Knowledge Update

​London, Dec 10 (IANS) Some groups killifish are up to 8,000 times more resistant than others to highly toxic industrial pollutants such as dioxins, heavy metals and hydrocarbons, thanks to their high levels of genetic variation, a study says.

"The Atlantic killifish seem particularly well-positioned to evolve the necessary adaptations to survive in radically altered habitats, because of their large population sizes and the relatively high level of DNA diversity seen in their populations," said one of the researchers John Colbourne, Professor at University of Birmingham in Britain.

The researchers wanted to explore the genetic mechanism responsible for evolutionary adaptation to toxic pollution observed in wild Atlantic killifish populations.

The Atlantic killifish is renowned for its ability to tolerate large fluctuations in temperature, salinity and oxygen levels. 

However, its rapid adaptation to the normally lethal levels of toxic pollution found in some urban estuaries in the US is unusual, even for such a hardy species.

The team analysed the genomes of four wild populations of pollution-tolerant killifish compared with four non-tolerant populations, to identify the mechanism behind this adaptation. 

"This report highlights the complexity of the processes involved in the adaptation of wild fish to lethal levels of environmental pollution," Colbourne said.

"It also demonstrates how the DNA of populations that differ in their susceptibility to pollutants can reveal 'signatures' of the adverse effects of chemicals in the environment," Colbourne noted.

The researchers warned that these findings -- published today in the journal Science -- should not be used to justify the harm caused by human pollution of the natural environment.

"Unfortunately, most species we care about preserving probably can't adapt to these rapid changes because they don't have the high levels of genetic variation that allow them to evolve quickly," lead author Andrew Whitehead, Associate Professor at University of California, Davis in the US.

​Tokyo, Dec 10 (IANS) Japan on Friday successfully launched a rocket carrying the unmanned cargo spaceship Kounotori 6 to deliver supplies for astronauts living in the International Space Station (ISS).

The H-2B rocket carrying the spaceship lifted off from the Tanegashima Space Centre in Kagoshima Prefecture, southwestern Japan, at 10:26 p.m. local time (GMT 1326), Xinhua news agency reported.

The spaceship, sixth of its kind, carries some 5.9 tonnes of supplies, including food, drinking water and other necessities, as well as some batteries and ultrasmall satellites.

It is expected to dock with the ISS on Tuesday, according to the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency.

After the supplies are unloaded to the ISS, the spaceship will then be loaded with waste materials, including used experiment equipment or used clothes and then undock.

Before re-entering the atmosphere, the Kounotori 6 will also conduct experiment on an electrodynamic tether, called the Kounotori Integrated Tether Experiment (KITE).

The launch, originally scheduled for September 2016, was postponed due to piping leakage.

Developed and built in Japan, the Kounotori spacecraft, also known as H-II Transfer Vehicle (HTV), has been used to deliver supplies to the space station.

The first mission of the HTV, or Kounotori 1, was launched in 2009.

New York, Dec 9 (IANS) Global open source solution provider Red Hat on Friday launched its "OpenShift Dedicated" solution -- a cloud-based service targeting enterprise IT and development teams -- on the Google Cloud Platform.

Beijing, Dec 9 (IANS) China's consumer price index, a main gauge of inflation, grew 2.3 per cent year on year in November, up from October's 2.1 per cent, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) said on Friday.

Toronto, Dec 9 (IANS) Canadian mobile company BlackBerry on Friday launched a Cloud-enabled mobile security platform for "Enterprise of Things" that will address entire businesses from endpoint to endpoint. "Enterprise of Things" is defined as the network of intelligent connections and endpoints within the enterprise that enable products to move from sketch to scale. It is a collection of devices, computers, sensors, trackers, equipment and other things that communicate with each other to enable smart product development, distribution, marketing and sales. "Businesses must be able to confidentially and reliably transmit sensitive data between endpoints to keep people, information and goods safe," John Chen, Executive Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, BlackBerry, said in a statement. The platform completes the integration of the BlackBerry's prior acquisitions of key technologies such as Good Technology, WatchDox, AtHoc and Encription, the company said.

​Toronto, Dec 9 (IANS) Smallpox, a pathogen that caused millions of deaths worldwide, may not be an ancient disease but a much more modern killer that went on to become the first human disease eradicated by vaccination, suggests genetic research.

Smallpox, one of the most devastating viral diseases ever to strike humankind, had long been thought to have appeared in human populations thousands of years ago in ancient Egypt, India and China, with some historical accounts suggesting that Pharaoh Ramses V - who died in 1145 BC -- suffered from smallpox.

The new findings, published in the journal Current Biology, fuel a longstanding debate over when the virus that causes smallpox, variola, first emerged and later evolved in response to inoculation and vaccination.

"This study sets the clock of smallpox evolution to a much more recent time-scale" said Eddie Holmes, Professor at the University of Sydney, Australia.

In an attempt to better understand its evolutionary history, and after obtaining clearance from the World Health Organisation (WHO), the team of scientists extracted the heavily fragmented DNA from the partially mummified remains of a Lithuanian child.

The child is believed to have died between 1643 A.D. and 1665 A.D., a period in which several smallpox outbreaks were documented throughout Europe with increasing levels of mortality. 

The smallpox DNA was captured, sequenced and the ancient genome, one of the oldest viral genomes to date, was completely reconstructed. 

Researchers compared and contrasted the 17th century strain with those from a modern databank of samples dating from 1940 up to its eradication in 1977. 

Strikingly, the research showed that the evolution of smallpox virus occurred far more recently than previously thought, with all the available strains of the virus having an ancestor no older than 1580.

