Bampot

In humans, as in other mammals, females have two X chromosomes and males have a single X and a puny little chromosome called Y. The names have nothing to do with their shape; the X stood for “unknown”.

The X contains about 900 genes that do all sorts of jobs unrelated to sex. But the Y contains few genes (about 55) and a lot of non-coding DNA – simple repetitive DNA that doesn’t seem to do anything.

But the Y chromosome packs a punch because it contains an all-important gene that kick-starts male development in the embryo.

The disappearing Y

Most mammals have an X and Y chromosome similar to ours; an X with lots of genes, and a Y with SRY plus a few others. This system comes with problems because of the unequal dosage of X genes in males and females.

How did such a weird system evolve? The surprising finding is that Australia’s platypus has completely different sex chromosomes, more like those of birds.

In platypus, the XY pair is just an ordinary chromosome, with two equal members. This suggests the mammal X and Y were an ordinary pair of chromosomes not that long ago.

In turn, this must mean the Y chromosome has lost 900–55 active genes over the 166 million years that humans and platypus have been evolving separately. That’s a loss of about five genes per million years. At this rate, the last 55 genes will be gone in 11 million years.

To reproduce, we need sperm and we need men, meaning that the end of the Y chromosome could herald the extinction of the human race.

The new finding supports an alternative possibility – that humans can evolve a new sex determining gene. Phew!

However, evolution of a new sex determining gene comes with risks. What if more than one new system evolves in different parts of the world?

A “war” of the sex genes could lead to the separation of new species, which is exactly what has happened with mole voles and spiny rats.

So, if someone visited Earth in 11 million years, they might find no humans – or several different human species, kept apart by their different sex determination systems.

Chronic kidney disease is the most common form of kidney disease and involves a slow and progressive deterioration of the kidneys' ability to cleanse the body.

Harmful substances and fluids that would otherwise have been excreted from the body with the urine are instead retained.

Research in recent years shows that outdoor air pollution particles from sources such as industry, vehicle exhaust and heating may increase the risk of chronic kidney disease.

The current study shows that this is also likely to be the case for occupational exposure to particles in the construction industry.

We see a clear link between having worked in construction environments with high dust levels and the risk of developing chronic kidney disease before the age of 65. But further studies are required to show whether there is a causal link and to identify the biological mechanisms.

A Berlin-led research team has uncovered critical regulators of severe kidney damage in patients with lupus, an autoimmune disorder affecting an estimated five million people worldwide, most of which are young women. A small, specialized population of immune cells — called innate lymphoid cells (ILCs) — trigger an avalanche of effects that cause harmful kidney inflammation, also known as lupus nephritis.

The research, published in Nature, upends conventional wisdom that autoantibodies — proteins produced by immune cells that mistakenly attack healthy tissues — are primarily responsible for lupus nephritis.

While autoantibodies are required for tissue damage, they are by themselves not sufficient. Our work reveals that ILCs are required to amplify the organ damage.

An insect species that evolved 130 million years ago is the inspiration for a new research study to improve navigation systems in drones, robots, and orbiting satellites.

The dung beetle is the first known species to use the Milky Way at night to navigate, focusing on the constellation of stars as a reference point to roll balls of dung in a straight line away from their competitors.

Insects have been solving navigational problems for millions of years, including those that even the most advanced machines struggle with. And they've done it in a tiny little package. Their brains consist of tens of thousands of neurons compared to billions of neurons in humans, yet they still manage to find solutions from the natural world.

Summary

• The UFO sighting at O'Hare Airport in 2006 was dismissed as a "hole-punch cloud" by an FAA investigation.

• Project Blue Book concluded no evidence of extraterrestrial UFOs or security threats to the US.

• People often mistake ordinary objects or weather phenomena for UFOs.

At around 16:15 on Tuesday, November 7, 2006, a group of United Airlines employees and several other people saw what they believed to be a flying saucer hovering over the airport for several minutes.

While the description of the UFO varies slightly depending on who you asked, they all agreed that the shiny object hovered silently over the apron for several minutes before suddenly disappearing into the sky.

The incident occurred over Gate C-17 in Terminal 1 and was first spotted by a ramp agent pushing back United Airlines Flight 466, which was to depart Chicago for Charlotte Douglas International Airport (CLT) in North Carolina. The ramp agent advised the flight deck that something was hovering over the plane.

The unknown object was then seen by the pilots, cabin crew, a member of United Airlines management, and a mechanic. Despite several people seeing it, no air traffic controller saw the object, and it did not appear on the radar. Several other people outside the airport reported seeing a dark gray disc-shaped craft hovering over the airport and were adamant that it was not a cloud.

The findings reveal a sobering reality: many policy measures have failed to achieve the necessary scale of emissions reductions.

Only 63 cases of successful climate policies, each leading to average emission reductions of 19%, were identified. The key characteristic of these successful cases is the inclusion of tax and price incentives in well-designed policy mixes.

"Our findings demonstrate that more policies do not necessarily equate to better outcomes. Instead, the right mix of measures is crucial. For example, subsidies or regulations alone are insufficient; only in combination with price-based instruments, such as carbon and energy taxes, can they deliver substantial emission reductions."

The outer shell of our planet is fractured into seven or eight major sections, or tectonic plates, on which the continents sit. We expect to see the continents rise up at the active boundaries of these plates, where volcanism and earthquakes are often concentrated.

