Monstrous People > Mutants, clones and cyborgs

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onishadowolf:
ScienceDaily (July 23, 2008) — For millennia, humans and viruses have been locked in an evolutionary back-and-forth -- one changes to outsmart the other, prompting the second to change and outsmart the first. With retroviruses, which work by inserting themselves into their host's DNA, the evidence remains in our genes.

Last year, researchers at Rockefeller University and the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center brought an ancient retrovirus back to life and showed it could reproduce and infect human cells. Now, the same scientists have looked at the human side of the story and found evidence that our ancestors fought back against that virus with a defense mechanism our bodies still use today.
"This is the first time that we've been able to take an ancient retrovirus and analyze how it interacts with host defense mechanisms in the laboratory in the present day," says Paul Bieniasz, who is an associate professor and head of the Laboratory of Retrovirology at Rockefeller and a scientist at the Aaron Diamond AIDS Research Center. Bieniasz and graduate student Youngnam Lee took their resurrected virus, called HERV-K, tested its strength against molecules involved in human antiviral defense.
Bieniasz, who also is an investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and Lee found that, at least in the laboratory, human cells infected with HERV-K fought back with several antiviral proteins. One of those proteins, called APOBEC3G, leaves a tell-tale signature behind: It mutates virus DNA in a recognizable pattern and is one our cells use to attack modern retroviruses. "But this is the first time it's been shown for this ancient retrovirus," Bieniasz says.
Once the scientists found that modern human cells attacked HERV-K with this molecule, they went back to look at the "fossil evidence," remnants of the virus that still remain in our genes and that the researchers had previously used to reconstruct it. What emerged were two copies of HERV-K that had clearly been mutated, and thus inactivated, by the APOBEC3G protein. "We're looking at things that happened millions and millions of years ago," says Lee. "But these sorts of ancient interactions may have influenced how humans are able to combat these retroviruses today. These proteins help protect us against current retroviruses." Indeed, HERV-K may well have helped to shape the modern APOBEC3G defense.
The earlier study and this one provide two sides of the evolutionary coin: the infectious agent, and the host defense. "Retroviruses are able to infect us and leave remnants in our DNA, and our DNA also holds evidence of what we've done to them in return," Lee says. "It's an illustration of the fight between host and virus."
Journal reference:
Lee et al. Hypermutation of an ancient human retrovirus by APOBEC3G. Journal of Virology, 2008; DOI: 10.1128/JVI.00751-08

onishadowolf:
ScienceDaily (June 2, 2009) — European researchers have developed a small robotic drone capable of helping save lives in emergency situations or preventing terrorist attacks in urban areas.

Drones, known as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), have proven to be of great value in military operations, but so far, their advantages have not been fully exploited for civilian uses.
In civil life, drones are mainly used in the agriculture sector – for assessing how well crops are growing in a particular part of a field – or for meteorological measurements.
The main barrier to the wider use of drones is their large size and lack of manoeuvrability around obstacles. Most military drones are fixed-wing UAVs designed to operate at high altitudes and do not need a lot of manoeuvrability. In built up, highly populated areas such drones would pose a danger to people if they hit a tree or a building, or crashed due to the loss of its navigational signal.
Smaller, lighter and autonomous
Seeing a market opportunity, European researchers and companies that make up the EU-funded µDrone (Micro Drone Autonomous Navigation and Environment Sensing -- http://www.ist-microdrones.org/) project are developing a smaller, more manoeuvrable drone that is capable of sensing and avoiding objects in its flight path. The new drone would be capable of carrying out missions autonomously in places with obstacles, such as in an urban area or inside a building.
Such drones could be used to patrol sensitive areas to detect intruders, find the survivors of a disaster or detect chemical spills, among other operations, says project coordinator Christophe Leroux.
“The monitoring of public and private sites is becoming increasingly important in the field of security and surveillance,” says Leroux.  “Mobile multi-sensor surveillance systems, able to be deployed quickly to analyse a situation, will boost the efficiency of the security teams. By combining sensors and robots, we can develop applications to search and warn, and to detect hazardous materials.”
The project team is close to developing a prototype of a small-size UAV capable of vertical take off and landing and for autonomous inspection and survey operations in urban areas with moving obstacles.
The mini-UAV was developed by AirRobot, a Germany-based company which is part of the project consortium. The drone is about 50cm in diameter, weighs less than one kilogram and can carry about 200grams. It looks like a miniature helicopter with four propellers, allowing it to take off and land vertically. A protective band surrounds the machine, preventing harm to people and the machine if an accident occurs.
The team also developed the software and hardware so the drone can locate its position in the air, navigate autonomously, and respond to unexpected events, such as an obstacle. Mission planning, collision avoidance and trajectory determination have been built into the drone’s software and hardware. The software’s visual memory map allows it to return home along its previous flight path.
The drone can be controlled from the ground or it can fly on a mission autonomously following a predefined path. Manual control can be switched on and off depending on the mission. The software and interface allows an operator without any technical knowledge to control it easily in urban areas or inside a building, Leroux says.
Monitoring for safety and security
He believes the new drone will be useful for policing, for example to determine the extent of a riot and for deploying forces, or for support at a crime scene. A remotely operated micro-UAV could be used to explore a crime scene inside a building without endangering the lives of police officers.
It can also be used for security. If an intrusion is detected, a UAV should be able to move faster than any ground-based robot or a human guard. Public places, airports, oil production facilities, pipelines and nuclear sites could be monitored using the micro-UAV.
The consortium is now focusing on evaluating and testing the new drone with potential users, including fire services. A small-sized UAV could be used for reconnaissance of the fire scene, helping fire fighters better assess how the fire is developing and if lives need to be saved. The drone will be tested with a fire service in Greece in November 2009 to determine how it performs.
“There is a need in the market for such a drone,” Leroux says. “Many end-users have already expressed an interest.”
µDrone received funding from the Specific Targeted Research Projects (STREP) strand of the Sixth Framework Programme for research.
Adapted from materials provided by ICT Results.

