The year 2004 was an interesting year in which the first hobbits were discovered, developments in the field of stem cells and nanotechnology and more
Did another human species exist until recently?
Almost all the science news sites on the Internet described this news as the most important news of the year: "Remains of a dwarf human race have been discovered that lived in Indonesia until 12 thousand years ago" (28/10/04)
As you remember, scientists discovered a new species of dwarf humans who lived in Indonesia at the same time as Homo sapiens, and at the same time when our ancestors filled the whole world. The new species, which was nicknamed the hobbit due to its dwarf size, lived in Flores Islands until 12 thousand years ago. This is what the journal Nature reports.
The find is considered one of the most significant of its kind in several decades. Australian archaeologists uncovered the bones when excavating a site called Liang Bua, one of the many sandstone caves scattered around Flores.
The remains of part of a skeleton were found at a depth of 5.9 meters. Initially, the investigators believed that it was the body of a child, but a deeper investigation revealed that this is not the case. Jewels on the teeth and the growth lines of the bone proved that it was an adult, the pelvis indicated that it was a female and some of the leg bones indicated that this woman walked on two legs like us.
"When we received data on the age of the skeleton, we were surprised at how young it is, and some of the scientists who work with us think that this must be a mistake because the skeleton has so many archaic and primitive characteristics," said one of my colleagues at my age, Mike Morewood, a professor of archeology at the University of New England in Australia.
The woman's skeleton is 18 years old, and is known as Liang Boa 1 or LB1 for short, and it was classified as a new species named Homo floresiensis. She was one meter tall and had long arms and a skull the size of a grapefruit. Since the discovery, the remains of six more individuals of the same species have been found. LB1 shared an island where rats the size of golden retrievers, giant deer and giant bugs also lived including Komodo dragons and pony-sized dwarf elephants called stegodons, which the hobbits almost certainly hunted.
In the meantime, there were also rumors about the discovery and perhaps even the capture of a living Hobbit, but there is no confirmation of this.
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Nobel Prize for the first time to Israelis active in Israel
103 years after the start of awarding the Nobel Prizes and 56 years after the establishment of the state, and although 125 of the approximately 700 Nobel Prize winners for their generations are Jews, two Israelis have finally won the coveted prize. The two Aharon Chechanover and Abraham Hershko from the Technion in Haifa, and the American Irwin Rose from the University of California, are the winners of the 2004 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. They won the award for their work on how the human body produces proteins to protect itself from infections. In Stockholm they were received with the honor of kings, and were honored to enter the pantheon of the world's most important scientists. In the traditional Nobel lecture in which each winner is honored, the two Israelis chose to show transparently the city of Haifa and the monastery where they worked on the discovery in the 70s. The two warn that if the basic education systems and higher education continue to deteriorate, there will be no more Israeli Nobel laureates.
A special expert reviews the Nobel Prizes, along with a personal impression of the ceremony in Stockholm
Israel leads in the number of scientific publications per capita (16/10)
Israeli scientists lead over their counterparts in the Western world in scientific publications. This encouraging figure was revealed by the Chairman of the Planning and Budgeting Committee at the Higher Education Council, Professor Shlomo Grossman, on the occasion of the academic year.
According to the data he presented, Israeli scientists are in first place in terms of scientific publications in the field of computer science. After Israel, the list includes scientists from the United States, Denmark and Canada. Many Israelis also write articles in other fields of knowledge: thus, Israel is in third place in biomedical research, in fifth place in chemistry, in sixth place in earth and space sciences, and in eighth place in physics.
"Israel occupies a formidable position in research in the world," said Grossman, "but in order to be able to maintain its position, it must allocate appropriate resources to continue conducting research."
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Nano technology
This year we were bombarded with news in the field of nanotechnology. Asher Idan, a futurist from Bar-Ilan University says that nanotechnology is the next technological revolution after the Internet. The personal computer revolution and the Internet revolution were made possible by technologies that allow working with devices, such as the processor components, at the micro (thousandth of a millimeter) level. Now the next revolution is getting closer due to technologies that allow working with devices, such as blood capillaries and artificial neurons at the nano (millionth of a millimeter) level. Perhaps we have reached the stage of entry of venture capital funds into the field of nanotechnology in a massive way, because recently the US government allocated to the "American Nanotechnology Agency" an amount approaching a billion dollars.
