Aestus Ajith

Individuals are more genetically similar to their spouses than they are to randomly selected individuals from the same population, according to a new study from the University of Colorado Boulder. Scientists already knew that people tend to marry others who have similar characteristics, including religion, age, race, income, body type and education, among others. In the new study, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences , scientists show that people also are more likely to pick mates who have similar DNA. While characteristics such as race, body type and even education have genetic components, this is the first study to look at similarities across the entire genome. "It's well known that people marry folks who are like them," said Benjamin Domingue, lead author of the paper and a research associate at CU-Boulder's Institute of Behavioral Science. "But there's been a question about whether we mate at random with respect ...

Japanese power company, Power Japan Plus has announced the development of a new type of battery intended for use in automobiles and other applications, the Ryden or dual carbon battery. The company claims the battery charges 20 times faster than current lithium ion batteries, doesn't heat up, so it doesn't require cooling and is cost competitive with other current batteries used in cars and trucks. They believe the battery will be a game-changer, leading to a surge in sales of hybrid and all electric vehicles. Representatives for Power Japan say the  battery  is actually something completely new—it's made of carbon instead of nickel, cobalt or manganese. Not only does that make it cheaper to make but it does away with the thermal change that exists with current batteries that necessitate the installation of cooling systems (and does away with the associated fire hazard in crashes). They add that the carbon they use is new as well—it's an organic compound grown fro...

Individuals are more genetically similar to their spouses than they are to randomly selected individuals from the same population, according to a new study from the University of Colorado Boulder. This shows theories describing light and matter interactions. Credit: Oliver Pike, Imperial College London Imperial College London physicists have discovered how to create matter from light - a feat thought impossible when the idea was first theorised 80 years ago. In just one day over several cups of coffee in a tiny office in Imperial's Blackett Physics Laboratory, three physicists worked out a relatively simple way to physically prove a  theory  first devised by scientists Breit and Wheeler in 1934. Breit and Wheeler suggested that it should be possible to turn  light  into matter by smashing together only two particles of light (photons), to create an electron and a positron – the simplest method of turning light into matter ever predicted. The calculation was ...

This incredible video proves that helium isn't just a voice-raising gas. In its superfluid state it also defies gravity, has zero friction and can leak through glass

Enlarge Nematostella embryo microinjection. Credit: Seth Palmer We humans have been around for about 2.5 million years, but the beating of our hearts is controlled by something much older than  Homo sapiens —an ancient molecular pathway that, according to Huck Institutes faculty researcher Tim Jegla, may be on the order of 700 million to a billion years old. The Jegla Lab studies the evolution of the nervous and muscular systems, using model organisms such as the cnidarian  Nematostella vectensis —also known as the starlet sea anemone—to investigate conserved traits and the molecular pathways and genes that underpin them. According to Jegla, the starlet sea anemone is in essence an animal that's as evolutionarily far away from humans as possible while still sharing the same neuromuscular signaling systems. Comparisons of humans and cnidarians reveal that only the fundamentally important mechanisms are conserved—such as those required to make a neuron or, in this case, a ...

Thanks to the internet, the concept of a government secret base has been rendered little more than a quaint  James Bond  plot. For example, in decades past, the public only had conjecture and hearsay to feed its curiosity about the inner workings of the US government’s shadowy military base on the southern shore of Nevada’s Groom Lake, a site better known as “Area 51.” But today, thanks to the technology of Google Maps, we can all achieve a clear birds-eye-view of the secret facility conveniently linked with user-submitted telephoto images supplying a ground level perspective. Now anyone with a smart phone can be treated to an unobstructed view into the secret military installation that for a long time, officially didn’t even exist. Though the government could no longer deny the  existence of Area 51, finally admitting to it in a newly declassified CIA history of its U-2 spy plan e program, it is still denying the existence of little green men and alien spa...

"Jumping genes" hide out like spies in our DNA, then spin off a copy of themselves that can jump to another area of our DNA -- potentially creating disease-causing mutations. There's a civil war going on inside every one of the 37 trillion cells in your body. Now, University of Michigan scientists have uncovered how your cells keep this war from causing too much collateral damage. On one side of the battle: your "regular" DNA, which provides the day-to-day instructions for life. On the other side: tiny bits of rogue DNA that hide like spies between genes in your own DNA. From time to time, these rogue bits of DNA spin off a copy of themselves and "jump" to another DNA location – often causing harmful mutations when they land. How our cells fight off the effects of these rogue DNAs, called LINE-1 retrotransposons, has remained a mystery. But in a new paper published in the open-access journal  eLife , scientists from the University of Michigan M...

A study tracing the evolution of HIV in North America has found the virus is getting better at dodging our immune system. Luckily, it's happening really slowly. Image: martynowi.cz/Shutterstock The research, published in  PLoS Genetics , suggests that the change is so gradual it's unlikely to impact vaccine and design - at least that's the case in North America. “Much research has focused on how HIV adapts to antiviral drugs – we wanted to investigate how HIV adapts to us, its human hosts, over time,” said lead author Zabrina Brumme,  from Simon Fraser University in Canada, in a press release . When HIV infects a host, it adapts to their immune response through mutations that can technically be passed on – these are known as immune escape mutations.  If these mutations spread throughout populations, it could be bad news for host immunity and vaccine development, according to Brumme. “Just like transmitted drug resistance can compromise treatment success,...

Superconducting materials expel magnetic fields, whose repulsive force can levitate a magnet, as shown here. Nevertheless, studies have shown superconductivity and magnetism can coexist in the same material. Now SLAC and Stanford researchers show that the two phases are interwoven at a very fine, microscopic level in a type of high-temperature superconductor known as an iron pnictide, and reveal how one phase gives way to the other. Credit: Julien Bobroff, Frederic Bouquet and Jeffrey Quilliam/Laboratory of Solid State Physics, LPS, via Wikimedia Commons Scientists at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University have shown for the first time how high-temperature superconductivity emerges out of magnetism in an iron pnictide, a class of materials with great potential for making devices that conduct electricity with 100 percent efficiency. In experiments at SLAC's Stanford Synchrotron Radiation Lightsource (SSRL), the team "doped" the material – one of...

Graphene trilayers can be stacked in two different configurations, which can occur naturally in the same flake. They are separated by a sharp boundary. Credit: Pablo San-Jose ICMM-CSI A University of Arizona-led team of physicists has discovered how to change the crystal structure of graphene, more commonly known as pencil lead, with an electric field, an important step toward the possible use of graphene in microprocessors that would be smaller and faster than current, silicon-based technology. Graphene consists of extremely thin sheets of graphite: when writing with a pencil, graphene sheets slough off the pencil's graphite core and stick to the page. If placed under a high-powered electron microscope, graphene reveals its sheet-like structure of cross-linked carbon atoms, resembling chicken wire. When manipulated by an  electric field , parts of the material are transformed from behaving as a metal to behaving as a semiconductor, the UA physicists found. Graphene is th...