Every Friday we round-up the best content from the past week written by Nature Network and Scitable bloggers. We also include highlights from the nature.com blogs, written by NPG editors and staff.
No, please, not the chocolate!
GrrlScientist warns us in her latest post that the cacao plant, the source of chocolate, is in trouble! Watch the video below to find out more!
Just imagine a world without chocolate…how would this impact your life? Leave your thoughts in GrrlScientist’s comment thread.
Galápagos Tortoises Reappear
Anne-Marie Hodge reports on some good news for the world of biology, as a species of Galapagos tortoise – thought to be extinct for over 150 years – may, in fact, be alive.
A team of researchers from Yale University, led by Gisella Caccone and Ryan Garrick, elucidated from a previous study that there were mysterious hybrid tortoises on Isabela Island–which is historically home to tortoises in the subspeciesC. becki (Poulakakis 2008). They were initially surprised to find that some of the individuals were significantly different from others, and became interested in where these anomalous invidiuals had come from. By comparing the genetic data from their living individuals to a range of Galápagos tortoise specimens stored in museums, they discovered that the outliers looked as though they were C. becki x C. elephantopus hybrids–an incredible revelation, considering that the latter subspecies was thought to have disappeared a century and a half ago.
You can also read the News blogs report on this story here.
Prostate Cancer
A newly discovered gene variation greatly increases a man’s chances of developing prostate cancer, according to the News Blog.
The newly identified variation, which lies in a development gene called HOXB13, probably plays a more consequential role in prostate cancer. Kathleen Cooney, at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and her team discovered the variation in four families with a history of prostate cancer. All of the 18 men with prostate cancer carried the same variation. Cooney’s team found it by sequencing more than 200 genes on a swath of chromosome 17 that had been previously linked to hereditary prostate cancer.
It is too early to say if the findings will be useful for genetic screening. Continue to the post to find out more.
Controversial?
Nature Middle East’s blog, The House of Wisdom, asked this week whether Saudi universities are buying their way into top charts, sparking a discussion on Twitter and on Google +:
In 2008, not a single university in Saudi Arabia ranked in the top 500 list published by the Academic Ranking of World Universities. However, in the 2011 edition of the rankings the King Saud University (KSA) jumped to the 200-to-300 bracket. A story in last week’s Science, however, suggests that a boost in scientific research may not be the main reason behind this impressive jump.
According to the feature, both King Abdelaziz University (KAU) and KSA, both in Saudi Arabia, have apparently offered lucrative contracts for professorships to internationally renowned scientists where they had to spend a few weeks in the Kingdom every year but would be required to add the university as a second affiliation to their names in the Institute for Scientific Information’s (ISI) list of highly-cited researchers.
You can find out more about this story by reading the full post here. Feel free to leave your thoughts and let us know what you think.
Synthetic biology
Scitable’s blogger Eric Sawyer explains that even though synthetic biology has received generous helpings of hype in the media, it’s easy to confuse speculation with data-backed results. He explains synthetic biology in action:
In a project from Collins’s own lab, investigators successfully engineered the T7 phage, a virus that infects E. coli, to degrade biofilms. The viruses invade E. coli cells and hijack their protein synthesis machinery, churning out viral proteins. The engineered version of T7 also contains a gene coding for the enzyme DspB, a molecular wrecking ball that destroys biofilm. With their fortress destroyed, a whopping 99.997% of the E. coli in Collins’s experiments were killed by t he engineered phages.
Find out more in his post.
Engaging geologists
This week’s guest blogger on Soapbox Science is Joel Gill, Director/Founder of Geology for Global Development. GfGD, established in 2011, is working to raise the profile of international development in the geosciences community. The organisation places a particular emphasis on student/recent graduate community. Joe explains in his post how GfGD is working to inspire and engage young geologists from all backgrounds:
Through the establishment of GfGD University Groups, run and developed by student ambassadors, we are starting to outwork our vision and grow our membership. These groups give students of the geosciences and related subjects an opportunity to pursue and outwork their interest in development, through seminars, discussion groups, advocacy, fundraising, writing for our blog and getting involved in our national work.
You can find out more about GfGD in the post and also hear some of their exciting plans for the future.
The $1,000 genome: are we there yet?
According to the News Blog, Life Technologies, based in Carlsbad,California, announced that it will debut a new sequencing machine this year which will eventually be capable of decoding entire human genomes in a day for less than $1,000. Life Technologies, however, is not the only the company working on such machines:
Not to be outdone, Illumina, the present market leader based in San Diego, California, said that it will release its own genome-in-a-day contender, the HiSeq 2500, in the second half of this year. Unlike Life Technologies, which is asking customers to buy an entirely new machine, Illumina says that it will be able to upgrade existing customers’ HiSeq 2000 machines for a relatively low price.
So how will this battle of the sequencers shake out? You can find out more in their report.
Michael Faraday Prize Lecture
On Thursday evening, London blogger Joanna Scott attended the annual Michael Faraday Prize Lecture at the Royal Society. In her post she summaries the key points from the prestigious lecture and explains the history of the prize:
The Royal Society Michael Faraday Prize is awarded every year to a scientist or engineer born in, or native to the Commonwealth, for science communication. The prize has been awarded since 1986 and the list of past winners is a veritable Who’s Who of well known scientists including Robert Winston and David Attenborough. As well as a cheque and a medal, the winner is invited to give the annual lecture at the Royal Society, and tonight’s speaker was the 2011 winner Professor Colin Pillinger, FRS, Professor of Planetary Sciences at the Open University. It was his work on meteorites from Mars which may hold evidence of life once having existed there that led him to conceive the Beagle 2 project and his prize lecture touched briefly on that topic.
You can find out more in her report.
Finally
If you’ve attended at a couple of challenging (boring) lectures, you’ve probably realised how important the chairs are. Well, Viktor Poor has run an experiment to quantify it:
