New Forms of Life

Late last year, it was reported that scientists had discovered new forms of life inside human bodies. They don’t match anything biology has classified.

A new class of RNA molecules was discovered inside bacteria that lives in the human body. They are circular genetic structures called obelisks. They differ from known viruses and bacteria. They appear to represent an unclassified category of RNA.

The discovery came from an analysis of genetic material obtained from microbial communities inside humans. Obelisks may be present across global populations. But their exact function is unclear.

These RNA entities are simple. They don’t encode proteins. They don’t form protective protein shells. They consist of short loops of RNA that replicate, although how remains a mystery.

More than 3,000 types of obelisks have been identified using computational tools designed to detect circular RNA structures in large genomic libraries. Researchers detected closed-loop RNA structures that lack protein-coding regions. As such, the molecules resemble viroids, which are also non-coding, circular RNAs. However, viroids infect plants, but obelisks are only found in human-associated bacteria.

Many of the obelisks are embedded in bacterial genomes, which suggests they may have adapted to specific bacterial hosts. No immediate health effects have been linked to obelisks, but their residence in bacteria that support digestion, immunity, and other function point to future research on the matter.

Obelisks don’t conform to definitions of viruses, plasmids, or other mobile genetic elements. They fall outside microbial categories.

The implications extend into evolutionary biology, particularly in the origins of RNA-based life. Some theories suggest early life may have relied solely on self-replicating RNA. Obelisks could offer insight into these early evolutionary stages.

Obelisks do exhibit genetic diversity. Different variants appear in specific regions of the body. This may reflect host-specific adaptations. It is unknown if they have any regulatory or ecological function in the microbiome.

There is scientific interest in non-coding and circular RNAs, which play roles in gene regulation and cellular function in plants and animals. Obelisks are different in that they seem to operate independently, with no participation in protein synthesis or cellular regulation.

The discovery shows that modern metagenomic-sequencing can detect molecular entities that don’t fit into established classifications.

Scientists expect further discoveries of novel RNA forms with unknown roles. It is not known if obelisks are ancient relics or modern molecular parasites. Research continues.

 

https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/medical/scientists-discover-new-forms-of-life-inside-human-bodies-that-don-t-match-anything-biology-has-classified/ar-AA1T7ARd?ocid=hpmsn&cvid=695189ccf8ea491b9920af677646366e&ei=56

Trilobite, Do You Bite in Threes?

When you spend a lot of time as a child/teen/adult reading everything you can find on all those fascinating creatures that inhabited the Earth before Humans came along, you come across a lot of strange names. You aren’t sure what those names mean. You might have a rough idea what that type of creature looked like, and that’s probably about all that you know. Because, really, who cares about an extinct sea creature that looked like some crazy kind of beetle?

So I decided to see what I could find out about trilobites, see if there was something about them that would prove interesting. I headed for Wikipedia to get a smattering of layman information before I looked for more advanced info.

Wow. The first sentence in the Wikipedia article is (basicly) “Trilobites ... are a group of extinct marine arachnomorph arthropods that form the class Trilobita. Guess we’d better put on our thinking caps for this one!

Extinct = they are all dead.

Marine = lived in the sea. Or maybe lived in water.

Arachnomorph = ? Well, arachnid is a type of spider, scorpions and what have you. (Thanks, dictionary.com, but why don’t you have the entire word in your list?) Morph has more than one meaning, but the one I’m most familiar with is “to transform”.

Arthropod = an invertebrate with a segmented body, jointed limbs and usually a hard shell that can be molted (discarded) should the creature get too big for it.

So far, what we’ve got is a water creature with a segmented body, limbs with joints and a hard shell. Might have looked vaguely like a spider. What comes to mind is a lobster, but they didn’t really look like that. The most common rendition I’ve seen for a trilobite is an oval shape. The larger ‘end’ is a pretty solid ‘half moon’ shape, with a ‘tail’ that goes down the middle of the oval to the smaller ‘end’. Behind the half moon head and on either side of the tail, filling up all the rest of the oval, are lots of limbs. But other trilobites had much different shapes. Let’s go on; what more can I find?

Trilobites ranged from 1/10 of an inch to about 12 inches. I think that entire range is for adult specimen.

The last of the trilobites died about 252 million years ago. But before that, they were quite a successful species, having spread all around the world and existing for over 300 million years. Scientists believe trilobites started their long journey as much as 700 million years ago, or possibly even further back. And if you think humans have some wildly different lifestyles, you obviously have not met many trilobites. Some were aggressive, and moved over the sea bed as predators, scavengers and/or filter feeders. Others were less aggressive and swam while eating plankton. Scientists are still debating whether or not any trilobites were parasites, while one group of trilobites appear to have had a symbiotic relationship with sulfur-eating bacteria.

Trilobites are thought to have originated in what is now Siberia. But that was over half a billion years ago, and with plate tectonics, who knows where that was actually located? Well, I’m sure there are people who do know, but I don’t. I’m going to have to look it up. Look for it in a later episode.

Anyway, as I said before, the trilobites all died out. Although they seemed to excel in changing shape, habitat and food throughout their long existence, eventually there was only one family left, and when its habitat disappeared, so did they. But while they were here, there were thousands of variations of trilobite. This diversity helped them fill many niches in the cycle of life.

On the other hand, there are some very distant relatives of the trilobites still living on Earth. Think horseshoe crab and others of that ilk.

And that is all I found that I understood in this 29-page article on Wikipedia. Go ahead and read it, if you want, but I warn you, it is FULL of very long words, most of them names of genus, family and specie, but not all. The ones that aren’t are used generously, with no explanation what it refers to, and which may not be in your dictionary. Have fun!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trilobite

Martian Shelter 4

We’re going to look at a different style of shelter this time. Something a little more complicated to build, I suppose, but which could be more... comfy, should we say?

This shelter is underground. Deep underground, not just some sand kicked over it. Building it would take tunnel-boring machines, which are quite heavy. Perhaps these would be shipped before people were sent, along with some robots to use the machines to bore out a network of tunnels and living quarters. Yes, apparently, some people are ready to go back to living in caves.

But ‘underground’ does not need to mean dark and unwelcoming. I watched an episode of a science show on Netflicks a couple weeks back, where the people were digging out a series of tunnels under New York City. They had some complicated equipment on the roof of a warehouse that gathered and concentrated sunlight before it was piped into the tunnels. Yes, I did say concentrated and piped. The tunnels they created were fully lighted, and with smooth, level floors, ceilings and walls, seemed far distant from a creepy cave.

The theory about living in man-made tunnels on Mars is that the gravity is weak and Mars doesn’t have any quakes, so you wouldn’t need as much support to hold up the ceilings; and there ‘probably’ would not be any moisture seepage. But, this plan does call for some heavy-duty insulation. Martian air may be thin, but Martian dirt and rocks are cold! Even without that insulation, the dirt and rocks would keep that nasty radiation out.

Of course, there are some drawbacks to this idea. There always are, right? All that equipment would be expensive to get there. And once it finishes digging out that first small habitat, then what? Oh, if there’s a big influx of immigrants, the equipment could be busy for years or decades, forming a city here, a city there... But eventually, one assumes, it will become obsolete or unneeded. A lot of money to just let rust away.

And it’s possible there’s more water on Mars than we think, so seepage could be a problem. With all the insulation installed to keep the internal temperature agreeable, we might not even know if seepage was occurring. I hear some of you thinking ‘Then it’s not a problem,’ but that’s not necessarily true. There could be some kind of mold, fungus or other organism that could start growing, possibly leading to health problems for our colonists. Water flows, and ice can expand and create cracks. This could - over time - undermine (so to speak) our efforts at adequate support.

If you own a house, you know you need to keep an eye open for such things, and if you don’t deal with small problems that crop up, you’ll eventually pay for it with a huge repair bill. But these tunnels would not be for an individual’s use; it sounds more like they would be cities, as least to begin with. Owned by committee, you might say. Would that ‘committee’ have the foresight to watch for and deal with these types of problems while they were small? Or would they be political entities, always kicking the financial can down the road?

Okay, if you don’t like the idea of a cave-dwelling, we’ll keep looking. I’ll see what else I can ‘dig up’ for you to consider.

http://www.imagineeringezine.com/e-zine/mars-makeshelter.html

Science Quiz

For 7 years, I’ve tried to ‘update my science [knowledge].’ I’ve always wanted to write science fiction, but my last science class was a quarter century ago, the one before that in 1970. I’d been busy working full time, raising kids, and so on. So when I retired and started writing science fiction, I found the vast research I did – and the results produced – shot huge holes in my time, the story background, and the plot I had picked.

Therefore, I subscribed to magazines, watched science and history documentaries, did other ‘educational’ things. I love to learn but… have I caught up? Am I ready to write science fiction?

Last week, I received the Jan/Feb 2017 issue of Discover. It includes a list of the ‘Top 100 Stories of 2016’. As I read through some of this list and the entry for each article, I realized I was not familiar with everything listed. Have I failed?

I decided to keep track of which stories I had and had not already heard about. Now, I don’t get to read a magazine in one sitting, so as of today, I’ve only gotten to #40. Don’t worry, I will finish this issue, but in the meantime, how many of these 40 items had I already learned about before this issue?

