Men are on the road to extinction as their genes shrink and slowly fade away, a genetic expert warned today.

The researcher in human sex chromosomes said the male Y chromosome was dying and could one day run out.

However readers shouldn't worry just yet - the change is not due to take place for another five million years.

Professor Jennifer Graves revealed the bleak future to medical students at a public lecture at the Royal College of Surgeons (RCSI) in Ireland.

But all is not lost. She said men may follow the path of a type of rodent which still manages to reproduce despite not having the vital genes that make up the Y chromosome.

'You need a Y chromosome to be male,' said Prof Graves.

'Three hundred million years ago the Y chromosome had about 1,400 genes on it, and now it's only got 45 left, so at this rate we're going to run out of genes on the Y chromosome in about five million years.

'The Y chromosome is dying and the big question is what happens then.'

The male Y chromosome has a gene (SRY) which switches on the development of testis and pumps out male hormones that determine maleness.

In her lecture, entitled The Decline and Fall of the Y Chromosome and the Future of Men, Prof Graves discussed the disappearance of the Y chromosome and the implications for humans.

She said it was not known what would happen once the Y chromosome disappeared.
'Humans can't become parthenogenetic (asexual), like some lizards, because several vital genes must come from the male,' she continued.

'But the good news is that certain rodent species - the mole voles of Eastern Europe and the country rats of Japan - have no Y chromosome and no SRY gene.

'Yet there are still plenty of healthy male mole voles and country rats running around. Some other gene must have taken over the job and we'd like to know what that gene is.'

The scientist said there were several candidate genes which could take over from SRY, adding whichever one did take over was sheer chance.

'It is even possible that two or more different sex-determination systems based on different genes could arise in different populations,' she added.

'These could no longer reproduce with each other, leading to two different species of humans.'

The work of Prof Graves, of the Australian National University, Canberra, on the evolution of sex determination has paved the way for developments in diagnosis of gender disorders and gender-related disease in humans.

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Anaconda, a giant rubber "snake" that floats offshore and converts wave energy to electricity, is a step closer to commercialization. An 8-meter long, 1/25th scale version is currently undergoing tests in a large wave tank in Gosport, UK, and a full-size working version could be a reality in five years.

Harnessing the power of waves is an attractive proposition because they are much more energy dense than wind. But wave power remains the poor relation of the renewable energy sector due to the difficulties of cheaply operating machinery in the harsh marine environment. The world's first commercial wave farm only began operating last year, off the northern coast of Portugal.

A variety of other designs are in testing around the world, but none are as unusual as the Anaconda. The rubber snake is filled with freshwater – to help deter sea creatures from setting up a home inside – and sealed at both ends to create a semi-rigid balloon that floats at the sea's surface.

Wave pulse

The tube is anchored at one end and as waves wash along its length they exert pressure on the snake that is transmitted by the water inside. This forces Anaconda's walls to expand outwards into the wave troughs where they are under less pressure, forming "bulge waves" that travel along the Anaconda's length.

These waves are similar to those that pass through the human circulatory system and can be felt as the pulse in the wrist and neck, says Rod Rainey of Atkins Global, co-inventor of the Anaconda. When each bulge wave reaches the end of the snake it keeps a turbine spinning to generate electricity.

The snake is made from a rubber-based material similar to that used to make dracones – flexible containers that are filled with diesel or water and towed behind ships for quick and cheap transportation.

Other than the turbine, Anaconda has no moving parts and unlike other wave power devices it needs only one tether to the ocean floor. That lowers construction costs and reduces the need for maintenance – an expensive undertaking in offshore settings where corrosion and accessibility are problems, explains Rainey.

Des Crampton, CEO of Checkmate Seaenergy, the firm commercializing the flexible wave harvester, says a full-size Anaconda 200 meters long could generate enough energy to power 1000 average homes. "Anaconda captures more energy than all existing wave energy devices," he says.

Rainey and retired physicist Francis Farley began work on the concept in 2007, and tested mini Anacondas last year. The first full-size Anacondas could become operational in 2014.

from New Scientist …

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The dinosaurs were wiped out by volcanoes that erupted in India about sixty five million years ago, according to new research.

For the last thirty years scientists have believed a giant meteorite that struck Chicxulub in Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula was responsible for the mass extinction of species, including T Rex and its cousins.

But now Professor Gerta Keller says fossilized traces of plants and animals dug out of low lying hills at El Penon in northeastern Mexico show this event happened 300,000 years after the dinosaurs disappeared. Professor Keller said the meteorite, despite having a diameter spanning six miles, seems to have had no effect on any of the plant and animal life of the region whereas the volcano eruptions could have blocked sunlight, altered climate and caused acid rain. She said: 'Not a single species went extinct as a result of the Chicxulub impact.' research, which has taken twenty years, will stop the raging debate at the heart of the demise of the dinosaurs.

