A very cold day in South Mississippi and what better time than a news dump?
Local–For the first time in a very long time the Gulf Coast has experienced 7 days straight below freezing weather…….today at 0600 it is 19 and high is predicted to be 31….may not seem much to some but for the Deep South it is a big deal.
Personal–Monday I have a full day (yet again) of doctors….I will find out the results of my last biopsy….I am dreading that encounter.
Do you want to live to 100?
People who don’t eat meat may be less likely than meat eaters to reach the age of 100, according to a recent study. But before you reconsider your plant-based diet, there’s more to these findings than meets the eye.
The research tracked over 5,000 Chinese adults aged 80 and older who participated in the Chinese Longitudinal Healthy Longevity Survey, a nationally representative study that began in 1998. By 2018, those following diets that don’t contain meat were less likely to become centenarians compared with meat eaters.
On the surface, this appears to contradict decades of research showing that plant-based diets are good for your health. Vegetarian diets, for example, have been consistently linked to lower risks of heart disease and stroke, type 2 diabetes, and obesity. These benefits come partly from higher fiber intake and lower saturated fat consumption.
So what’s going on? Before drawing any firm conclusions, there are several important factors to consider.
Functional Synthetic Life….
While the world was busy arguing over AI-generated art and essays, a team at the Arc Institute and Stanford University was training AI on a much more complex language: the code of life itself. In a breakthrough study published on the preprint server bioRxiv scientists revealed they have successfully used generative AI to design viable bacteriophages — viruses that hunt and kill bacteria.
Traditional genetic engineering is a painstaking grind of trial and error. We’re often limited by our own “human” understanding of how thousands of genetic parts interact. To bypass this bottleneck, researchers turned to Evo, a new class of “genome language models.”
Just as ChatGPT predicts the next word in a sentence, Evo was trained on millions of pieces of genetic information to predict the next nucleotide in a DNA sequence. Evo 1 used ~2.7M genomes, Evo 2 used a curated atlas of 128k organisms (with 9.3 trillion nucleotides). By learning the “grammar” of viral evolution, the AI can begin to innovate, proposing holistic genomic architectures that have never existed in the wild.
The researchers used a well-known virus called ΦX174 as their template. It’s a tiny, elegant predator that infects E. coli bacteria. This virus is called a bacteriophage, meaning bacteria-eater. By “prompting” Evo with a few snippets of ΦX174 DNA, they generated thousands of synthetic candidates. After a rigorous digital filtering process, they took 285 of the best designs and physically synthesized them in the lab.
https://www.zmescience.com/science/biology/ai-generative-design-new-virus-species/
What could go wrong?
Water Water Everywhere……for many years we were taught that the water here on Earth came to us via the many meteor strikes in the early…..but is that fat?
For many years, planetary scientists have believed that water-rich meteorites arriving late in Earth’s history (OK, the time might be late to the researchers, but it’s still 4 billion years ago) could have delivered most of Earth’s water. But in a paper (https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2531796123) published in the Proceedings to the National Academy of Sciences, researchers led by Tony Gargano at the Lunar and Planetary Institute and The University of New Mexico analyzed a large number of Apollo lunar regolith samples using high-precision triple oxygen isotopes
They can’t do the same with Earth because tectonics and constant crustal recycling have erased the meteorite bombardment record. But the Moon is stable with no atmosphere, and therefore no weather. So, it has maintained an archive: lunar regolith, the loose layer of debris produced and reworked by impacts over billions of years.
Ever since the Apollo missions brought back lunar samples, scientists have analyzed that material by studying elements abundant in meteorites but scarce in the Moon’s crust. But lunar regolith is difficult to decipher. First, meteorite impacts can melt, vaporize, and rework material repeatedly. Second, geological processes after those impacts can separate metal from silicate, which complicates trying to figure out the type and amount of material that came from meteorites.
This is a disturbing find about our children….
An alarming proportion of kids just starting school are baffled by how books work.
In a new survey of primary, or elementary, school staff conducted by the UK charity Kindred Squared, the teachers estimated that nearly a third of students in reception class — the equivalent of pre-school in the US — did not know how to correctly use books. At times, some children even tried to swipe or tap the pages like a smartphone, reported Sky News.
It’s sounds incredible, but it’s not the first that we’ve heard of the bizarre phenomenon. The Kindred researchers define “using” books separately from literacy, and instead focus on a child’s ability to intuit turning the pages, rather than trying to interact with them like a touchscreen. Even though 44 percent of parents believe this is something a child should be able to do, the reality according to the 1,000 surveyed teachers is that 28 percent of them can’t. Teachers in the survey, which focused on other aspects of school readiness beyond reading, also said that around a quarter of children weren’t toilet trained and couldn’t eat and drink on their own.
The findings are a grim reflection of how smartphones have taken over our lives and will add to the concerns over screen time’s impact on a child’s development. Parents are themselves addicted to their devices and pass their bad habits along, spawning whole generations of “iPad babies.”
https://futurism.com/future-society/children-schools-books-like-phones
I apologize for the brevity of this post today but I had to deal with a family crisis….hopefully all will be back to normal soon.
Enjoy your Saturday…..keep warm and smile.
As always….Be Well and Be Safe….
I Read, I Write, You Know
“lego ergo scribo”