Moloch:

--- Quote from: onishadowolf on May 31, 2009, 06:31:34 PM ---You mean the T virus. The virus in Resident Evil series that reanimates dead cells. Yeah it does.

--- End quote ---

Actually, they did state that the T virus was engineered from the original T cell in the human body. The T virus basically accelerates the body's own immune system to superhuman levels, which in some people actually makes them superhuman, while in most cases just causes outlandish mutations.

onishadowolf:
That's right.

onishadowolf:
Gene genesis
About a quarter of present-day life's DNA blueprint was sketched out by 2.8 billion years ago
By Tina Hesman Saey
Web edition : Tuesday, December 21st, 2010
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Using the genetic equivalent of the Hubble telescope, researchers have peered into the distant past and witnessed an explosion of new genes that happened more than 3 billion years ago.

About 27 percent of all gene families that exist today were born between 3.3 billion and 2.8 billion years ago, two researchers from MIT report online December 19 in Nature. The surge of gene births — which the scientists have dubbed the Archean expansion — predate some important changes in Earth’s early chemistry, including the appearance of large amounts of oxygen in the atmosphere, say evolutionary biologists Eric Alm and Lawrence David.

The study may show how early organisms responded to and helped alter the planet’s chemistry. Daniel Segrč, a computational biologist at Boston University, says that the work provides “insight into really ancient metabolic events.”

Fossils of organisms billions of years old are difficult to find; the earliest organisms might not have been preserved in stone at all. Most familiar fossils appeared in the Cambrian period more than 540 million years ago. Some stromatolites — fossils of cyanobacteria — are as much as 3.4 billion years old.

But the researchers have found a rich molecular fossil bed billions of years old in the genetic blueprints of living organisms.

“Imprinted in the DNA of modern organisms is the history of these Precambrian events,” says Alm.

To read that history, the researchers traced the evolution of 3,983 gene families in the genomes of 100 different living species. Gene families are groups of genes that share similar structures and functions. Analyzing that amount of data is a technical tour de force, says Jason Raymond of Arizona State University in Tempe. Most researchers painstakingly reconstruct the evolutionary history of one gene at a time, he says. By simultaneously examining how thousands of genes changed over time to produce the variation seen in organisms today, “they’ve leapfrogged other researchers,” he says. “If they’d have done this 10 years ago, I’d be out of a Ph.D.”

Genes for shuttling electrons burst onto the scene about 3.3 billion years ago, the researchers calculate. Those genes, known as electron transport genes, are important for such processes as photosynthesis and respiration. By increasing the energy efficiency of some early life forms, these genes may have enabled populations to thrive.

Genes for using oxygen appeared at the tail of the genetic expansion around 2.8 billion years ago, long before oxygen began accumulating in the atmosphere around 2.5 billion years ago. The team also found evidence for the birth of genes for processing nitrogen and for using iron, molybdenum, copper and other elements.

While the genetic predictions match geochemical data for many of the elements, a few appear to contradict ideas about Earth’s early history. For instance, the new data predict that genes for using nickel were increasing at a time when geochemists say nickel concentrations in the ocean were crashing.

“Somebody’s wrong, and that’s what’s really exciting to me,” says Timothy Lyons, a geochemist at the University of California, Riverside. While he doesn’t expect the genetic models to singlehandedly overturn geochemical models of the early ocean, the new study might help refine chemical predictions. The genetic data is “another control and constraint that can’t be ignored.”

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