Science News Round-up
There’s been a lot of big science news lately. My three favorite recent stories:
Elephants rarely get cancer. Now we know why: their P53 proteins
Elephants rarely get cancer. I’ve long wondered why this hasn’t been explored in detail. Now it has. Cancer happens due to DNA mutations as cells replicate within the body (“somatic” mutations, which, note, are not inherited). P53 proteins are a major guard against cancer, because they repair DNA errors and, if that fails, kill the entire flawed cell and let the system start over with a new cell. This is going on all the time when we’re healthy. Cancer cells survive when they manage to thwart P53, which they do by changing P53’s interaction with the MDM2 protein.
The big discovery: elephants have 40 slightly different versions of P53. Cancers have a much harder time learning to thwart all 40. While the study authors don’t say they are going to run right out and start a biotech, this result is so resounding that I hope it will soon lead to effective drugs. Read more here or here (paywall).
Making cement from algae, without emitting carbon
Researchers have made cement with limestone newly grown from coccolithophores (a kind of microalgae), rather than quarried limestone.
This is important because it captures carbon, thus turning cement manufacture, which accounts for 7% of all carbon emissions, into a carbon neutral process that first captures the carbon, then emits it. This has something in common with the virtues of mass timber construction, where carbon is sequestered into trees and then stored in buildings. It also raises the obvious idea (though the researchers don’t mention this) of capturing carbon with coccolilithophores and then burying it.
This limestone looks to be very easy to deploy – just grow it with the microalgae and sell it to cement producers as a raw input. The researchers say that a set of ponds 50 miles by 50 miles would grow enough coccolithophore limestone to supply the entire world cement industry, and they have a founded a startup to try to get it done. Read more here.
Discovery of extragalactic neutrino factories
Finally, it has long been a mystery of physics where neutrinos come from. They are, I gather, extremely hard to detect. Now we have evidence that neutrinos are generated in blazars, which are galactic nuclei powered by extremely massive black holes. The evidence, as best I understand it, comes down to ‘photographing’ the neutrinos as they come from the sky with the IceCube Neutrino Observatory in Antarctica (!), and showing that this image looks like the image in the sky of the known blazar sources. There’s more info here.