"So now that we have a timeline, we have to ask whether the earlier documented historical evidence of smallpox, which goes back to Ramses V and includes everything up to the 1500s, is real," senior author of the study Hendrik Poinar from McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada, said.

"Are these indeed real cases of smallpox, or are these misidentifications, which we know is very easy to do, because it is likely possible to mistake smallpox for chicken pox and measles," Poinar pointed out.

"It is still unclear what animal is the true reservoir of smallpox virus and when the virus first jumped into humans," Holmes noted.

​Nay Pyi Taw, Dec 9 (IANS) In one-of-a-kind discovery, a tail of a feathered dinosaur has been found perfectly preserved in amber in Myanmar, opening a new window on the biology of a group that dominated earth for more than 160 million years, a media reported on Friday.

Described in the journal Current Biology, the examination of the specimen suggests the tail was chestnut brown on top and white on its underside.

"This is the first time we've found dinosaur material preserved in amber," co-author Ryan McKellar, of the Royal Saskatchewan Museum in Canada, told the BBC news.

The study's first author, Lida Xing from the China University of Geosciences in Beijing, discovered the remarkable fossil at an amber market in Myitkina, Myanmar.

The 99-million-year-old amber had already been polished for jewellery and the seller had thought it was plant material. On closer inspection, however, it turned out to be the tail of a feathered dinosaur about the size of a sparrow.

McKellar said examination of the tail's anatomy showed it definitely belonged to a feathered dinosaur and not an ancient bird.

"We can be sure of the source because the vertebrae are not fused into a rod or pygostyle as in modern birds and their closest relatives," he explained.

"Instead, the tail is long and flexible, with keels of feathers running down each side."

McKellar said there are signs the dinosaur still contained fluids when it was incorporated into the tree resin that eventually formed the amber. This indicates that it could even have become trapped in the sticky substance while it was still alive.

Co-author Prof Mike Benton, from the University of Bristol, added: "It's amazing to see all the details of a dinosaur tail - the bones, flesh, skin, and feathers - and to imagine how this little fellow got his tail caught in the resin, and then presumably died because he could not wrestle free."

The findings also shed light on how feathers were arranged on these dinosaurs, because 3D features are often lost due to the compression that occurs when corpses become fossils in sedimentary rocks.

The feathers lack the well-developed central shaft - a rachis - known from modern birds. Their structure suggests that the two finest tiers of branching in modern feathers, known as barbs and barbules, arose before the rachis formed.

Paul Barrett, from London's Natural History Museum, called the specimen a "beautiful fossil", describing it as a "really rare occurrence of vertebrate material in amber".

He told BBC news: "Feathers have been recovered in amber before, so that aspect isn't new, but what this new specimen shows is the 3D arrangement of feathers in a Mesozoic dinosaur/bird for the first time, as almost all of the other feathered dinosaur fossils and Mesozoic bird skeletons that we have are flattened and 2D only, which has obscured some important features of their anatomy."

​Washington, Dec 9 (IANS) US researchers said on Thursday they have discovered a tumour in a 255-million-year-old mammalian ancestor called a gorgonopsian.

The tumour, found in the extinct species's fossilised jaw, is a benign one made up of miniature, tooth-like structures, they reported in the latest issue of Journal of the American Medical Association Oncology.

Known as a compound odontoma, this type of tumour is common to mammals today. Before this discovery, the earliest known evidence of odontomas came from Ice Age-era fossils, Xinhua reported.

"We think this is by far the oldest known instance of a compound odontoma," said senior author Christian Sidor, a University of Washington (UW) professor of biology and curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture. "It would indicate that this is an ancient type of tumour."

According to the study, gorgonopsians were distant mammal relatives and the top predators the apex predator during its pre-dinosaur era about 255 million years ago. 

These animals are part of a larger group of animals called synapsids, which includes modern mammals as its only living member.

Sidor and colleagues spotted the tumour when they examined wafer-thin slices of the fossilised gorgonopsian jaw, collected in southern Tanzani, to see how the tooth was nestled within its socket.

They immediately noticed irregular clusters of up to eight tiny, round objects embedded next to the root of a canine tooth. The objects within each cluster resembled small, poorly differentiated teeth, or toothlets, that harboured distinct layers of dentin and enamel.

"At first we did not know what to make of it," said Megan Whitney, lead author and UW biology graduate student. "But after some investigation we realized this gorgonopsian had what looks like a textbook compound odontoma."

In humans and other mammals, the tumour's toothlets grow within the gums or other soft tissues of the jaw and can cause pain and swelling, as well as disrupt the position of teeth and other tissues, the researchers said.

Odontomas are considered benign tumours because they do not metastasize and spread throughout the body. But given the disruptions they cause, surgeons often opt to remove them.

"Until now, the earliest known occurrence of this tumour was about one million years ago, in fossil mammals," said Judy Skog, programme director in the National Science Foundation's Division of Earth Sciences, which funded the research.

"These researchers have found an example in the ancestors of mammals that lived 255 million years ago. The discovery suggests that the suspected cause of an odontoma is not tied solely to traits in modern species, as had been thought," Skog added.

​Kathmandu, Dec 8 (IANS) Nepal's state-owned telecom company Nepal Telecom and China Telecom Global have signed an agreement on providing internet protocol service between the two countries through cross-border Terrestrial Cable Route, the company said.

​Tehran, Dec 7 (IANS) The Iran government on Wednesday approved a proposal to change the name of the country's currency unit from rial to toman, media reported.

One toman equals 10 rials and one dollar is worth about 3,900 tomans in Iran's unofficial market currently, Xinhua news agency reported.