The Neanderthal is the closest relative to the modern human. (Google Photo)

US and German scientists launched a two-year project to decipher the genetic code of the Neanderthal, a feat they hope will help deepen understanding of how modern humans’ brains evolved, AP reported.
Neanderthals were a species that lived in Europe and western Asia from more than 200,000 years ago to about 30,000 years ago. Scientists from Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology are teaming up a company in Connecticut to map the genome, or DNA code.
“The Neanderthal is the closest relative to the modern human, and we believe that by sequencing the Neanderthal we can learn a lot,“ said Michael Egholm, a vice president at 454 Life Sciences Corp. of Branford, Conn., which will use its high-speed sequencing technology in the project.
There are no firm answers yet about how humans picked up key traits such as walking upright and developing complex language. Neanderthals are believed to have been relatively sophisticated, but lacking in humans’ higher reasoning functions.
The Neanderthal project follows scientists’ achievement last year in deciphering the DNA of the chimpanzee, our closest living relative. That genome map produced a long list of DNA differences between humans and chimps and some hints about which differences might be crucial.
The chimp genome “led to literally too many questions, there were 35 million differences between us and chimpanzees--that’s too much to figure out,“ Jonathan Rothberg, 454’s chairman, said.
“By having Neanderthal, we’ll really be able to home in on the small percentage of differences that gave us higher cognitive abilities,“ he said. “Neanderthal is going to open the box. It’s not going to answer the question, but it’s going to tell where to look to understand all of those higher cognitive functions.“
Over two years, the scientists aim to reconstruct a draft of the 3 billion building blocks of the Neanderthal genome--working with fossil samples from several individuals.
They face the complication of working with 40,000-year-old samples, and of filtering out microbial DNA that contaminated them after death.
Only about 5 percent of the DNA in the samples is actually Neanderthal DNA, Egholm estimated, but he and Rothberg said pilot experiments had convinced them that the decoding was feasible.

New radar images of Saturn’s moon Titan reveal dunes, hills, valleys and rivers that scientists say look a lot like home, Space reported.
But on Titan, which is frigid and shrouded in smog, the features are likely carved in ice rather than solid ground.
The detailed view is of a bright area on Titan called Xanadu. It’s about the size of Australia and has been studied from afar for years. Now scientists are getting a better look with NASA’s Cassini spacecraft. Radar is bounced off the surface to generate an image that cannot be made using visible-light observations because the orbiting spacecraft can’t see through the moon’s thick atmosphere.
The observations reveal mountains about as high as the Appalachians.
“Surprisingly, this cold, faraway region has geological features remarkably like Earth,“ said Jonathan Lunine, a Cassini researcher at the University of Arizona.
The river channels are likely carved by liquid methane or ethane, as the moon is too cold for water to be liquid.
“Although Titan gets far less sunlight and is much smaller and colder than Earth, Xanadu is no longer just a mere bright spot, but a land where rivers flow down to a sunless sea,“ Lunine said.
Liquid methane might fall as rain or trickle from springs to create the rivers, Lunine and his colleagues figure. Perhaps the rivers carry grains of material that accumulate as dunes elsewhere.
“This land is heavily tortured, convoluted and filled with hills and mountains,“ said Steve Wall, the Cassini radar team’s deputy leader at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “Xanadu has been washed clean. What is left underneath looks like very porous water ice, maybe filled with caverns.“

Scientists in the US have combined spider silk with biological silica to make an extremely strong composite nanomaterial that could be used in industrial and medical applications. The new nanomaterial, which has been made by David Kaplan at Tufts University in Massachusetts and colleagues, boasts the flexibility and tensile strength of silk and the toughness of silica, Physicweb reported.
Silica is widely found in biological systems, where it supports and protects single-celled organisms, such as algae (diatoms). It also exists in the skeletons of some higher animals and even in plants. Spider silk, meanwhile, is a highly flexible material that has a high tensile strength. Moreover, it can self assemble to produce well-defined sheet-like structures.
In their new work, Kaplan and colleagues used genetic engineering to make a cloned spider silk protein that can form films and fibers. By mixing this material with biosilica--from the proteins of diatoms--in aqueous solution, the researchers were able to create a new composite nanomaterial with exceptional mechanical properties. The researchers found that the eliptically shaped silica particles attached themselves to the protein fibres, which as a result became “sticky“.
The silica particles were also found to form in a narrow range of sizes of between just 0.5 and 2 microns in diameter, unlike their natural counterparts, which vary over a broader range from 0.5 to 10 microns. According to Kaplan and co-workers, this ability to control the silica particle size could be used in industrial and biomedical applications, and to make new composites. An example is novel biomaterials for making artificial bone.
The researchers say that their technique might allow the production of other tough materials and composites that are difficult to fabricate using traditional industrial methods. The team will now try to better control the silica morphology to further improve its mechanical properties.