They know nano technology
רובוטיקה
The day is not far when mobile robots will be sold in the commercial market and their services will be enjoyed by the entire population, according to a new study and technological trend analysis conducted by the research company Strategy Analytics (SA), which specializes in business consulting for technology companies. The market research was revealed at the conference "Robots in every home?" Conducted by the Economic Commission for Europe of the United Nations for 2004. The study that deals with the issue of commercial readiness for the production and use of mobile robots, which was commissioned by the United Nations, was conducted by Nina Buck, Vice President of SA.
SA's market research under the title: "Mobile Service Robots: Entering the Commercial World", provides an up-to-date snapshot of the field of robotics for commercial needs and examines the challenges facing developers of mobile robots, which need to operate in dynamic environments. The study reviews the various categories of mobile robots that are currently leaving the research labs for real life, but notes that it is still a "market in its embryonic stage". Buck even identifies the barriers that the market needs to overcome in order to reach the stage of widespread commercial use.
Honda Motor launched the new version of the humanoid robot it produces - a robot that knows how to run, bypass obstacles and respond to human touch. The developers of the robot, which looks like a boy in an astronaut suit and is called Asimo, say that the new model is a significant improvement over the previous models. According to them, Eskimo brings them closer to developing a robot that can move around homes and offices on its own and interact with people.
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Agriculture was developed 10,000 years earlier (28/6/2004)
Wild types of the wheat mother like those found in his tent were the forerunners of the initial steps of the slides 23 thousand years ago, much earlier than previously thought. That's what experts say.
Grass species including wild types of wheat and barley, which were the ancestors of the variety of grains grown today.
An Israeli-American team reported the findings in the Journal of the National Academy of Sciences.
The evidence comes from a collection of 90 prehistoric plant remains that were excavated in his tent in the north of the country. The Uholo site dates back to prehistoric times and remained undisturbed until the recent excavations by Ehud Weiss of Harvard University and his colleagues.
The low-oxygen environment has well preserved the remains of plants that were left there during the Stone Age. The archaeologists also found the remains of a hut, a bonfire, a human grave and stone tools at the site.
The attack of the cicadas
Billions of cicadas have flooded large areas of the USA in the last two months - from New Jersey to Virginia, in southern states like Tennessee and parts of Ohio and Indiana. The cicadas emerged from their hiding places under the trees, shed their skin and flew away. The males made loud mating calls. This spectacle takes place once every 17 years. However, in mid-June the cicadas began to die. The last action of the cicada females, before they left the world, was to lay their eggs - about 600 eggs each.
The world is a dangerous place for larvae hatched from egg nests. On their way to the excavations under the ground, the larvae become a main target for predators such as insects and cockroaches. And if the ground is too hard, they can't reach the roots of the trees. According to Mike Raup, an entomologist from the University of Maryland in the US who followed last summer's cycle of cicadas, the mortality rate of the larvae in the first two years is around 90%.
The question arises, why do these cicadas spend their childhood phase, so many years in the ground and why exactly 17 years? If such a long life cycle is not an amazing enough fact, then another amazing fact is that two more species of cicadas with a multi-year life cycle are known - one in which the life cycle is also 17 years (which may have developed independently and separately from the famous cicadas of the eastern USA) b) And another species whose life cycle is 13 years.
What is special about the numbers 13 and 17 that different species of cicadas have chosen such numbers of years, as the length of their life cycle?
The answer is that these two numbers are prime - and not so small (smaller are 11, 7, 5, etc.)
This evolutionary tactic is called flooding. The species that reproduces quickly and surprises its predators and its food sources at once, chances of surviving and passing this trait on to the next generation are high. In the case of the cicadas it reached the point of absurdity.
