China’s annual emissions exceeded those of all developed nations combined in 2019, the first time this has happened since national greenhouse gas emissions have been measured,according to a new report from the Rhodium Group.Chinese President Xi Jinpinghas vowed to make his country carbon neutral by 2060, and climate policy is seen as a major area of cooperation — and evencompetition– between the United States and China.But the new report highlights how difficult reducing China’s impact on the climate could be.
According to the researchers, global emissions reached 52 gigatons of CO2-equivalent in 2019, an increase of 11.4% over the past decade. And China’s share is growing fast.
While China’s emissions were less than a quarter of developed country emissions in 1990, they have more than tripled over…
Photos released by NASA could prove that there’s life on Mars.
The photographs show what appears to be fungi on the Red Planet, therefore proving that Mars could in fact be home to some forms of life.
The theory comes from microbiologist Dr Xinli Wei from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, astrophysicist Dr Rudolph Schild from Harvard-Smithsonian and Dr. Rhawn Gabriel Joseph after studying NASA’s Curiosity rover images.
They’ve dubbed the odd-looking specimens as a type of mushroom, MailOnline reports.
Describing the appearance of the mushrooms as being like ‘puffballs’, the scientists wrote in the study:
Fungi thrive in radiation intense environments. Sequential photos document that fungus-like Martian specimens emerge from the soil and increase in size, including those resembling puffballs (Basidiomycota). After obliteration of spherical specimens by the rover wheels, new sphericals-some with stalks-appeared atop the crests of old tracks.
This fungi then changes and grows along with Mars’ seasons, and is believed to grow up to a staggering 300 metres in the spring, but will disappear by the time winter comes round.
Leading on from this, scientists believe that this ‘may represent massive colonies of black fungi, mould, lichens, algae, methanogens and sulfur reducing species’.
Comparative statistical analysis found that nine ‘spherical specimens’, believed to be the so-called puffballs, emerged from beneath the soil. They were also found to have moved closer together over time.
In regards to how this proves that there could be life on Mars, the trio went on to explain:
Although similarities in morphology are not proof of life, growth, movement, and changes in shape and location constitute behaviour and support the hypothesis there is life on Mars.
Upon the discovery of fungus on Mars, it hasn’t just opened up the possibility of life on the planet, it’s also opened the possibility of buildings there being made out of it.
Last year, NASA announced that it was exploring technologies that could see people’s future homes on the Red Planet being made of the organisms.
Lynn Rothschild, the principal investigator on NASA’s myco-architecture project said at the time, ‘Right now, traditional habitat designs for Mars are like a turtle — carrying our homes with us on our backs – a reliable plan, but with huge energy costs. Instead, we can harness mycelia to grow these habitats ourselves when we get there.’
“Parents need to know that their children are not as safe as we think. It could happen to anyone. And I think that message needs to be said more. This could be anybody’s child,” Dykota Morgan’s father said
Published 2 hours ago•Updated 1 hour ago
NBCUniversal Media, LLC
After their 15-year-old daughterdied less than two days after testing positive for COVID, a couple from suburban Bolingbrook is warning other families to remain vigilant in following public health guidance and advocating for everyone to get vaccinated in order to protect their children.
Dykota Morgan, a freshman at Bolingbrook High School who was a multi-sport athlete with no known pre-existing conditions, died at around 3 a.m. Tuesday at Central DuPage Hospital, her family said.
“Parents need to know that their children are not as safe as we think. It could happen to anyone. And I think that…
Several days ago, the mega-popular podcast host Joe Rogan advised his young listeners to skip the COVID-19 vaccine. “I think you should get vaccinated if you’re vulnerable,” Rogan said. “But if you’re 21 years old, and you say to me, ‘Should I get vaccinated?’ I’ll go, ‘No.’”
Rogan’s comments drew widespread condemnation. But his view is surprisingly common. One in four Americans says they don’t plan to take the COVID-19 vaccine, and about half of Republicans under 50 say they won’t get a vaccine. This partisan vaccine gap is already playing out in the real world. The average number of daily shots has declined 20 percent in the past two weeks, largely because states with larger Trump vote shares are falling off the pace.
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What are they thinking, these vaccine-hesitant, vaccine-resistant, and COVID-apathetic? I wanted to know. So I posted an invitation on Twitter for anybody who wasn’t planning to get vaccinated to email me and explain why. In the past few days, I spoke or corresponded with more than a dozen such people. I told them that I was staunchly pro-vaccine, but this wouldn’t be a takedown piece. I wanted to produce an ethnography of a position I didn’t really understand.https://8c794c497f2ea8a779df98b223999ee0.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html
The people I spoke with were all under 50. A few of them self-identified as Republican, and none of them claimed the modern Democratic Party as their political home. Most said they weren’t against all vaccines; they were just a “no” on thisvaccine. They were COVID-19 no-vaxxers, not overall anti-vaxxers.
Many people I spoke with said they trusted their immune system to protect them. “Nobody ever looks at it from the perspective of a guy who’s like me,” Bradley Baca, a 39-year-old truck driver in Colorado, told me. “As an essential worker, my life was never going to change in the pandemic, and I knew I was going to get COVID no matter what. Now I think I’ve got the antibodies, so why would I take a risk on the vaccine?”
Some had already recovered from COVID-19 and considered the vaccine unnecessary. “In December 2020 I tested positive and experienced many symptoms,” said Derek Perrin, a 31-year-old service technician in Connecticut. “Since I have already survived one recorded bout with this virus, I see no reason to take a vaccine that has only been approved for emergency use. I trust my immune system more than this current experiment.”
Others were worried that the vaccines might have long-term side effects. “As a Black American descendant of slavery, I am bottom caste, in terms of finances,” Georgette Russell, a 40-year-old resident of New Jersey, told me. “The fact that there is no way to sue the government or the pharmaceutical company if I have any adverse reactions is highly problematic to me.”
Many people said they had read up on the risk of COVID-19 to people under 50 and felt that the pandemic didn’t pose a particularly grave threat. “The chances of me dying from a car accident are higher than my dying of COVID,” said Michael Searle, a 36-year-old who owns a consulting firm in Austin, Texas. “But it’s not like I don’t get in my car.”
And many others said that perceived liberal overreach had pushed them to the right. “Before March 2020, I was a solid progressive Democrat,” Jenin Younes, a 37-year-old attorney, said. “I am so disturbed by the Democrats’ failure to recognize the importance of civil liberties. I’ll vote for anyone who takes a strong stand for civil liberties and doesn’t permit the erosion of our fundamental rights that we are seeing now.” Baca, the Colorado truck driver, also told me he didn’t vote much before the pandemic, but the perception of liberal overreach had a strong politicizing effect. “When COVID hit, I saw rights being taken away. So in 2020, I voted for the first time in my life, and I voted all the way Republican down the ballot.”
After many conversations and email exchanges, I came to understand what I think of as the deep story of the American no-vaxxer. And I think the best way to see it clearly is to contrast it with my own story.
My view of the vaccines begins with my view of the pandemic. I really don’t want to get COVID-19. Not only do I want to avoid an illness with uncertain long-term implications, but I also don’t want to pass it along to somebody in a high-risk category, such as my grandmother or an immunocompromised stranger. For more than a year, I radically changed my life to avoid infection. So I was thrilled to hear that the vaccines were effective at blocking severe illness and transmission. I eagerly signed up to take both my shots, even after reading all about the side effects.
The under-50 no-vaxxers’ deep story has a very different starting place. It begins like this:
The coronavirus is a wildly overrated threat. Yes, it’s appropriate and good to protect old and vulnerable people. But I’m not old or vulnerable. If I get it, I’ll be fine. In fact, maybe I have gotten it, and I am fine. I don’t know why I should consider this disease more dangerous than driving a car, a risky thing I do every day without a moment’s worry. Liberals, Democrats, and public-health elites have been so wrong so often, we’d be better off doing the opposite of almost everything they say.
