Z Blurbs

Great white shark bite mark sparks fears prehistoric monster Megalodon has returned – World News

From www.mirror.co.uk
2022-01-09 21:06:45
[email protected] (Charles Wade-Palmer, Lucy Skoulding)
Excerpt:

There are concerns that prehistoric monster Megalodon is back after huge bite marks were pictured on the side of a great white shark.

Diver Jalil Najafov, 40, saw the 15ft shark with the massive bite mark swimming off Isla Guadalupe in Mexico – and the huge wound has since sparked a debate as to what on earth attacked it.

Experts argued why another shark would have bitten its own kind so violently, while social media users had another much more terrifying idea, reports the Daily Star.

Jalil’s Instagram post has led to speculation it could have come from a Megalodon, an ancient shark species regarded as one of the largest and most powerful predators to have ever lived.

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Death rates up 40%, setting new 200-year high, life insurance company CEO says

From www.dailykos.com
2022-01-09 21:00:15
Walter Einenkel
Excerpt:

 

There are large areas of the United States under Republican control where COVID-19 deaths and COVID-19-related deaths are openly undercounted. Unfortunately for the GOP and Trump death-cult followers, life insurance doesn’t care about your internet research degree at MAGA Meme University. Their entire business model is based on the gamble that they can figure out exactly who will die and when, based on the best actuarial science and statistical data available.

Comedian Greg Fitzsimmons once told a joke that the strange relationship a consumer has with life insurance can be summed up as the consumer placing a bunch of money on a table and saying, “I bet you I die this year,” and the insurance company picking up the money, counting it, and saying “We bet you don’t.”

Life insurance companies do not care about your feelings. People either die or they don’t. Different groups of people have higher mortality rates for a variety of reasons, and life insurance companies…

 

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DNA in Unlikely Places Helps Piece Together Ancient Humans’ Family Trees

From www.discovermagazine.com
2022-01-09 18:00:00
Bridget Alex
Excerpt:

 

One hundred thousand years ago, Neanderthals gathered in a cave perched 3,000 feet up in present-day Spain’s Atapuerca Mountains. While cooking and watching youngsters wrestle, they littered the floor with DNA in shed skin, spit and other bodily debris. 

Dirt accumulated and protected the genetic material for millennia, even as humans and animals sheltered there. At the site, known as Estatuas, archaeologists have uncovered abundant stone tools and animal bones since 2008. The sole Neanderthal bone found — a toe tip with Swiss cheese consistency — seemed too precious to crush for DNA analysis. The scientists therefore couldn’t elucidate the inhabitants’ genetic traits and ties with other Neanderthal clans.

Instead, they searched the dirt for loose DNA. In 2018, researchers dropped into pits at Estatuas and collected sediment from layers that formed between 70,000 and 113,000 years ago. They had fetched nearly 800 sediment samples in 2017 from the Chagyrskaya and Denisova caves in southern Siberia, promising locations that had already yielded DNA-bearing fossils of Neanderthals and their Denisovan relatives.

At the Max Planck Institute in Germany, Benjamin Vernot and colleagues separated the human DNA from sequences belonging to animals, plants and microbes. The resulting Science and Nature papers demonstrated that dirt devoid of fossils and artifacts can conceal a genetic treasure trove. At Denisova Cave, researchers extracted human DNA fragments from over 220 sediment samples — versus nine fossils with genetic material. The dirt indicated that lineages of Neanderthals, Denisovans or Homo sapiens lived there at different points.

 

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Scientists vacuum zoo animals’ DNA out of the air

From www.opb.org
2022-01-09 17:19:33

Excerpt:

A key part of protecting endangered species is figuring out where they’re living. Now researchers say they have found a powerful new tool that could help: vacuuming DNA out of the air.

“This is a bit of a crazy idea,” admits Elizabeth Clare, a molecular ecologist at York University in Toronto, Canada. “We are literally sucking DNA out of the sky.”

But it works. Clare’s group was one of two to publish papers in the journal Current Biology Thursday showing that dozens of animal species could be detected by simply sampling the air.

 

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