxy at close to the speed of light.

Most cosmic rays originate from outside the Solar System, and sometimes even the Milky Way, and when they collide with certain atoms, they give rise to new elements. 

Interestingly, lithium is part of the reason why Johnson decided to distribute this new periodic table in the first place. If it's giving you a serious case of deja vu, it's because there's a similar version on Wikipedia:

Jennifer Johnson

But, as Johnson explains, the Wikipedia version is unclear in some places, and just plain wrong in others.

She says the "large stars" and "small stars" in the Wikipedia version don't make much sense, because nucleosynthesis has nothing to do with the radius of the stars, so we have to assume they mean "high-mass stars" and "low-mass stars", respectively. 

"High-mass stars end their lives (at least some of the time) as core-collapse supernovae. Low-mass stars usually end their lives as white dwarfs," says Johnson.

"But sometimes, white dwarfs that are in binary systems with another star get enough mass from the companion to become unstable and explode as so-called Type-Ia supernovae. Which 'supernova' is being referred to in the Wikipedia graphic is not clear."


Head over to Johnson's blog to access a higher resolution version of the periodic table, and if you need a colour blind-friendly version, she's got you covered:

Jennifer Johnson

Other articles on the same theme:

• Four new symbols have been added to Mendeleev periodic table ( Nihonium, Moscovium, Tennesseen and Oganessiin )

• 2016 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to researchers Jean Pierre Sauvage Sir J. Fraser Stoddart and Bernard L. Feringa

• A new theory on the Creation of the Universe, disprove the Big Bang

• What form does the atomic nucleus? New discovery may explain the mysteries of the Universe.

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DOCTORS SUCCESSFULLY TREAT TWO BABIES WITH LEUKEMIA USING GENE-EDITED IMMUNE CELLS

Scientists are using gene-editing techniques to fight cancer.

IT’S A PROMISING APPROACH, BUT STILL NEEDS A LOT MORE RESEARCH

In a study out this week in the journal Science Translational Medicine, a group of British doctors reported that they had successfully “cured” two infants of the blood cancer leukemia using a treatment that involves genetically modified immune cells from a donor.

The study was incredibly small—just two babies—and the infants have only been free of leukemia for 16 and 18 months. Technically, that’s not long enough to say they are cured. Declaring someone who previously had cancer as “cured” usually doesn’t happen until that person has been free of the disease for a few years, at least. But what’s significant about this study is that it combines a promising, novel approach—CAR T cell therapy—with a relatively new gene-editing technique called TALENS, which enables the direct manipulation of genes within a person’s DNA.

In the cancer community, CAR T cell therapy is already touted as a promising immunotherapy treatment (which involves harnessing a person’s immune system to fight cancer on its own), but in preliminary trials, it’s had its limitations. Before it can become a universal cancer treatment, these kinks and logistics need to be worked out. And researchers in the field think that many of them can be solved using gene-editing techniques such as TALENS, the one used in this study, as well as CRISPR, supposedly the easiest such technique to date.


First, what is CAR T-cell treatment?

CAR T, which stands for chimeric antigen receptor T cell, is a new type of cancer treatment which is not yet publicly available, but is in active clinical trials in the United States as well as many other countries such as the United Kingdom and China. The therapy involves removing some T cells (specialized immune cells) from a patient's blood. Then those cells are genetically altered in a lab, giving them special receptors on their surface called CARs. Once the cells are ready, they are infused back into the patient’s blood, where the new (CAR) receptors seek out tumor cells, attach to them, and kill them.
CAR T-cell trials are currently in phase II clinical trials in the United States. A few drug companies, including Novartis, have plans to make the therapy available as early as this year.


How does gene-editing help?

