The ocean contains a vast number of living things, including many, many pathogens — from bacteria that thrive on coral to fungi that infect lobsters. A drop of seawater may hold 10 million viruses.

Recently, a team of scientists revealed a frightening member of this menagerie: free-floating cancer cells that cause contagious tumors in shellfish. Last year, they found one such cancer in a species of clam. On Wednesday, they reported that three more species were plagued with contagious cancers.

The cancers are specific to shellfish and do not appear to pose a danger to humans who eat them.

Continue reading “Cancer Is Contagious Among Clams. What About Us?” →

The world’s crops face a vast army of enemies, from fungi to bacteria to parasitic animals. Farmers have deployed pesticides to protect their plants, but diseases continue to ruin a sizable portion of our food supply.

Some scientists are now investigating another potential defense, one already lurking beneath our feet. The complex microbial world in the soil may protect plants much like our immune system protects our bodies.

Scientists have known about so-called “suppressive soils” for decades. In 1931, a Canadian scientist named A. W. Henry discovered the spores of the common root rot, a fungus that strikes wheat crops, in a range of soil samples. But try as he might, he could almost never get the spores to grow.

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Scientists digging in the Liang Bua cave on the Indonesian island of Flores years ago found a tiny humanlike skull, then a pelvis, jaw and other bones, all between 60,000 and 100,000 years old.

The fossils, the scientists concluded, belonged to individuals who stood just three feet tall — an unknown species, related to modern humans, that they called Homo floresiensis or, more casually, the hobbits.

On Wednesday, researchers reported that they had discovered still older remains on the island, including teeth, a piece of a jaw and 149 stone tools dating back 700,000 years.

Continue reading “New Fossils Strengthen Case for ‘Hobbit’ Species” →

Just a few years ago, Crispr was a cipher — something that sounded to most ears like a device for keeping lettuce fresh. Today, Crispr-Cas9 is widely known as a powerful way to edit genes. Scientists are deploying it in promising experiments, and a number of companies are already using it to develop drugs to treat conditions ranging from cancer to sickle-cell anemia.

Yet there is still a lot of misunderstanding around it. Crispr describes a series of DNA sequences discovered in microbes, part of a system to defend against attacking viruses.

Continue reading “Scientists Find Form of Crispr Gene Editing With New Capabilities” →