Just as my COVID-19 story shapes my vaccine eagerness, this group’s COVID-19 story shapes their vaccine skepticism. Again and again, I heard variations on this theme:
I don’t need some novel pharmaceutical product to give me permission to do the things I’m already doing. This isn’t even an FDA-approved vaccine; it’s authorized for an emergency. Well, I don’t consider COVID-19 a personal emergency. So why would I sign up to be an early guinea pig for a therapy that I don’t need, whose long-term effects we don’t understand? I’d rather bet on my immune system than on Big Pharma.
For both yes-vaxxers like me and the no-vaxxers I spoke with, feelings about the vaccine are intertwined with feelings about the pandemic.
Although I think I’m right about the vaccines, the truth is that my thinking on this issue is motivated. I canceled vacations, canceled my wedding, avoided indoor dining, and mostly stayed home for 15 months. All that sucked. I am rooting for the vaccines to work.
But the no-vaxxers I spoke with just don’t care. They’ve traveled, eaten in restaurants, gathered with friends inside, gotten COVID-19 or not gotten COVID-19, survived, and decided it was no big deal. What’s more, they’ve survived while flouting the advice of the CDC, the WHO, Anthony Fauci, Democratic lawmakers, and liberals, whom they don’t trust to give them straight answers on anything virus-related.
The no-vaxxers’ reasoning is motivated too. Specifically, they’re motivated to distrust public-health authorities who they’ve decided are a bunch of phony neurotics, and they’re motivated to see the vaccines as a risky pharmaceutical experiment, rather than as a clear breakthrough that might restore normal life (which, again, they barely stopped living). This is the no-vaxxer deep story in a nutshell: I trust my own cells more than I trust pharmaceutical goop; I trust my own mind more than I trust liberal elites.
So what will change their minds?
I cannot imagine that any amount of hectoring or shaming, or proclamations from the public-health or Democratic communities, will make much of a difference for this group. “I’ve lost all faith in the media and public-health officials,”said Myles Pindus, a 24-year-old in Brooklyn, who told me he is skeptical of the mRNA vaccines and is interested in the Johnson & Johnson shot. “It might sound crazy, but I’d rather go to Twitter and check out a few people I trust than take guidance from the CDC, or WHO, or Fauci,” Baca, the Colorado truck driver, told me. Other no-vaxxers offered similar appraisals of various Democrats and liberals, but they were typically less printable.
From my conversations, I see three ways to persuade no-vaxxers: make it more convenient to get a shot; make it less convenient to not get a shot; or encourage them to think more socially.
1.Try something like “DoorDash for vaccines.”
To get people to participate in an activity they don’t really care about, you make it as easy and tantalizing as possible. Some people have already suggested offering money, free food, or even lottery tickets in exchange for vaccination. But one source who asked to remain anonymous suggested that state health departments should offer something like DoorDash for vaccines.
With any new technology, the early adopters are the ones most willing to tolerate glitches and a bad experience. That’s fine when supply is limited, but as you try to get to mass market, you need to perfect the product and experience.
All of which to say: Cities should start to roll out a vaccine in-home service, which people can book on short notice. Providers come to you, and maybe bring you some sort of gift along with the vaccine. Cities should have enough capacity and staff to do that at this point, and a service such as this would be key to getting young people in particular to take it.
2.Make it suck more to not be vaccinated.
Governments and companies may find that soft bribery is the best way to get the no-vaxxers to the clinics. Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, for example, has linked her state reopening policies to progress in shots, letting restaurants and bars increase their occupancy once 60 percent of the state has been vaccinated, and promising to lift mask orders when 70 percent of Michiganders have received both doses.
Millions of people want to go to sporting events, attend concerts, or travel internationally. If those who cannot prove that they’ve been vaccinated are denied service, I expect that some will sign up for shots purely as a means of reengaging in their favorite activities. “If all or most countries instituted vaccine passports, that might change [my mind],” Younes, the attorney, told me.https://8c794c497f2ea8a779df98b223999ee0.safeframe.googlesyndication.com/safeframe/1-0-38/html/container.html
But the cultural backlash against domestic restrictions could be prodigious. If blue-state governors and sports stadiums deny economic activities to the unvaccinated while red-state stadiums allow anybody to sit at a bar or in the bleachers, it will deepen the culture-war tensions between scolding liberals and accommodating conservatives in a way that might not be good for Democrats politically, even if they have the upper hand in the public-health argument.
3.“What if natural immunity isn’t enough to protect your grandmother?”
The most common argument against the vaccines is: My immune system is good enough for me. One counterargument is: That’s right, but the vaccines are even better at protecting others.
Even for people who have already recovered from COVID-19, getting fully vaccinated strengthens the antibody and T-cell protection against the disease and likely provides superior protection from variants that can pierce our natural immunity.
Why do more levels of protection matter? Because the vaccines aren’t just about building a defensive wall around safe young bodies. We’re also collectively building a wall around the more vulnerable members of society. And little holes in the wall can lead to unnecessary deaths.
In April, the CDC reported that an unvaccinated health-care worker set off an outbreak in a mostly vaccinated Kentucky nursing home. Several vaccinated seniors got sick and one vaccinated resident died.* To be absolutely clear: The vaccines worked to protect most residents. But no vaccine is perfect, and the COVID-19 vaccines won’t stop all infections, especially for some people with weak immune systems.
I made this case to several no-vaxxers: Your grandparents, elderly neighbors, and immunocompromised friends will be safer if you’re vaccinated, even if you’ve already been infected. I played with the “COVID is no worse than driving” metaphor that many of them offered. I agree that driving is acceptably safe for most people, I said. But imagine, I added, if you could have a forward collision warning system installed in your car for free? An already-pretty-safe activity would become an even safer activity; and what’s more, you’d be protecting other people on the road at minimal cost to yourself.
I can’t tell you this argument got a lot of people to drop the phone, sprint to a vaccine clinic, and sign up for a Fauci tattoo on their arm. The truth is that I’m not sure that I changed anybody’s mind. But I can honestly say that this argument gave several no-vaxxers a bit of pause. They responded by talking about chains of transmission throughout the community, rather than focusing on their own immune system. Several of them asked to see evidence of my position so that they could examine it for themselves.
The United States suffers from a deficit of imagining the lives of other people. This is true of my side: Vaccinated liberals don’t take much time to calmly hear out the logic of those refusing the shots. But it’s also true of the no-vaxxers, who might reconsider their view if they grasped the far-ranging consequences of their private vaccination decisions. Instead of shaming and hectoring, our focus should be on broadening their circle of care: Your cells might be good enough to protect you, but the shots are better to protect Grandpa.
Mhudiblu, a female bonobo, holds her daughter Akema. Mhudiblu’s DNA was sequenced to help construct a new, high-quality bonobo genome assembly for great ape and other hominid evolution and genetic research Credit: Claudia Philipp/Wuppertal Zoo Germany
Chimpanzees and bonobos diverged comparatively recently in great ape evolutionary history. They split into different species about 1.7 million years ago. Some of the distinctions between chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) and bonobo (Pan paniscus) lineages have been made clearer by a recent achievement in hominid genomics.
A new bonobogenome assembly has been constructed with a multiplatform approach and without relying on reference genomes. According to the researchers on this project, more than 98% of the genes are now completely annotated and 99% of the gaps are closed.
The high quality of this assembly is allowing scientists to more accurately compare the bonobo genome to that of other great apes—the gorilla, orangutan, chimpanzee—as well as to the modern human. All these species, as well as extinct, ancient, human-like beings, are referred to as hominids.
Because chimpanzee and bonobo are also the closest living species to modern humans, comparing higher-quality genomes could help uncover genetic changes that set the human species apart.
In a May 5 Nature paper, researchers explain how they developed and analyzed the new bonobo assembly, and what juxtaposing it to other great ape genomes is revealing.
The multi-institutional project was led by Yafei Mao, of the Department of Genome Sciences at the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle, and Claudia R. Catacchio, of the Department of Biology at the University of Bari, Italy. The senior scientists were Evan Eichler, professor of genome sciences at the UW School of Medicine, and Mario Ventura of the University of Bari. Eichler is also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator.
By comparing the bonobo genome to that of other great apes, the researchers found more than 5,571 structural variants that distinguished the bonobo and chimpanzee lineages.
The researchers explained in the paper, “We focused on genes that have been lost, changed in structure, or expanded in the last few million years of bonobo evolution.”
