Building an insect army
The Pentagon could soon get some sixlegged recruits, reports The Washington Post. A program funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is examining whether insects can be deployed to protect crops such as corn and wheat from a drought, a natural blight, or an attack by a biological weapon. The bugs in question—aphids, leafhoppers, and whiteflies—naturally spread viruses among plants. DARPA wants to know if these viruses can be customized, using gene editing, to have a specific effect on struggling plants. A virus could turn off certain genes in a wheat crop, for example, to slow its growth rate during a drought. The researchers insist the project, titled “Insect Allies,” has solely peaceful aims. But a group of skeptical scientists and legal academics have warned that the technology could be used “to develop biological agents for hostile purposes.” Silja Voeneky, a professor of international law at Germany’s University of Freiburg, questions why DARPA is even experimenting on insects. “They could use spraying systems,” she says. “To use insects as a vector to spread diseases is a classical bioweapon.”
easy, new research suggests, because the moon’s surface is covered with jagged, building-high ice spikes. Scientists came to that conclusion after examining a spot on Earth that might approximate Europa, reports LiveScience.com. They settled on the Andes, South America’s largest mountain range. When the sun blasts fields of ice in high-altitude areas there, parts of the ice—rather than melting—turn directly into gas, a phenomenon known as sublimation. This process carves pits into the ice fields, and eventually leaves blade-like ice structures behind. On Earth, these so-called penitentes grow to between 3 and 16 feet tall, but conditions on Europa are much more extreme, and ice towers there could rise 50 feet. The researchers haven’t actually seen Europa’s penitentes yet, but radar evidence supports their theory. Lead author Daniel Hobley, from Cardiff University in the U.K., says Europa’s unique conditions “present both exciting exploratory possibilities and potentially treacherous danger.”
Neanderthals, who had been living in the region for hundreds of thousands of years. Neanderthals’ immune systems had adapted to Eurasian diseases—protections they likely passed on to humans through interbreeding. “One of the things that population geneticists have wondered about is why we have maintained these stretches of Neanderthal DNA in our own genomes,” study leader David Enard of the University of Arizona, tells ScienceDaily.com. “This study suggests that one of the roles of those genes was to provide us with some protection against pathogens as we moved into new environments.”