This new treatment has worked really well for blood cancers like leukemia, especially in young children. The problem, as the researchers point out in their study, is that each set of T cells have to be custom made for each patient. That takes a lot of time, and a lot of money. Further, it’s not always feasible, or even possible, to harvest T cells from leukemia patients who simply don’t have enough healthy ones to begin with.
And that’s where gene-editing comes in. The researchers took T cells from donor recipients and made a total of four genetic changes. The two they made with TALENS enabled the T cells to become universal—allowing them to be used in any person without the risk of rejection (a phenomenon called graft-versus-host disease, where the recipient’s immune system creates such an overwhelming response to the foreign cells that the patient can die as a result). The other genetic alterations added that signature receptor to seek out and attack cancer.


What are the limitations of this study?

The two infants in the study—aged 11 and 18 months—both had an aggressive form of leukemia, and had already been subjected to other treatments like chemotherapy and stem cell transplants. And the fact that they have remained cancer free is extremely promising. But again, the study was small. Further, according to a report in MIT Technology Review, many CAR T experts argue that because the children also received other treatments simultaneously (one had a stem cell transplant soon after receiving the CAR T cells) it’s impossible to know for sure whether the CAR T cells were the sole reason the cancer cells stayed away. “There is a hint of efficacy but no proof,” Stephan Grupp, director of cancer immunotherapy at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, told MIT Tech Review. “It would be great if it works, but that just hasn’t been shown yet.


What’s next?

The combination of CAR T cell immunotherapy with gene-editing remains an incredibly promising area of research. Not only to create a “universal donor” CAR T cell, but also to make the treatment more effective. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania are currently researching using the the gene-editing technique CRISPR to edit out two genes—called checkpoint inhibitors—that prevent CAR T from working as well as it should. The trial, which could take place this year, would be the first case of a CRISPR-altered cell being used in a human patient in the United States. In November, a Chinese group tested their first CRISPR gene-edited T cells in a patient with lung cancer.
However, it’s important to remember that CAR T cell therapy is in its early stages, and CRISPR/TALEN gene edited CAR T is even newer. There’s still a lot more work to be done, including many, many more studies like this one, with a lot more patients, before it’s available for everyone.

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Big Diamonds From Great Depths and how do Gemstones Form: The most valuable jewelry offers researchers important information from the depths of the Earth

Geologists studied these scraps of diamond leftover from the shaping of big jewels. Evan Smith/Gemological Institute of America

Evan Smith wanted to get his hands on the world's biggest diamonds — the kind that sit at royal scepters, and the ones that are always the target of elaborate movie heists.

But this wasn't for some nefarious get-rich-quick scheme. It was for science.

"The most valuable, the most prized, of all gemstones are coincidentally some of the most scientifically valuable pieces of the Earth," says Smith, a diamond geologist at the Gemological Institute of America.

The Ungraspable Value of the World's Largest Diamond The New Yorker

They're scientifically valuable because they come from a deep part of the Earth that humans can't access and don't know that much about.

GEMSTONE TREASURES OF THE WORLD POSTER  Jewelry auction Pinterest

Because of their rare size and quality, Smith thought these diamonds might have come from somewhere different, though no one knew exactly where.

"It was a total mystery," says Smith.

Layers of the Earth - Maggie's Science Connection

To solve that mystery, he'd have to look inside the diamonds, at tiny specs of junk no wider than a human hair that the crystals had brought with them on their journey from the deep.

"You really couldn't ask for a better vessel to store something in. Diamond is the ultimate Tupperware," says Smith.

World's Largest Rough Diamond Fails to Sell At Auction Forbes

A slogan like "the ultimate Tupperware" won't sell many engagement rings, but for scientists, the diamonds' Tupperware-quality is key. It makes the geologic equivalent of messages in a bottle.

But Smith couldn't just knock on a royal palace door and ask to crack open the crown jewels.

Price and Buying Guide for 4 Carat Diamonds

Evan Smith

Gemological Institute of America

Instead, he got the Gemological Institute of America to buy eight fingernail-sized chunks of those big diamonds, the scraps leftover from when the rough diamonds were cut into sparkly jewels.