The continents we now recognize were once united as single, great "supercontinents." One such example was Gondwana, which existed hundreds of millions of years ago and started to break up during the age of the dinosaurs. We believe that when these supercontinents break apart, it triggers a kind of stirring process under the continents, which we now call a "mantle wave." This motion deep in the Earth ripples slowly across the partially molten underbelly of the landmass, disturbing its deep roots.

While a mosquito bite is often no more than a temporary bother, in many parts of the world it can be scary. One mosquito species, Aedes aegypti, spreads the viruses that cause over 100,000,000 cases of dengue, yellow fever, Zika and other diseases every year. Another, Anopheles gambiae, spreads the parasite that causes malaria. The World Health Organization estimates that malaria alone causes more than 400,000 deaths every year. Indeed, their capacity to transmit disease has earned mosquitoes the title of deadliest animal.

Male mosquitoes are harmless, but females need blood for egg development. It's no surprise that there's over 100 years of rigorous research on how they find their hosts. Over that time, scientists have discovered there is no one single cue that these insects rely on. Instead, they integrate information from many different senses across various distances.

A team led by researchers at UC Santa Barbara has added another sense to the mosquito's documented repertoire: infrared detection. Infrared radiation from a source roughly the temperature of human skin doubled the insects' overall host-seeking behavior when combined with CO2 and human odor.

Combining detailed county-to-county migration data with Toxics Release Inventory data, and fine-scale PM2.5 concentration levels, we investigate the relationship between internal migration, income of migrant and non-migrant households and county-level differences in environmental quality. We show that households moving to “cleaner” counties are relatively “richer”—a result consistent with a sorting by income in the spirit of Tiebout (1956). An implication of this finding is that internal migration could contribute to the persistence of disparities in pollution exposure at the county-level.

Our findings suggest that destination counties with lower pollution levels than the migrants’ home counties attract wealthier households. From the perspective of Environmental Justice, this outcome is consistent with households self-selecting based on income across areas with different levels of environmental quality. Furthermore, our research contributes to the existing literature on internal migration by emphasizing how socioeconomic characteristics shape households’ responses to differences in destination attributes.

Research from Radboud university medical center reveals that T cells from the adaptive immune system can manipulate the memory of innate immune cells. Previously, it was believed that the memory of innate immune cells operated independently.

This surprising connection opens up new possibilities for the treatment of various diseases. A mouse model shows that no immunosuppressive drugs are needed after an organ transplantation if this interaction between T cells and the innate immunity is temporarily blocked after the transplantation.

Trained immunity is regulated by T cell-induced CD40-TRAF6 signaling

Highlights

•T cells modulate trained immunity induction in monocytes via CD40-TRAF6 signaling

•Blocking CD40-TRAF6 signaling inhibits trained immunity in monocytes in vitro

•SNPs in the proximity of CD40 associate with trained immunity responses in vivo

•Myeloid-specific CD40-TRAF6 inhibition prolongs allograft survival in vivo

https://www.cell.com/cell-reports/fulltext/S2211-1247(24)01015-5

When it comes to talk of whether aliens have visited Earth or if UFO sightings are actually not of this world, no event is as iconic or widely debated as that of the Roswell Incident of 1947. This mystery unfolded in the prairie landscapes of New Mexico, just north of Roswell, where an alleged UFO crash sparked an enduring controversy that we continue to talk about today.

The incident fueled conspiracy theories that claimed that the government covered up the debris from an alien spaceship. By 1994, the US Air Force released a report that concluded that the crashed UFO was a top-secret nuclear test surveillance balloon from Project Mogul.

When one reporter questioned what would happen if the public didn’t accept this explanation, as they had not accepted the others, the Air Force spokesperson stated that perhaps they would be back with another report. The release of the report only seemed to intensify the public’s curiosity and suspicion surrounding the incident, with many pointing out inconsistencies and gaps in the official narrative

OP.. @[email protected]

Luis Elizondo, a military veteran and intelligence agent, claims US government has retrieved alien technology and bodies from crash sites for 50-plus years

In his memoir, Elizondo makes a number of revelations, including the existence of what he calls a “super-secret umbrella group” composed of government officials and defence contractors who he says have been retrieving technology and biological remains of non-human origin for more than half a century.

AATIP was like “one of those Russian dolls, one tiny secret tucked within another”, he writes. He describes one unit, the Legacy Program, as having black ops “so black they weren’t even black”. “We spoke of ‘purple novas’ — projects and programs so secret that not even the secretary of defence or the president would ever know of them.”

According to the conspiracy theory, the 1947 crash of what was said to be a US Army Air Forces weather balloon near Roswell, New Mexico, was actually a spacecraft.

Elizondo writes that the intelligence he studied pointed to two saucers colliding that day on July 8. “Our primitive EMP (electro-magnetic pulse) device must have somehow disrupted their propulsion bubble, rendering them vulnerable … like a 757 losing all power on its jet engines,” he concludes.

“Four deceased non-human bodies were in fact recovered from the 1947 Roswell crash,” Elizondo claims in the book, which spent a year under Pentagon security review before being passed for publication. Several parts remain redacted.

He writes of at least three other incidents where “non-human cadavers” were recovered from supposed air force crashes, including one in December 1950 in Ciudad Acuña, Mexico, across the Rio Grande from Del Rio, Texas, and four in 1989 in Kazakhstan in the former Soviet Union.