Aug 24: Can drugs replace a healthy lifestyle? And more...
Blue and fin whales breed, sun turns into white dwarf, ecosystem interdependence, and losing tails
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
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.
What 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.
There 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.
The tiny genetic fluke that led humans — and other great 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.
Better 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.