She said: 'The decades old controversy over the cause of the mass extinction will never achieve consensus.' Understanding what caused the dinosaurs to disappear remains a great mystery. Theories attempting to explain it include asteroid or cometary impacts, volcanoes, global climate change, rising sea levels and supernova explosions. Scientists know that at a point about 65 million years ago, some phenomenon triggered mass extinctions on the land and oceans.

Dr Richard Lane, of the US National Science Foundation's division of earth sciences which funded the research, said Prof Keller may be onto something. He said: 'Keller and colleagues continue to amass detailed stratigraphic information supporting new thinking about the Chicxulub impact and the mass extinction at the end of the Cretaceous. The two may not be linked after all.'

This has been always point of world wide debate … many people have spent years … sometimes their whole life just to find one single answer … HOW DID DINOSOURS REALLY DIED ?? … and , many scientists have their theories … asteroid hit … global warming … disease  … ice age … climate change … evolution … and now … the volcano … but nobody has never ever got confidence or say 100% reliable proof that their conclusion is correct … all theories are just based on assumptions … well , lets hope that someday … we will really able to know how those dinos disappeared suddenly all over the planet … because it can give us idea of future of mankind …

from DailyMail …

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With more than 1.5 billion people online around the round, scientists estimate the carbon footprint of the internet is growing by more than 10 per cent each year.

Many internet companies are struggling to manage the costs as energy bills soar, while their advertising revenues come under pressure from the recession.

It is thought one site facing problems is video website YouTube. Although now the world's third-biggest website, it requires a heavy subsidy from Google, its owner.

Recent analysis by Credit Suisse suggest it could lose as much as £317m this year.

As the demand for electricity grows, the computer industry's carbon footprint is also increasing, although tracking the growth of its energy use is difficult, as internal company estimates of power consumption are rarely made public.

A study by Rich Brown, an energy analyst at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab in California, commissioned by the US environmental protection agency, suggested US data centers used 61bn kW of power in 2006 - enough to supply the UK for two months.

"Efficiency is being more than overwhelmed by continued growth and demand for new services," he said. "It's a common story... technical improvements are often taken back by increased demand."

Urs Hölzle, Google's vice-president of operations, said it was struggling to contain energy costs despite developing its own data centers.

"You have exponential growth in demand from users, and many of these services are free so you don't have exponential growth of revenue to go with it," he told The Guardian

"With good engineering we're trying to make those two even out … but the power bill is going up."

Mr Hölzle dismissed concerns about the environmental impact of using the internet as "overblown".

"One mile of driving completely dwarfs the cost of a search," he said. "Internet usage is part of our consumption, just like TV is, or driving."

To avoid future scenarios such as possible website failures and power cuts, the industry is attempting to combat the problem - introducing new designs for data centres, innovative cooling methods and more investment in renewable energy.

Researchers at Microsoft's £50m research lab in Cambridge are replacing energy-consuming new machines with the systems used in older, less powerful laptops.

Andrew Herbert, the director of Microsoft Research Cambridge, said: "We found we can build more energy-efficient data centers with those than with the kind of high performance processors you find in a typical server."

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There will be about 1,700 U.S. cases of the new H1N1 flu, aka "swine flu," in the next four weeks under a worst-case scenario, according to a research team's new simulations.
And a second team working independently, about 200 miles away, on exactly the same question came up with a similar forecast.

As of Thursday, there were 109 lab-confirmed U.S. cases of the new influenza, according to the World Health Organization, which earlier this week raised the risk level of the influenza to one stage below pandemic because the virus is being transmitted within at least two countries in one region of the world. A full pandemic— the virus is also being transmitted within a third country in a different region — is considered imminent.

It is not clear, however, how virulent or deadly this flu strain will become. Flu viruses are unpredictable, and while some in history have proven incredibly deadly, many would-be-pandemics turned out to be quite mild. Also, medicine and public health are more sophisticated today, in terms of treatments and educational campaigns, than they were during the nation's last pandemic flu in 1968, let alone during the Spanish flu of 1918.

Still, researchers are eager to predict what might happen and Dirk Brockmann has identified the hotspots.

California, Texas and Florida will have most of the cases by late May if Brockmann's large-scale computer simulations are right. His group at Northwestern University came up with the figure of 1,700 cases by late May, and also projected more than 100 cases for the Chicago area.

"Remember — that's exponential growth, which means slow at the beginning and then very fast," Brockmann said. "If you run the worst-case scenario for four months, we're at a very different number."

Brockmann's computer clusters can be used to simulate an infectious disease that spreads among 300 million people. The approach was based on human mobility patterns — daily commuting, intermediate trips and long-distance ones — which helps determine how a disease could potentially spread, and he modeled those on data from a dollar-bill tracking project called WheresGeorge.com. You can track people's movements, to a certain extent, if you know where they spend cash.