Earth structure infographic Freepik

After grinding some down and cutting others open, Smith used fancy techniques involving big microscopes, lasers and electron beams to figure what was inside. He also used some not-so-fancy equipment — a magnet attached to a string — to figure out if they contained iron. ("After staring at these inclusions for hours on end over the course of many months, you start to resort to some alternative tools," he says).

Diamond Cutting Green Laser Machine Diamond Industry

Smith eventually found that many of the stones contained bits of garnet with a silicon content indicating that they must have formed under very high pressure. He also found iron and nickel, shrouded in invisible envelopes of fluid methane.

"That's unusual. This is the first time I've seen methane around an inclusion," he says.


When he took a nondestructive look at 53 other diamonds passing through the institute for quality grading, he found that 38 of them contained the same unusual materials.

As Smith and his colleagues wrote Thursday in the journal Science, those odd bits and pieces told him two important things.

How Do Gemstones Form? Gem Rock Auctions

"One, they tell us that these large, exceptional-quality diamonds originate from extreme depths in the Earth," he says, from about 200 to 500 miles below us.

That's about as far under our feet as the International Space Station is above our heads. And it's about twice as deep as where most diamonds are born.

"So, that in itself is pretty amazing," says Smith.


The second thing he learned is that the diamonds had formed inside oxygen-deprived patches of liquid metal. And that's the first hard evidence that the Earth's mantle is not a uniform stew of oxygen-rich rocks

World's First Realization of Ultrahigh Pressure and Ultrahigh Temperature at the Earth's Center - Finally reaching the Earth's Core — SPring-8 Web Site

It might not sound very exciting, says Kanani Lee, a mineral physicist at Yale University, but it is.

"It further complicates things, but it makes us have to think more deeply about what's going on in the planet because ultimately this does affect what we see up on the surface," says Lee.

As the Earth cooled over the last 4.5 billion years, its layers slowly revolved from the core to the surface and back again. Until recently, scientists expected that the mantle, the part of the planet between the continental plates and its core, would be pretty thoroughly mixed, with oxygen distributed throughout. But these diamonds show that until relatively recently, there were pockets that somehow managed to resist that mixing.

A rare diamond carried this tiny package of material from hundreds of miles underground. It's about as wide as a poppy seed. Evan Smith/Gemological Institute of America

And those pockets were long-lasting and widespread enough to produce diamonds that surfaced on multiple continents and that range in age from about 100 million years old to about a billion years old.

It's unclear if those pockets are still around now. Nevertheless, it means that the planet and its past could be a little messier than scientists first thought.

"It tells you that we have to refine our thinking about how the planet – whether it's Earth or any other planet — evolves with time. And that our simple pictures may not be good enough anymore if we can't explain these features," says Lee.

Those odd features are just slivers of a much larger picture — how Earth became what it is today, including its ability to host life.


"Over time, those are the things that shape the surface of the Earth. They're the materials that the whole surface of the Earth is built with," Smith says.

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• New Anglo-Saxon precious treasure, discovered by archaeologists in England

• A new treasure has been discovered in Greece it was found in the ruins of an ancient city dating back 2,500 years

• Giant Blobs of Rock, Deep Inside the Earth, Hold Important Clues About Our Planet

• New Report: Heavy iron isotopes leaking from Earth’s core

• It was discovered a huge reservoir of melted carbon deep beneath Earth's surface in the Western United States

• Earth's mantle cools more quickly than was previously thought

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Human blood, organs, and a surprising virus CCHFV detected in ancient pottery

photo: C. Wiktorowicz, et.al. Journal of Archaeological Science

Sometime between 600 and 450 B.C.E., a high-status individual in what is today Germany developed some disturbing symptoms: large bruises, bleeding from the nose and gums, and bloody diarrhea and urine. His fellow villagers, shocked—or perhaps intrigued—by his condition, stored his blood and organs in pottery vessels after he died, and interred them in a burial mound. 


