Nautilus Magazine

There’s a Far Side cartoon depicting a bunch of chickens splayed out flat on the ground unable to move, with a sign over them reading “Boneless Chicken Ranch.” According to research recently published in Science China Life Sciences, geneticists have brought the panel to life—using carp.

Grass carp are some of the most popular fish farmed across the globe, but for different reasons. In the United States and Europe, non-breeding triploid varieties are used to keep aquatic plant growth from choking waterways. In Asia, however, they’re farmed for food. Unfortunately, the 118 needle-like bones lining their bodies make the species a bit of a chore to eat, and can also throw 118 tiny wrenches into the processing pipeline.

That’s why researchers from China’s Huazhong Agricultural University set out to create grass carp without any bones. By editing the gene runx2b, crucial for the development of bones, they were able to establish a stable population of grass carp without any of the annoying bones.

Of course, tinkering with genes comes with consequences. To find out if the fish were otherwise fine, the researchers subjected them to a battery of tests. Micro-CT scans showed no other major skeletal deformities or changes to the proportion of fat or muscle tissue volume. Similarly, a chemical analysis showed no significant differences in moisture, protein, fat, amino acids, sugars, collagen, or other nutrients, compared to wild grass carp. However they did find the boneless carp had less calcium in their muscles and more potassium, most likely related to the role bones play in balancing minerals in their bodies.

Basically, boneless carp could one day be coming to a grocery store near you—or at least a grocery store near those in Asia.

Faith that science will conquer aging is common in Silicon Valley these days. In recent years, public institutions like the National Institutes of Health have been slow to commit any more than a token of their overall budgets to aging research. It is the private funders with big dreams who are galvanizing the field.

https://nautil.us/the-immortality-hype-235946?

The Immortality Hype - Nautilus Despite the hyperbole, private funding is changing the science of aging for the better.

As an inquisitive species, humans are interested in figuring out where we came from. Paleontological evidence has shown that the great ape lineage of “hominoids,” which includes gorillas, chimps, orangutans, and us, diverged from monkeys more than 25 million years ago. But when modern apes took their own evolutionary path has remained murky.

To date, our focus has been East Africa (namely, Kenya and Uganda), where most of the oldest great ape fossils have been found. That might have been misguided, though, as paleontologists from Egypt and the United States recently discovered a lower jawbone of an ape in rock deposits called Wadi Moghra in northern Egypt, a finding they just published in a new paper in Science.

The jawbone’s unique combination of dental traits— “large canine and third lower premolar relative to posterior molar size-length, relatively low-crowned and highly crenulate molars, etc.”—merited a new genus and species. Dubbed Masripithecus moghraensis (“Egyptian ape from Moghra”), the ancient ape dates to about 17 or 18 million years ago, or the Early Miocene.

“[The] findings on Masripithecus confirm that paleontologists might have been looking for crown-hominoid ancestors in the wrong place,” paleontologists David Alba and Júlia Arias-Martorell wrote in a related Perspective.

To figure out where M. moghraensis fits into the family tree of humans, lead study author Shorouq F. Al-Ashqar from Mansoura University and colleagues modeled its anatomy and age relative to other known fossil ancestors. It looks to be the closest known relative of the lineage that spawned modern apes, including humans, closer even than the species found in East Africa.

During the Early Miocene, Afro-Arabia was connected to Eurasia as their continental plates drifted together, creating the potential for migration between the continents. Either way, by the Middle Miocene, apes were geographically widespread and diverse beyond Africa. Indeed, concluded the study authors, “hominoid populations in northeastern Afro-Arabia were geographically and ecologically best positioned to disperse into Eurasia as soon as marine barriers diminished.”

Based on their models, the researchers propose a migration of apes from Egypt, skirting northward around what is now the Red Sea, then dispersing westward into Europe and eastward into the Middle East.

Whatever the route, we may all have deeper Egyptian roots than we ever imagined.