A pond microbe rewrote DNA's stop signs, and kites save seabirds

Their test subject was a previously unknown protist from a freshwater pond in Oxford University Parks, now called Oligohymenophorea sp. PL0344 2. When postdoc Jamie McGowan assembled its genome, the organism turned out to read DNA by different rules. Two signals that normally tell a cell to stop building a protein had each been reassigned to a different amino acid. Scientists had thought those two signals evolve together; in this protist they had split and taken separate jobs 2. "It's sheer luck we chose this protist to test our sequencing pipeline," McGowan said 2. The paper appeared in PLOS Genetics in 2023.

In a two-year trial, ten Cornish fishers fitted cameras to their boats and tested two devices from Fishtek Marine. One is a buoy with a spinning head and two large eyes that floats above the net. The other is a bird-shaped kite flown from the stern, meant to look like a bird of prey 237. University of Exeter scientists analyzed the footage and catch data. Bycatch fell 59 percent with the buoy and 71 percent with the kite, according to the study in Conservation Letters 237. "This study provides some of the strongest evidence to date that simple, practical deterrents can substantially reduce seabird bycatch in gillnet fisheries," said lead author Tom Horton 237.

"Optogenetics provides opportunities for mapping the brain in a way that we could once only dream of," said Per Svenningsson, chair of the Nobel Committee 222. The same week, the New England Journal of Medicine published a study on a therapy built on the technique for advanced retinitis pigmentosa, a genetic disorder in which the retina's light-sensing cells degenerate 88222. STAT notes that it flagged optogenetics as a Nobel contender almost a decade ago, back when it sat on informal watchlists 88.

The haul is worth an estimated $250,000 and would otherwise have been thrown away 224. Behind it is Project MedBridge, started this year by Ben Kurian, a junior at Olentangy Liberty High School in Powell, Ohio. His mother is a nurse practitioner, and he kept hearing that big hospitals discard good sterile supplies because they won't be used before their dates pass 224. Kurian cold-emailed distributors until the Pittsburgh nonprofit Brother's Brother Foundation agreed to handle shipping to an under-resourced clinic overseas 224. He is part of a student-run wave: United2Heal, founded at the University of Michigan in 2007, has over a hundred undergraduates sorting supplies on Saturdays 224.

He arrived from the Seychelles already fully grown, as a gift, 144 years ago 216220. Researchers led by the longevity nonprofit Kallel sequenced his genome and found 287 unique gene variants tied to DNA repair, lower inflammation, insulin regulation and cancer suppression 216220. They also compared his epigenome, the on/off switches on his genes, with those of younger giant tortoises. The switches controlling DNA repair and metabolism looked "very similar" to the young animals', though the epigenome usually drifts with age 216220. "We found that the gene regulators involved in energy production and DNA repair have remained incredibly stable in Jonathan over almost two centuries," said Cambridge's Justin Gerlach 220. It is the first giant-tortoise epigenome, reported in Science Advances 216.

Co-author Boris Gänsicke said niobium "had not been reported in any other white dwarf analyzed to date," and once it was recognized, "everything fell into place" 61. Nicholas Stone of the University of Wisconsin-Madison explained that the pattern is the signature of the s-process, a nuclear reaction that builds heavy elements inside bloated red giants, and that "no ordinary, 'first-generation' planet should carry" it 61. The team's reading is that gas shed by the dying star was trapped and squeezed into a new planet. They used ground and space observatories, including NASA's TESS 61.

After seven sessions, the trained mice had smaller visceral fat cells, less fat around the intestines and more activity in molecular pathways that break down stored fat, even though their body weight had not changed 7. Diets were identical across the obese groups, so the effect came from exercise itself. The study appeared in the journal Life Sciences 7.