First, the ones I had no knowledge of:

#4. Oldest Human DNA Revises Our Family Tree (I’d heard of Neanderthals & Denisovans, but not this particular story)

#5. Biologists Create Organism with Smallest Genome

#9. New Particle Fizzles, Leaving Physicists to Soul Search

#10. Did Lucy Fall and Not Get Up? (I knew about Lucy, but this was a new hypothesis that she died by falling out of a tree.)

#11. Bangladesh Sits Atop Potential Major Quake Zone

#12. Big Data May Lead to Earlier Alzheimer’s Diagnosis

#18. Electrons ‘Split’ in New Form of Matter

#19. Science in a Post-Brexit World

#22. NIH Proposes Lifting ‘Chimera’ Research Ban

#23. Picky Primes (Prime numbers are not as random as believed.)

#24. Finding China’s Great Flood

#27. Battle for Access (Should scientific papers be available to all, or only those who can afford to subscribe to scientific journals?)

#28. A Bone to Pick about Philistines

#29. Go, Go AlphaGo (Computer learns game, beats human champion.)

#31. Pushing the Limits of Life in the Lab

#32. Disrupting Dopamine Dogma

#35. Mathematicians Find the Answers (I was unaware of this question.)

#36. T. Rex Evolution: Smarts First, Size Second

#37. The Rise and Fall of Theranos (Fake medicine exposed)

#39. Plenty of Room at the Bottom (Saving data with chlorine and copper)

#40. Pluto’s Hidden Ocean (I knew it had one, but this article is about how it’s freezing, breaking Pluto apart.)

And the ones I was familiar with:

#1. Einstein’s Ripples in Space-Time

#2. Earth’s Surprise Neighbor Hints at Exoplanet Abundance (planets of Proxima Centauri)

#3. A New Enemy Emerges (zika and mosquitoes)

#6. The Pace – and Problems – of Climate Change Accelerate

#7. Can America Avoid Another Flint?

#8. Looking for Planet Nine

#13. Persistent Heat Decimates Coral Reefs

#14. The Ozone Hole is Finally Healing (Still has a long way to go.)

#15. More Hobbitses, Prescious! (More remains of hobbit-sized hominids found.)

#16. We Are All Africans

#17. The Falcon Has Landed, Now SpaceX is Eyeing Mars

#20. Ceres Hosts an Ice Volcano

#21. Regulating the Brave New World of Human Gene Editing

#25. The End of the Periodic Table? (How many more elements can scientists make?)

#26. Drug Couriers for Brain Injuries

#30. Crowdsourced Study Pinpoints Depression Genes

#33. Planets of the Milky Way

#34. Superbug Arrives in the US (Bacteria not deterred by any known medicine.)

#38. A Sharp Find (Ancient sword found in Denmark)

How did I shape up? Hmm, 21 stories I did not know; 19 I was semi-familiar with. If I were in school, that would be less than 50%, a solid F. But, I can’t know everything, so I don’t feel bad. Besides, some of these articles have hinted at background knowledge or even a story plot. I am stoked!

What have you learned in the past 7 years? I bet it’s a lot, whether science or not.

Aliens Among Us

The other day, I read an article in Popular Science that scientists have discovered alien life. And they didn’t find it on some other planet, a moon or an asteroid; they found it right here on Earth.

Now, don’t get your nerves tied in knots. They found bacteria that is definitely alive, but isn’t life as we know it. Yeah, that old disclaimer. How many times have we heard some scientist say, “Well, if we do find life on ____, it certainly won’t be life as we know it.”?

And they didn’t even have to go off this world to find examples of life as we don’t know it.

When I was growing up, some of my favorite authors wrote about all sorts of aliens, from 3-legged, 3-gendered crabs to creatures where the male was about 1/8th the size of the female, attached himself to her, and his only purpose was to father children. And some tried to imagine creatures that didn’t use biology as we knew it, rock creatures that could move through the soil of their planet, crystals, intelligent energy.

I found them all great fun to read.

What’s so alien about this bacteria they’ve discovered? It doesn’t have the type of biology we are familiar with. It doesn’t eat carbohydrates or protein, and it doesn’t expel the type of waste products an animal or plant would. One strain eats electricity, or rather, electrons. Another expels electrons as waste.

Yes, there are probably several types of these ‘alien’ bacterium. Based on this article, at least two strains have been named, with one graduate student trying to culture at least 20 more. Even that has to be done differently, because it doesn’t grow on petri dishes. You have to supply an electrode of some kind. Or something that they would see as food.

They aren’t really aliens. They are part of Earth’s eco-system, and have been for billions of years. But they are alien from us, even more than the creatures that grow in the super-heated vents of water rising from underwater volcanoes.

That old phrase, ‘life as we know it’, always did irritate me. We would be on a different planet, so why would we expect to find Old MacDonald and Betsy the cow? Why not keep our minds open to all sorts of possibilities, and just see what’s out there?

Something a little smarter than bacteria, I hope.