They know evolution in action
The navigation mechanism of the pigeons - at the base of the source (26/11/04)
Scientists have discovered for the first time that homing pigeons have an organ at the base of their beaks that maps the changes in the Earth's magnetic field. The findings reinforce the idea that homing pigeons and other migratory birds use a network of visible and invisible cues to guide them across hundreds and sometimes thousands of miles of land.
Cordola Mora and his colleagues at the University of Auckland believe they have solved one of the mysteries of the homing pigeon - whether it uses anomalies in the Earth's magnetic field to build a map that will give it its position in space.
Although previous experiments have suggested that the birds can navigate themselves according to the Earth's magnetic field, there have been other experiments that have shown that they can detect slight changes in the field. A competing theory claimed that pigeons have a developed sense of smell that helps them.
Prof. Tim Guilford (Guilford) from the University of Oxford in Britain, said that the navigation of animals like the homing pigeon remains a mystery in several aspects. "Birds know how to use the sun as their main compass, and nocturnal migratory birds use magnetic field and star compass navigation. "This is the second stage, but the invisible signs, those in the first stage, were difficult to discover." said.
The ancestor of the mammals - 2/12/2004
Scientists have managed to recover part of the genetic code of the mammal from which all mammals evolved, including man, the researchers estimate that the ancient creature lived during the time of the dinosaurs, about 75 million years ago. The researchers used computer analysis to compare and contrast the genes of modern mammals, then designed a common sequence for all of them. The study is published in the December issue of the magazine "Genetic Research".
The project was led by David Hassler, a researcher at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Hasler's team writes in the paper that the rebuilding effort is similar to trying to draw conclusions about the first car by looking at the many types of cars on the road these days. Although the differences between the cars have grown over the years, they share basic characteristics that have existed in all car models since time immemorial, such as four rubber tires, a windshield and an engine.
mass extinctions
Man and his activity that destroys nature is the cause of the largest species extinction in history, which may possibly reach the level of the extinction caused by the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs.
Ecologists have presented solid evidence for the disappearance of many species of animals and plants around the world. Research into UK wildlife raises the possibility that insects, considered among the most resilient species on Earth, are becoming extinct at a rate similar to that of other long-studied large animals.
If this situation is indeed global, we may be witnessing the greatest extinction since the mass extinction that killed the dinosaurs, says Jeremy Thomas of the Center for Ecology and Hydrology in Dorset, UK, who led the study, which was published on March 20.3.2004, XNUMX in the journal Science.
They know endangered animals
The struggle for Darwin
155 years after the publication of the book "The Origin of Species" and in the USA evolution is still a dirty word. In Georgia, a public council that runs a school in the suburbs of Atlanta decided to add warning stickers on biology textbooks, calling to question the theory of evolution taught in those books (it's just a theory that has never been proven, the sticklers claim, contrary to evidence in the field, of course). In Dover County, Pennsylvania, they decided that XNUMXth graders should study the creation theory with the same degree of seriousness. Both issues are now at the doorstep of the federal courts which so far are the only brake against creationism.
Darwin knew
Man has fewer genes than previously thought (24/10)
Scientists partnering with the Human Genome Project have found that humans have fewer genes than previously thought. During the research it became clear that humans have only 20-25 thousand genes, compared to about 100 thousand, the estimated number of genes until the discovery. Francis Collins, one of the scientists who led the research, told the Reuters news agency that "three years ago we thought that instead of 100 thousand, there were about thirty thousand, but at the end of all the tests, it turns out that there are even less, and this is the most accurate picture so far."
A gene is the unit of heredity. The genes consist of a sequence of nucleotides (the building blocks of DNA), and encode the information needed by the cell to create proteins in the processes of transcription and translation. The Human Genome Project is a large-scale international research operation in the field of genetics, the purpose of which is to present a detailed and accurate description of the sequence of genes (or more precisely, the sequence of nucleotides - the building blocks of genes) in each of the 46 chromosomes in the human body.
