A solar-powered airplane finished crossing the United States on Saturday, landing in New York City after flying over the Statue of Liberty during its historic bid to circle the globe, the project team said. The spindly, single-seat experimental aircraft, dubbed Solar Impulse 2, arrived at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport at about 4 a.m. local time after it took off about five hours beforehand at Lehigh Valley International Airport in Pennsylvania, the team reported on the airplane's website. Such a pleasure to land in New York! For the 14th time we celebrate sustainability," said the project's co-founder Andre Borschberg on Twitter after flying over the city and the Statue of Liberty during the 14th leg of the trip around the globe. The Swiss team flying the aircraft in a campaign to build support for clean energy technologies hopes eventually to complete its circumnavigation in Abu Dhabi, where the journey began in March 2015. The solar cr...
Elephants have improved protections against malignancy that can forestall tumors shaping, say researchers. They were attempting to clarify why the creatures have lower levels of disease than would be normal by their size. The group at the University of Utah said "nature has effectively made sense of how to forestall growth" and plan to devise new medicines. Be that as it may, specialists said the emphasis ought to be on the "silly" and "crazy" things people do to build hazard. There is a line of reasoning that says each cell can get to be malignant so the a greater amount of them you have, the more probable you are to get disease. So if an elephant has 100 times the same number of cells as a man then the storage compartment swinging well evolved creatures ought to be 100 times more inclined to have the illness.
But then the investigation, distributed in the Journal of the American Medical Association, indicated just 5% of elephants kick the bucket from disease contrasted with up to 25% of individuals. The scientists turned to the elephant's DNA - the blueprint of life - to find an explanation. Cancer is caused by mutations in a cell's DNA that produce faulty instructions leading to rampant growth as the cell spirals out of control, But animals also have "smoke alarms" that detect the damage and either lead to the cell being repaired or killed. One of these alarms is called TP53, and while humans have one TP53 gene, elephants have 20. As a result, elephants seem far more keen to kill off cells on the cusp of going rogue. Dr Joshua Schiffman, one of the researchers and a paediatric oncologist, said: "By all logical reasoning, elephants should be developing a tremendous amount of cancer, and in fact, should be extinct by now due to such a high risk for cancer.
"Nature has already figured out how to prevent cancer, it's up to us to learn how different animals tackle the problem so we can adapt those strategies to prevent cancer in people."The menopause is also a potential explanation for why humans have not evolved better ways of preventing cancer. In an evolutionary sense "success" is judged by the number of descendants you have rather than how long you live. Elephants have the greatest reproductive success towards the end of their lives, while humans can live for decades after the menopause. It means there is little evolutionary pressure in humans to develop ways of preventing cancer in old age.
"Humans have engineered socially extended lifespans way beyond reproductive senescence - you can't find another species like that," concluded Prof Greaves.
Comments
Post a Comment