They were particularly interested in what is called incomplete lineage sorting. This is the less-than-perfect passing along of alleles into the separating populations as species diverge, as well as the loss of alleles or their genetic drift. Analyses of incomplete lineage sorting can help clarify gene evolution and the genetic relationships among present-day hominids.
The higher-quality bonobo genome assembly enabled the researchers to generate a higher resolution map comparing incomplete lineage sorting in hominids. They identified regions that are inconsistent with the species tree. In addition, they estimate that 2.52% of the human genome is more closely related to the bonobo genome than the chimpanzee genome, and 2.55% of the human genome is more closely related to the chimpanzee genome than the bonobo genome.
The total proportion based on incomplete lineage sorting analysis (5.07%) is almost double earlier estimates (3.1%).
“We predict a greater fraction of the human genome is genetically closer to chimpanzees and bonobos compared to previous studies,” the researchers note.
The researchers took their incomplete lineage sorting analysis back 15 million years to include genome data from orangutan and gorilla. This increased the incomplete lineage sorting estimates for the hominid genomes to more than 36.5%, which is only slightly more than earlier predictions.
Surprisingly, more than a quarter of these regions are distributed non-randomly, have elevated rates of amino acid replacement, and are enriched for particular genes with related functions such as immunity. This suggests that incomplete lineage sorting might work to increase diversity for specific regions.
The new bonobo genome assembly is named for the female great ape whose DNA was sequenced, Mhudiblu, a current resident of the Wuppertal Zoo in Germany. The researchers estimate that sequence accuracy of the new assembly is about 99.97% to 99.99%, and closes about 99.5% of the 108,390 gaps in the previous bonobo assembly.
The bonobo is one of the last great ape genomes to be sequenced with more advanced long-read genome sequence technologies, the researchers noted.
“Its sequence will facilitate more systematic comparisons between human, chimpanzee, gorilla and orangutan without the limitations of technological differences in sequencing and assembly of the original reference,” according to the researchers.
Explo
MAY 5, 2021
New bonobo genome fine tunes great ape evolution studies
Mhudiblu, a female bonobo, holds her daughter Akema. Mhudiblu’s DNA was sequenced to help construct a new, high-quality bonobo genome assembly for great ape and other hominid evolution and genetic research Credit: Claudia Philipp/Wuppertal Zoo Germany
Chimpanzees and bonobos diverged comparatively recently in great ape evolutionary history. They split into different species about 1.7 million years ago. Some of the distinctions between chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) and bonobo (Pan paniscus) lineages have been made clearer by a recent achievement in hominid genomics.
A new bonobogenome assembly has been constructed with a multiplatform approach and without relying on reference genomes. According to the researchers on this project, more than 98% of the genes are now completely annotated and 99% of the gaps are closed.
The high quality of this assembly is allowing scientists to more accurately compare the bonobo genome to that of other great apes—the gorilla, orangutan, chimpanzee—as well as to the modern human. All these species, as well as extinct, ancient, human-like beings, are referred to as hominids.
Because chimpanzee and bonobo are also the closest living species to modern humans, comparing higher-quality genomes could help uncover genetic changes that set the human species apart.
In a May 5 Nature paper, researchers explain how they developed and analyzed the new bonobo assembly, and what juxtaposing it to other great ape genomes is revealing.
The multi-institutional project was led by Yafei Mao, of the Department of Genome Sciences at the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle, and Claudia R. Catacchio, of the Department of Biology at the University of Bari, Italy. The senior scientists were Evan Eichler, professor of genome sciences at the UW School of Medicine, and Mario Ventura of the University of Bari. Eichler is also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator.
By comparing the bonobo genome to that of other great apes, the researchers found more than 5,571 structural variants that distinguished the bonobo and chimpanzee lineages.
The researchers explained in the paper, “We focused on genes that have been lost, changed in structure, or expanded in the last few million years of bonobo evolution.”
They were particularly interested in what is called incomplete lineage sorting. This is the less-than-perfect passing along of alleles into the separating populations as species diverge, as well as the loss of alleles or their genetic drift. Analyses of incomplete lineage sorting can help clarify gene evolution and the genetic relationships among present-day hominids.