Researchers say they’re gaining greater insight into how the brain’s own stem cells may trigger one of the deadliest forms of cancer.
According to HealthDay, the stem cells--which can turn into a variety of brain cells--appear to carry a receptor that pulls in a specific chemical. If the cells get over-stimulated by the chemical, that may lead to tumor formation.
The discovery, “might lead to better understanding of early growth“ of brain malignancies, said study co-author Arturo Alvarez-Buylla, a professor of neurological surgery at the University of California, San Francisco. As a result, he said, “We might be able to make some headway in diagnosing cases early,“ when they are most receptive to treatment.
At issue are brain tumors called malignant gliomas. Brain tumors are routinely fatal, but malignant gliomas are especially deadly because they’re often not discovered until they’ve grown significantly, sometimes becoming as large as a fist, Alvarez-Buylla said.
Other factors conspire to make malignant gliomas incurable in adults for “all practical purposes,“ said Charles D. Stiles, a professor of microbiology and molecular genetics at Harvard Medical School. The tumors are hard to find, are often in areas of the brain that surgeons can’t reach, and are “notoriously resistant to radiation therapy,“ Stiles said.
In the new study, which received partial funding from the federal government, Alvarez-Buylla and colleagues examined non-embryonic, neural stem cells called “B cells“ in mice and tried to determine how they function.
Reporting in the July 20 issue of Neuron, the researchers found that B cells in mice and humans have a receptor for a chemical called platelet-derived growth factor.
When the cells are “stimulated“ with the chemical in mice, they began to grow tumor-like masses, Alvarez-Buylla said. On the other hand, when this growth factor is removed, “the cells stop growing and the tissue recovers.“
The research suggests that the growth factor can trigger the cells in humans to “grow in a very abnormal manner and invade the tissue around them,“ Alvarez-Buylla said.
What’s next? More research could give scientists a greater understanding of the brain cancer process, Alvarez-Buylla said.
But, for now, the research has no direct impact on the treatment of glioma patients, said Stiles, who co-wrote a commentary accompanying the study. Indeed, he said, one clinical trial has already shown that inhibiting the growth factor won’t help patients with recurrent tumors.
Even so, Stiles said, the “line of attack“ suggested in the study should be “reexamined and pursued.“

Food allergies are an exaggerated immune response in which the body produces histamines and antibodies that induce symptoms in the gastrointestinal tract, airways and skin. (Google Photo)

Researchers have identified a protein that they say could be responsible for triggering food allergy in humans and would be useful in developing more accurate tests for such allergies, NewKerala said.
Researchers led by M. Cecilia Berin at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York, showed for the first time that CD23, a protein normally present in a person’s intestinal tract, acts as a receptor for IgE, a protein associated with allergic reactions.
The researchers studied nine paediatric patients aged three to 17 years. They believe that the presence of CD23 may provide a surrogate method of looking at the gut without invasive tests like biopsies, reported the science portal EurekAlert.
Food allergies are an exaggerated immune response in which the body produces histamines and antibodies that induce symptoms in the gastrointestinal tract, airways and skin, and in the most severe cases induces anaphylactic shock, an often fatal systemic reaction.
These allergies are often characterized by abdominal pain, diarrhoea, vomiting, hives, swelling of the eyelids, face, lips and tongue, shortness of breath or wheezing and difficulty swallowing, among other symptoms.
The most common allergens are peanuts, tree nuts, shellfish, fish, wheat, milk, eggs and soy.
Food allergies often present a unique problem for allergy testing since not every patient has detectable levels of immunoglobulin E (IgE) in their serum, especially patients with delayed allergies.
A number of reliable testing methods exist for food and other allergies, including skin tests and serum IgE tests; however, they may not accurately diagnose the allergies.
The researchers said that CD23 can be detectable in stool samples from food allergic patients. They are now intending to conduct larger scale trials to determine how CD23 in the stool correlates with clinical findings.
“We hope to determine that CD23 offers a promising target for food allergies that leads to more accurate, easier to tolerate tests for these patients,“ Berin said.

Children need to do more exercise than recommended in international guidelines to reduce their risk of developing cardiovascular disease, a team of researchers said on Friday.
Instead of one hour a day of moderate physical activity, young people may need to do 90 minutes to stave off high blood pressure, raised cholesterol levels and other risk factors that can lead to heart problems, Reuters said.
“Physical activity levels need to be higher than the current international guidelines of at least one hour per day,“ said Lars Bo Andersen of the Norwegian School of Sports Science in Oslo.
Andersen and his team assessed the impact of exercise on 1,732 children from Denmark, Estonia and Portugal, aged either nine or 15.
They compared the amount of exercise they did every day and measured their risks of developing heart disease.
They found that the more the children exercised, the more their combined risks factor score decreased.
Nine-year-olds who did 116 minutes of moderate to vigorous exercise a day and the teens who exercised for 88 minutes daily had the lowest risk factor scores, according to the research published in The Lancet medical journal.