"These networks play an important role in the spread of infectious disease," he said. "So we're looking at how people travel in the United States and Europe and trying to find a theory behind human traffic. Then we can unravel the structures within these networks and explain them."

Brockmann says his forecast is off by a little bit, and that's a good thing. His team's worst-case scenario assumes that no measures have been taken by officials and public health agencies to combat the spread of disease. Most likely, the case count will be lower than his estimate as a result of such things as stronger public health campaigns for hand washing and social distancing (stand far away from people who are coughing and sneezing), school closures where children are found to be symptomatic and the federal travel advisory against non-essential trips to Mexico.
Brockmann and his team's swine flu results match up well with those of a research group at Indiana University in Bloomington led by computer scientist Alex Vespignani. The teams were aware of each other's work but intentionally worked independently and remained ignorant of each other's methodology to see if they arrived at the same results. When scientists independently arrive at the same result, it suggests they have a finding that is "robust," that is it will stand the test of time.

"When we look at the numbers, they are in stunning agreement," Vespignani told LiveScience. "That is very comforting in the sense that it's a sign of robustness. Also it suggests that the results we are getting are probably correct."

The two teams know each other from conferences, but have never specifically collaborated on a published research report, he said. (Brockmann's team includes graduate students Christian Theimann, Rafael Brune and Alejandro Morales Gallardo. Vespignani said there are 20 members of his research team.)

Of course, the H1N1 flu outbreak is still evolving, Brockmann said.

"We have to buy time for the development and distribution of a vaccine, so that is the point, the main issue," Vespignani said.

Vespignani said his team's forecast for the number of cases on May 17 is 1,200 (a public version of his results are at www.gleamviz.org). If you project that rate forward to Brockmann's calculation for late May, when the virus will have spread to even more people, you get a decent alignment, with rounding.

Most recently on 29th of april, influenza pandemic alert level raised from phase 4 to phase 5 …. which means , the pandemic is imminent .. and virus has been spread in two countries in one region !!! …. the last phase is 6 … that is pandemic phase …

from Live Science …

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Africans have more genetic variation than anyone else on Earth, according to a new study that helps narrow the location where humans first evolved, probably near the South Africa-Namibia border.

The largest study of African genetics ever undertaken also found that nearly three-fourths of African-Americans can trace their ancestry to West Africa. The new analysis published Thursday in the online edition of the journal Science.

"Given the fact that modern humans arose in Africa, they have had time to accumulate dramatic changes" in their genes, explained lead researcher Sarah Tishkoff, a geneticist at the University of Pennsylvania.

People have been adapting to very diverse environmental niches in Africa, she explained in a briefing.

Over 10 years, Tishkoff and an international team of researchers trekked across Africa collecting samples to compare the genes of various peoples. Often working in primitive conditions, the researchers sometimes had to resort to using a car battery to power their equipment, Tishkoff explained.

The reason for their work? Very little was known about the genetic variation in Africans, knowledge that is vital to understanding why diseases have a greater impact in some groups than others and in designing ways to counter those illnesses.

Scott M. Williams of Vanderbilt University noted that constructing patterns of disease variations can help determine which genes predispose a group to a particular illness.

This study "provides a critical piece in the puzzle," he said. For example, there are clear differences in prevalence of diseases such as hypertension and prostate cancer across populations, Williams said.

"The human genome describes the complexity of our species," added Muntaser Ibrahim of the department of molecular biology at the University of Khartoum, Sudan. "Now we have spectacular insight into the history of the African population ... the oldest history of mankind.

"Everybody's history is part of African history because everybody came out of Africa," Ibrahim said.

Christopher Ehret of the department of history at the University of California, Los Angeles, compared genetic variation among people to variations in language.

There are an estimated 2,000 distinct language groups in Africa broken into a few broad categories, often but not always following gene flow.

Movement of a language usually involves arrival of new people, Ehret noted, bringing along their genes. But sometimes language is brought by a small "but advantaged" group which can impose their language without significant gene flow.

Overall, the researchers were able to study and compare the genetics of 121 African groups, 60 non-African populations and four African-American groups.

The so-called "Cape-colored" population of South Africa has highest levels of mixed ancestry on the globe, a blend of African, European, East Asian and South Indian, Tishkoff said.

"This will be a great population for study of diseases" that are more common in one group than another, she said.

The study also found that about 71 percent of African-Americans can trace their ancestry to western African origins. They also have between 13 percent and 15 percent European ancestry and a smaller amount of other African origins. There was "very little" evidence for American Indian genes among African-Americans, Tishkoff said.

Ehret added that only about 20 percent of the Africans brought to North America made the trip directly, while most of the rest went first to the West Indies.

And, he added, some local African-American populations, such as the residents of the sea islands off Georgia and South Carolina, can trace their origins to specific regions such as Sierra Leone and Guinea.

from Yahoo! …

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