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Deaths in natural disasters break records year after year
On 31/10 we read that the number of people killed in natural disasters reached 2003 people in 76,806, three times the number of people killed in 2002. A report published by the International Red Cross states what the reasons were for the external increase in the number, and how the number of the sacrifices Now the death toll from just one disaster - the one that hit us last week in Southeast Asia has reached 130.
About two weeks ago, UN environmental researchers published data according to which the outgoing year, 2004, ranked fourth in the list of the hottest years in history. This is a warming trend that has been going on for more than a decade. Another serious figure shows that in the last 14 years, the 10 hottest years ever were recorded.
medicine
Gene therapy will probably be the hit of the next few years. Whether it is the activation of genes discovered this year such as the gene for longevity or genes that cause diseases, to genetic control of the immune system.
Cloning
The whole world intervened this year and established laws against human cloning. This follows news from a group of researchers from Korea, and from the Italian doctor Severino Antinori, and a mysterious sect called the Raelites about the birth of several cloned babies. No proof was provided for this. It seems that these laws will cause such acts to be carried out underground in the future as well. As history shows, science done underground does not bode well.
On the other hand, as far as the cloning of animals is concerned, there are apparently no restrictive laws and therefore the first cloned cat was sold in the US this week. This year, a zoo in San Diego was also able to present a rare type of cloned buffalo, American and Japanese researchers reported the cloning of a bull that itself had already been cloned, and an attempt was made to clone flies (as if there were no flies in the world).
the stem cells
This field is developing as a miracle cure for everything - in experiments conducted this year, the researchers were able to prevent blindness in mice, help treat baldness, help fight diabetes and even grow teeth. But despite all these advantages, in the US it is forbidden to give a government research grant for these studies. The state of California is about to break this law and allocate 3 billion dollars in the next 10 years - we'll see if Schwarzenegger's famous power will stand up to Bush.
The number of people killed in natural disasters breaks records year after year
On 31/10 we read that the number of people killed in natural disasters reached 2003 people in 76,806, three times the number of people killed in 2002. A report published by the International Red Cross states what the reasons were for the external increase in the number, and how the number of the sacrifices Now the death toll from just one disaster - the one that hit us last week in Southeast Asia has reached 120.
About two weeks ago, UN environmental researchers published data according to which the outgoing year, 2004, ranked fourth in the list of the hottest years in history. This is a warming trend that has been going on for more than a decade. Another serious figure shows that in the last 14 years, the 10 hottest years ever were recorded.
Artificial creation of a living cell
Researchers at Rockefeller University in the US have taken the first principled step towards creating a type of artificial life. They created a synthetic vesicle that produces genes, and resembles a crude type of biological cell.
All the components of what the scientists call "vesicle bioreactors" come from a variety of branches of life. The cell walls were taken from the cells of a hen's egg (more precisely from the protein) while the cell contents are derivatives of the common bacterium E. coli, stripped of its genetic material.
The meaning of life includes ready-made components of the biological machinery needed to produce proteins. The researchers also added to the process an enzyme from a virus that allows the cell to translate DNA code. When genes were added to the process, the cell fluids began to produce proteins, just as a normal cell does.
A gene that causes phosphorescent green color is taken from a species of jellyfish. The cell glowed as a result of the presence of protein and this shows that the genes were indeed copied. Using a second gene, from the bacterium Staphylococcus aureus, the researchers were able to convince their cells to drill pores in the cell walls. This allowed nutrients from the environmental soup to penetrate so that the cell could function in some cases for a few days.
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5/11/2004 Brain in a petri dish
CNN reports that Thomas DeMarse, a professor of biomedical engineering at the University of Florida, developed a "brain" in a glass plate, which was able to fly a virtual jet plane, and which could advance the scientific understanding of neurological disorders such as epilepsy.
The "living computer" grew from 25 thousand neurons that were removed from the brain of a rat and organized around a network of 60 electrodes in a Petri dish. When they connected the saucer to a simulator of an F22 jet plane, the brain and the simulator established a bilateral relationship similar to the one that neurons receive and interpret signals from each other and control our body.
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