The higher-quality bonobo genome assembly enabled the researchers to generate a higher resolution map comparing incomplete lineage sorting in hominids. They identified regions that are inconsistent with the species tree. In addition, they estimate that 2.52% of the human genome is more closely related to the bonobo genome than the chimpanzee genome, and 2.55% of the human genome is more closely related to the chimpanzee genome than the bonobo genome.
The total proportion based on incomplete lineage sorting analysis (5.07%) is almost double earlier estimates (3.1%).
“We predict a greater fraction of the human genome is genetically closer to chimpanzees and bonobos compared to previous studies,” the researchers note.
The researchers took their incomplete lineage sorting analysis back 15 million years to include genome data from orangutan and gorilla. This increased the incomplete lineage sorting estimates for the hominid genomes to more than 36.5%, which is only slightly more than earlier predictions.
Surprisingly, more than a quarter of these regions are distributed non-randomly, have elevated rates of amino acid replacement, and are enriched for particular genes with related functions such as immunity. This suggests that incomplete lineage sorting might work to increase diversity for specific regions.
The new bonobo genome assembly is named for the female great ape whose DNA was sequenced, Mhudiblu, a current resident of the Wuppertal Zoo in Germany. The researchers estimate that sequence accuracy of the new assembly is about 99.97% to 99.99%, and closes about 99.5% of the 108,390 gaps in the previous bonobo assembly.
The bonobo is one of the last great ape genomes to be sequenced with more advanced long-read genome sequence technologies, the researchers noted.
“Its sequence will facilitate more systematic comparisons between human, chimpanzee, gorilla and orangutan without the limitations of technological differences in sequencing and assembly of the original reference,” according to the researchers.
Mhudiblu, a female bonobo, holds her daughter Akema. Mhudiblu’s DNA was sequenced to help construct a new, high-quality bonobo genome assembly for great ape and other hominid evolution and genetic research Credit: Claudia Philipp/Wuppertal Zoo Germany
Chimpanzees and bonobos diverged comparatively recently in great ape evolutionary history. They split into different species about 1.7 million years ago. Some of the distinctions between chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) and bonobo (Pan paniscus) lineages have been made clearer by a recent achievement in hominid genomics.
A new bonobogenome assembly has been constructed with a multiplatform approach and without relying on reference genomes. According to the researchers on this project, more than 98% of the genes are now completely annotated and 99% of the gaps are closed.
The high quality of this assembly is allowing scientists to more accurately compare the bonobo genome to that of other great apes—the gorilla, orangutan, chimpanzee—as well as to the modern human. All these species, as well as extinct, ancient, human-like beings, are referred to as hominids.
Because chimpanzee and bonobo are also the closest living species to modern humans, comparing higher-quality genomes could help uncover genetic changes that set the human species apart.
In a May 5 Nature paper, researchers explain how they developed and analyzed the new bonobo assembly, and what juxtaposing it to other great ape genomes is revealing.
The multi-institutional project was led by Yafei Mao, of the Department of Genome Sciences at the University of Washington School of Medicine in Seattle, and Claudia R. Catacchio, of the Department of Biology at the University of Bari, Italy. The senior scientists were Evan Eichler, professor of genome sciences at the UW School of Medicine, and Mario Ventura of the University of Bari. Eichler is also a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator.
By comparing the bonobo genome to that of other great apes, the researchers found more than 5,571 structural variants that distinguished the bonobo and chimpanzee lineages.
The researchers explained in the paper, “We focused on genes that have been lost, changed in structure, or expanded in the last few million years of bonobo evolution.”
They were particularly interested in what is called incomplete lineage sorting. This is the less-than-perfect passing along of alleles into the separating populations as species diverge, as well as the loss of alleles or their genetic drift. Analyses of incomplete lineage sorting can help clarify gene evolution and the genetic relationships among present-day hominids.
The higher-quality bonobo genome assembly enabled the researchers to generate a higher resolution map comparing incomplete lineage sorting in hominids. They identified regions that are inconsistent with the species tree. In addition, they estimate that 2.52% of the human genome is more closely related to the bonobo genome than the chimpanzee genome, and 2.55% of the human genome is more closely related to the chimpanzee genome than the bonobo genome.
