Aug 24: Can drugs replace a healthy lifestyle? And more…

0
Aug 24: Can drugs replace a healthy lifestyle? And more…

On this week’s episode of the Best of Quirks & Quarks with Bob McDonald:

Blue whales are genetically healthy but are breeding with fin whales, study suggests

Quirks and Quarks8:52Blue whales are genetically healthy but are breeding with fin whales, study suggests

Researchers have sequenced the genome of a blue whale that washed up in Newfoundland in 2014, and used it to do a comparative study of North Atlantic blue whales. A team led by Mark Engstrom, curator emeritus at the Royal Ontario Museum, found that despite their small population, the whales are genetically diverse and connected across the North Atlantic — but also, surprisingly, the average blue whales from this group are, genetically, about 3.5 per cent fin whale. The work was published in the journal Conservation Genetics.

A man in rain gear stands in front of the partially flensed carcass of a blue whale.
In 2014, Mark Engstrom, curator emeritus at the Royal Ontario Museum, and his team cut up the carcass of a blue whale in Winter House Brook, N.L. They have now sequenced its genome, and presented the results in a new study. (Paul Daly/Canadian Press)

What will become of our solar system as our sun evolves into a white dwarf star?

Quirks and Quarks7:50What will become of our solar system as our sun evolves into a white dwarf star?

Over many billions of years, our sun, and stars of similar size, will first swell into a red giant star, and then contract into a small, dense white dwarf star. A new study using the James Webb Space Telescope has surveyed nearby white dwarf star systems to understand the fate of their planets, and astronomer Susan Mullally says this can help predict our planet’s fate as well. Their research will appear in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

White Dwarf Stars from the Southern Ring Nebula
The James Webb Space Telescope took this image of the Southern Ring Nebula with a white dwarf visible in centre. New research examines the fate of the planets in the dwarf’s system. (NASA/ESA/CSA/STScI )

There was an old elephant who swallowed an ant…

Quirks and Quarks7:54There was an old elephant who swallowed an ant…

The complex interdependence of plants and animals in an ecosystem are often hard to fathom until they go wrong. This is illustrated by a new study in Kenya, which showed how an invasive ant led to elephants knocking down trees, affecting how lions hunt zebras, which turned out to be bad news for buffalo. Adam Ford from the University of British Columbia, Okanagan is part of the team on this study published in Science.

A female lion yawns while lying in dry brown grass
A female lion in Kenya. (Submitted by Adam Ford)

The tiny genetic fluke that led humans — and other great apes — to lose our tails

Quirks and Quarks8:44The tiny genetic fluke that led humans — and other apes — to lose our tails

In our evolutionary history, a fragment of genetic material accidentally found itself in in a gene long known to be important for the development of our entire back end. The result of this mutation, according to a study in the journal Nature, was our ape ancestors lost their tail — and we remain tail-less to this day. Itai Yanai, a cancer biologist from New York University Grossman Medical School, identified the mutation, and found when they duplicated it in mice, they also lost their tails.

The young baboon on the left looks like it wants to eat the tail of the baboon in front of it on the right by pulling it towards its mouth.
These baboons in a Berlin zoo held on to their tails. Scientists have discovered a simple genetic mutation that led to humans, chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans and gibbons to lose their tails approximately 25 million years ago. (Ina Fassbender/AFP/Getty Images)

Better living through pharmacology — Can drugs duplicate a healthy lifestyle?

Quirks and Quarks19:46Better living through pharmacology — Can drugs duplicate a healthy lifestyle?

The key to good health used to be simple: eat less and exercise. But popular new weight loss drugs could soon be joined on the shelf with a new class of pharmaceuticals that duplicate the effects of a trip to the gym. We explore just how these new pharmaceuticals work, and just how much they can replace a healthy lifestyle.

First developed to treat type 2 diabetes, now widely popular as weight loss drugs, GLP-1 agonist drugs like Ozempic may have benefits beyond helping with obesity and cardiovascular disease. Dr. Daniel Drucker, a senior research scientist at Lunenfeld-Tanenbaum Research Institute and the University of Toronto, said early evidence suggests they may also work to treat kidney disease, addiction related disorders, metabolic liver disease, peripheral vascular disease, Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.

To counter our modern sedentary lifestyles, scientists are also looking for the equivalent of an exercise pill. Ronald Evans, a professor at the Salk Institute, has been working on drugs that control genetic “master switches” that can turn on the same network of genes — and confer many of the same benefits — as a brisk walk or a jog would do.

A woman wearing a blue shirt lifts it up to inject a shot of Ozempic into her side.
Ozempic is part of a larger class of drugs developed to treat type 2 diabetes, obesity and cardiovascular disease. But researchers are investigating whether the drugs have much wider benefit for other illnesses. (Lee Smith/Reuters)

link

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *