Beer Made With 45 Million Year Old Yeast?

The other day I came across a Reddit post entitled: “Beer Made With 45 Million-Year-Old Yeast Found in Amber.”

And I was intrigued.

The link led to an Indiegogo campaign from the Fossil Fuels Brewing Co. aiming to raise money to further their production of beer made with ancient yeast. As the story goes, the idea was born after the “chance discovery of a beautiful amber stone, replete with a 45 million year old leaf, and a single yeast spore – still alive and itching to make beer.”

Ghost World - Part III: Resurrection

De-extinction. It's an amazing and controversial idea, and it may even be impossible. It's also not what you think. 

In Part I of this series, I reviewed the ways in which our world is a poor impersonation of what it was thousands of years ago, haunted by the absence of the ancient giants that once provided stability to ecosystems. In Part II, I reviewed the ways in which modern researchers are hoping to fix those ecosystems, by transporting "replacement" species to fill the gaps left by extinction, and even "un-domesticate" certain species to recreate their wild ancestors. 

Isn't there another option though? Instead of trying to replace the dead, why not bring them back? Why not simply clone extinct species?

Happy Accidents: Beneficial Mutations in Humans

A while back, I was talking with a group of young students about evolution and natural selection, and I was teaching them about the role of mutations when I was asked an interesting question that I failed to answer.

The concept of mutations can be tough to grasp, because mutation sounds like a really bad thing, and indeed it often is. A mutation is essentially an accident in your DNA, and while most of them are harmless, most of the rest have unfortunate side effects. And yet mutation is one of the driving forces of evolution: natural selection weeds out the bad accidents and encourages the good ones, and life changes through the generations.

Which brings me to this question I was asked: Are there examples of good mutations in humans?

News Trip! Science on the Ancient Seas

Happy 2014 everyone!  The year is barely two weeks old, and I’ve already seen a bunch of new research about ancient marine creatures.  Apparently, 2014 is a good year for studying the seas of the past.

For today’s post, let’s take a trip back in time, and make a few stops on the way to talk about some of the new science coming out on the old oceans.

Stop #1: The Dark Waters of the Mesozoic (and Paleogene)

Let me introduce you to three creatures that were swimming the seas a long time ago:

1. A fossil sea turtle from the Paleogene Period, 55 million years ago;
2. A fossil mosasaur, an aquatic relative of lizards, from the Late Cretaceous Period, 86 million years ago;
3. A fossil ichthyosaur, a dolphin-like reptile, from the Early Jurassic Period, 190 million years ago.

The Serpents' Sequence

Scientists recently mapped the full genomes of snakes for the first time!

Actually, 2013 has been a big year for whole-genome sequencing in reptiles.

But let’s back up a step: What is whole-genome sequencing?

A genome is the entirety of an organism’s genetic material – all of its DNA.  Genes – small sections of DNA – code for proteins.  One gene might tell your body how to make a certain type of protein, and that protein might help build cells, or catalyze chemical reactions, or do pretty much anything else your body needs.  If you think of genes as the body’s instructions, then the genome is the entire blueprint.

Back in the early 1990’s, a group of scientists from various institutions in several countries embarked upon a legendary task: to describe and record the entire human genome – every gene in the body.  The Human Genome Project took over ten years to complete, but finally in 2003, these scientists published the full human whole-genome sequence for the first time - a full list of about 20,500 genes.  The Human Genome Project was one of the most monumental achievements of recent science, and it has led to incredible advancements in our understanding of human development, evolution, and especially genetic diseases.

Designer Genes

Genetic engineering involves directly altering the genetic code of an organism, generally in some way that is beneficial to us.  For example, if you want to treat a patient with diabetes, you need insulin.  Instead of going out and tapping into the pancreas of a cow, you could culture bacteria to produce insulin for you.  The procedure is relatively straight-forward: take a blood sample from a person, search the DNA for the gene that codes for insulin production, snip out the gene, make some copies of it, and put it in a bacterium.  If the bacterial cell takes up the insulin gene, you’re set!  Now you’ve got a culture of bacteria producing human insulin for all your pharmaceutical needs.

Genetically engineered organisms are actually pretty common in modern science.  Bacteria can be made to produce medically important substances like insulin, growth hormones, or blood-clotting factors; a lot of the food you buy at the supermarket has been genetically engineered in some way; some companies use algae as a source of organic fuel; a few years ago, a group of researchers in Taiwan made glow-in-the-dark pigs; and last month, a couple of Harvard scientists engineered a human cell that fires a laser.

I’ll repeat that.  A human cell that fires a laser.

A Fossil Of A Different Color

Here at The Meniscus, it’s all about news in science.  Scientists are always conducting new research and new experiments, and every new experiment, if done right, leads to a new discovery, a new tidbit of knowledge to be added to the vast scientific knowledgebase, and it’s all pretty exciting.  But every now and then, science goes a step further and develops a new method of research.  A stroke of genius or an advance in technology can allow scientists to look at their subject in a way no one ever has before, and this opens the doors to a whole new realm of discoveries waiting to be made.

Every scientific discipline has its limitations.  In the field of paleontology, research is limited by the condition of fossil material.  When a prehistoric animal becomes fossilized, what typically happens is that the soft parts (hair, skin, etc.) are degraded away and the hard parts (bones, teeth, etc.) are preserved as fossils.  Now, bones and teeth are great; they allow paleontologists to interpret the diet, structure, and lifestyle of ancient animals.  But as you can imagine, not having access to the skin, blood, or internal organs of an animal really limits what you can figure out about its life.

There are, of course, exceptions.

The history of paleontology is littered with examples of new methodologies being developed and allowing researchers to look at fossils in completely new ways.  Back in the 80s, scientists began tackling the challenge of extracting genetic material from fossils, an idea that was almost unthinkable for a long time.  My undergraduate advisor once said (I’m paraphrasing here) “If you told me 30 years ago that you were gonna try to find DNA in fossil bones, I’d have said you’d had a few too many beers.”  And yet, today, scientists study ancient DNA all the time, learning more about prehistoric life than bones and teeth alone could ever have told us.  In fact, last year, an analysis of fossil DNA allowed researchers to identify an entirely new species of early man from just a tooth and a pinky bone.