The total proportion based on incomplete lineage sorting analysis (5.07%) is almost double earlier estimates (3.1%).
“We predict a greater fraction of the human genome is genetically closer to chimpanzees and bonobos compared to previous studies,” the researchers note.
The researchers took their incomplete lineage sorting analysis back 15 million years to include genome data from orangutan and gorilla. This increased the incomplete lineage sorting estimates for the hominid genomes to more than 36.5%, which is only slightly more than earlier predictions.
Surprisingly, more than a quarter of these regions are distributed non-randomly, have elevated rates of amino acid replacement, and are enriched for particular genes with related functions such as immunity. This suggests that incomplete lineage sorting might work to increase diversity for specific regions.
The new bonobo genome assembly is named for the female great ape whose DNA was sequenced, Mhudiblu, a current resident of the Wuppertal Zoo in Germany. The researchers estimate that sequence accuracy of the new assembly is about 99.97% to 99.99%, and closes about 99.5% of the 108,390 gaps in the previous bonobo assembly.
The bonobo is one of the last great ape genomes to be sequenced with more advanced long-read genome sequence technologies, the researchers noted.
“Its sequence will facilitate more systematic comparisons between human, chimpanzee, gorilla and orangutan without the limitations of technological differences in sequencing and assembly of the original reference,” according to the researchers.
Sea turtles are known for relying on magnetic signatures to find their way across thousands of miles to the very beaches where they hatched. Now, researchers reporting in the journal Current Biology on May 6, 2021, have some of the first solid evidence that sharks also rely on magnetic fields for their long-distance forays across the sea.
“It had been unresolved how sharks managed to successfully navigate during migration to targeted locations,” said Save Our Seas Foundation project leader Bryan Keller, also of Florida State University Coastal and Marine Laboratory. “This research supports the theory that they use the earth’s magnetic field to help them find their way; it’s nature’s GPS.”
Researchers had known that some species of sharks travel over long distances to reach very specific locations year after year. They also knew that sharks are sensitive to electromagnetic fields. As a result, scientists had long speculated that sharks were using magnetic fields to navigate. But the challenge was finding a way to test this in sharks.
“To be honest, I am surprised it worked,” Keller said. “The reason this question has been withstanding for 50 years is because sharks are difficult to study.”
This image shows an overhead shot of bonnetheads in the holding tank. Credit: Bryan Keller
Keller realized the needed studies would be easier to do in smaller sharks. They also needed a species known for returning each year to specific locations. He and his colleagues settled on bonnetheads (Sphyrna tiburo).
“The bonnethead returns to the same estuaries each year,” Keller said. “This demonstrates that the sharks knows where ‘home’ is and can navigate back to it from a distant location.”
The question then was whether bonnetheads managed those return trips by relying on a magnetic map. To find out, the researchers used magnetic displacement experiments to test 20 juvenile, wild-caught bonnetheads. In their studies, they exposed sharks to magnetic conditions representing locations hundreds of kilometers away from where the sharks were actually caught. Such studies allow for straightforward predictions about how the sharks should subsequently orient themselves if they were indeed relying on magnetic cues.
If sharks derive positional information from the geomagnetic field, the researchers predicted northward orientation in the southern magnetic field and southward orientation in the northern magnetic field, as the sharks attempted to compensate for their perceived displacement. They predicted no orientation preference when sharks were exposed to the magnetic field that matched their capture site. And, it turned out, the sharks acted as they’d predicted when exposed to fields within their natural range.
The researchers suggest that this ability to navigate based on magnetic fields may also contribute to the population structure of sharks. The findings in bonnetheads also likely help to explain impressive feats by other shark species. For instance, one great white shark was documented to migrate between South Africa and Australia, returning to the same exact location the following year.
This figure shows how the experiment assessed the ability of bonnethead sharks to use the Earth’s magnetic field to navigate. Credit: Keller et al./Current Biology
“How cool is it that a shark can swim 20,000 kilometers round trip in a three-dimensional ocean and get back to the same site?” Keller asked. “It really is mind blowing. In a world where people use GPS to navigate almost everywhere, this ability is truly remarkable.”