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Now, using a novel technique based on analyzing ancient proteins, archaeologists have reconstructed the contents of these vessels to conclude that the individual likely died from Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever virus (CCHFV), a severe tick-borne disease that still kills people across the world today.

Crimean‐Congo hemorrhagic fever virus (CCHFV) ResearchGate

"This is the first identification of CCHFV or any hemorrhagic fever virus in the archaeological record," says Conner Wiktorowicz, the study's lead researcher and a Ph.D. candidate in archaeology at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana.

Congo-Crimean Hemorrhagic Fever Virus (CCHFV) structure A. Viral ResearchGate

It’s also the only known example of human blood and organs being buried in pottery vessels during this time in this region, raising the question of whether this was a more widespread practice, previously unknown to archaeologists.

Human blood, organs, and a surprising virus detected in ancient pottery

The contents of ceramic vessels decay over time, leaving a film of residue containing proteins from any organic matter stored within. 

Archaeologists are exploring new ways to recover and analyze these proteins. In the new study, a team led by Wiktorowicz ground up a small portion of each of the pottery fragments (or sherds), used detergent and other chemicals to dislodge any proteins stuck to them, and isolated and analyzed the protein fragments using various techniques. The team then fed this information into a national protein database.






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Vera Rubin, the American astronomer who confirmed the existence of dark matter, died at the age of 88 years.

Vera Rubin, the American astronomer who confirmed the existence of dark matter,  died at the age of 88 years, on the December 25, 2016.

First, the existence of this material was proposed by astrophysicist Fritz Zwicky in the 30s, but Rubin is one that confirmed his hypothesis. The observations made by scientists in the 70s were met with skepticism, but were confirmed in the decades that followed.

BBC - Universe - Vera Rubin photo: bbc

Reaching for the Stars - Vera Rubin photo: vq.vassar.edu

First, the existence of this material was proposed by astrophysicist Fritz Zwicky in the 30s, but Rubin is one that confirmed his hypothesis. The observations made by scientists in the 70s were met with skepticism, but were confirmed in the decades that followed.

Dark matter is invisible and impossible to detect because it does not absorb or emit light, so even until this day no one knows exactly what it consists of.

Proof of its existence came when astronomers began to weigh galaxies and noticed that they are much heavier than was originally thought. Vera Rubin worked with a new spectrographs to determine the stars from the edge moves faster than was observed since the first calculations use only the visible matter. It is argued that this difference in speed is due to dark matter.

Rubin's discovery was presented in 1980 in an influential paper that supported the idea that dark matter is an essential mystery that astronomers need to solve.


Other articles on the same theme:

• The First Stars in the Universe could provide clues about Dark Matter

• Dark Energy vs. Dark Matter

• Astronomers issued a shocking theory about the universe: 'The Universe is Flat!'

• The universe: Reading the future from the distant past

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Surprising new discovery: The brain continues to mature until the age of 30 years

The human brain does not fully mature until the age of 30 years. The new discovery raises questions regarding punishment of criminals under 30 years.

For the most sophisticated processes such as attention, perception, decision-making and risk-taking, the brain begins reaching maturity until the fourth decade. Both in the UK and the USA ,, maturity '' a person is a key factor regarding the investigation of a person.

Stages of brain development before birth ResearchGate

In a report by the House of Common Select Committee has recommended that young adults aged between 18 and 25 to be treated differently from older criminals in May. The report suggests that most young people involved in crime stop at the age of 25 years.

One of the greatest difficulties to establish when the brain is mature is the discovery of a man whose brain has matured. The key change that occurs in adolescence until age 20 and 30 years is thinning gray matter and white matter thickening.

The Science Behind the Male Brain Grand River Academy

Increased white matter is to increase connectivity between different brain regions. The brain that continues to develop is the prefrontal cortex. This area of ​​the brain located in the front of the head is involved in the activation of important factors such as attention, planning, decision making, control, logical thinking, personality development and short-term memory.


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