In future studies, Keller says he’d like to explore the effects of magnetic fields from anthropogenic sources such as submarine cables on sharks. They’d also like to study whether and how sharks rely of magnetic cues not just during long-distance migration but also during their everyday behavior.
Reference: “Map-like use of Earth’s magnetic field in sharks” by Bryan A. Keller, Nathan F. Putman, R. Dean Grubbs, David S. Portnoy and Timothy P. Murphy, 6 May 2021, Current Biology. DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2021.03.103
This work was supported by the Save Our Seas Foundation and the Florida State University Coastal and Marine Laboratory.
Sea turtles are known for relying on magnetic signatures to find their way across thousands of miles to the very beaches where they hatched. Now, researchers reporting in the journal Current Biology on May 6, 2021, have some of the first solid evidence that sharks also rely on magnetic fields for their long-distance forays across the sea.
“It had been unresolved how sharks managed to successfully navigate during migration to targeted locations,” said Save Our Seas Foundation project leader Bryan Keller, also of Florida State University Coastal and Marine Laboratory. “This research supports the theory that they use the earth’s magnetic field to help them find their way; it’s nature’s GPS.”
Researchers had known that some species of sharks travel over long distances to reach very specific locations year after year. They also knew that sharks are sensitive to electromagnetic fields. As a result, scientists had long speculated that sharks were using magnetic fields to navigate. But the challenge was finding a way to test this in sharks.
“To be honest, I am surprised it worked,” Keller said. “The reason this question has been withstanding for 50 years is because sharks are difficult to study.”
This image shows an overhead shot of bonnetheads in the holding tank. Credit: Bryan Keller
Keller realized the needed studies would be easier to do in smaller sharks. They also needed a species known for returning each year to specific locations. He and his colleagues settled on bonnetheads (Sphyrna tiburo).
“The bonnethead returns to the same estuaries each year,” Keller said. “This demonstrates that the sharks knows where ‘home’ is and can navigate back to it from a distant location.”
The question then was whether bonnetheads managed those return trips by relying on a magnetic map. To find out, the researchers used magnetic displacement experiments to test 20 juvenile, wild-caught bonnetheads. In their studies, they exposed sharks to magnetic conditions representing locations hundreds of kilometers away from where the sharks were actually caught. Such studies allow for straightforward predictions about how the sharks should subsequently orient themselves if they were indeed relying on magnetic cues.
If sharks derive positional information from the geomagnetic field, the researchers predicted northward orientation in the southern magnetic field and southward orientation in the northern magnetic field, as the sharks attempted to compensate for their perceived displacement. They predicted no orientation preference when sharks were exposed to the magnetic field that matched their capture site. And, it turned out, the sharks acted as they’d predicted when exposed to fields within their natural range.
The researchers suggest that this ability to navigate based on magnetic fields may also contribute to the population structure of sharks. The findings in bonnetheads also likely help to explain impressive feats by other shark species. For instance, one great white shark was documented to migrate between South Africa and Australia, returning to the same exact location the following year.
This figure shows how the experiment assessed the ability of bonnethead sharks to use the Earth’s magnetic field to navigate. Credit: Keller et al./Current Biology
“How cool is it that a shark can swim 20,000 kilometers round trip in a three-dimensional ocean and get back to the same site?” Keller asked. “It really is mind blowing. In a world where people use GPS to navigate almost everywhere, this ability is truly remarkable.”
In future studies, Keller says he’d like to explore the effects of magnetic fields from anthropogenic sources such as submarine cables on sharks. They’d also like to study whether and how sharks rely of magnetic cues not just during long-distance migration but also during their everyday behavior.
Reference: “Map-like use of Earth’s magnetic field in sharks” by Bryan A. Keller, Nathan F. Putman, R. Dean Grubbs, David S. Portnoy and Timothy P. Murphy, 6 May 2021, Current Biology. DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2021.03.103
This work was supported by the Save Our Seas Foundation and the Florida State University Coastal and Marine Laboratory.
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