Zebrafish made to grow pre-hands instead of fins

PERHAPS the little fish embryo shown here is dancing a jig because it has just discovered that it has legs instead of fins. Fossils show that limbs evolved from fins, but a new study shows how it may have happened, live in the lab.

Fernando Casares of the Spanish National Research Council and his colleagues injected zebrafish with the hoxd13 gene from a mouse. The protein that the gene codes for controls the development of autopods, a precursor to hands, feet and paws.

Zebrafish naturally carry hoxd13 but produce less of the protein than tetrapods - all four-limbed vertebrates and birds - do. Casares and his colleagues hoped that by injecting extra copies of the gene into the zebrafish embryos, some of their cells would make more of the protein.

One full day later, all of those fish whose cells had taken up the gene began to develop autopods instead of fins. They carried on growing for four days but then died (Cell, DOI: 10.1016/j.devcel.2012.10.015).

"Of course, we haven't been able to grow hands," says Casares. He speculates that hundreds of millions of years ago, the ancestors of tetrapods began expressing more hoxd13 for some reason and that this could have allowed them to evolve autopods.

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N. Korea mourns late leader

SEOUL: North Korea on Monday mourned the death one year ago of leader Kim Jong-Il, with its rocket scientists taking pride of place at a special memorial ceremony led by his son and successor Kim Jong-Un.

Kim Jong-Il died of a heart attack on December 17, 2011, although his death was only announced two days later.

Monday's ceremony, attended by hundreds of top party and military cadres, was held in the Kumsusan Palace of the Sun in Pyongyang, which houses the embalmed bodies of Kim Jong-Il and his father and founding president Kim Il-Sung.

In the city's main square, people left floral tributes at the foot of giant statues of the two Kims, with state media saying at least 750,000 mourners had paid their respects on Sunday alone.

The official mourning -- broadcast live on state TV -- saw Kim Jong-Un and his wife Ri Sol-Ju lead rows of officials in bowing deeply to two giant statues of his father and grandfather inside the memorial hall.

The stone-faced officials clad in black were led by goose-stepping soldiers carrying a big floral tribute with a ribbon message reading, "The great comrades Kim Jong-Il and Kim Il-Sung stay with us forever."

A group of scientists who worked on the North's successful long-range rocket launch last week were among the first to pay tribute.

"These are scientists who made great contributions to the successful launch of our Kwangmyongsong-3 satellite and helped showcase the nation's scientific technologies to the whole world," the TV announcer said.

The Kim family has ruled the isolated, impoverished but nuclear-armed nation for more than six decades with an iron fist and a pervasive personality cult.

- AFP/ck

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Cisco rumored to be putting Linksys up for sale

Cisco Systems is said to be in the works of selling off home wireless router-maker Linksys, according to Bloomberg.

Cisco has reportedly tapped financial services company Barclays to help it find a Linksys buyer. According to Bloomberg, the hope is that TV set makers may be interested in purchasing the company.

The networking-equipment maker bought Linksys for $500 million in 2003 as a way to facilitate its entry into the consumer networking market. Now, nearly 10 years later, it's looking like Cisco is trying to get out of this market.

Cisco has shuttered several of its consumer businesses the past couple of years, such as its Flip video business. It has also laid off thousands of employees with the end-goal of cutting about 14 percent of its global workforce, or around 11,500 employees.

The company has had poor luck moving into the consumer space and sales in its core businesses have slowed. While Cisco still dominates in the IP routing market, it has been more challenged in its Ethernet switching business at the hands of rivals such as Hewlett-Packard and Chinese manufacturers such as Huawei.

While it looks like Cisco is trying to exit consumer businesses, it is growing its software and technology services. It acquired the Wi-Fi and cloud-networking start-up Meraki last month as a way to "cloudify" its software-focused products and simplify IT operations.

CNET contacted Cisco for comment on a possible Linksys sale. We'll update the story when we get more information.

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Space Pictures This Week: Frosty Mars, Mini Nile, More

Photograph by Mike Theiss, National Geographic

The aurora borealis, also known as the northern lights, illuminates the Arctic sky in a recent picture by National Geographic photographer Mike Theiss.

A storm chaser by trade, Theiss is in the Arctic Circle on an expedition to photograph auroras, which result from collisions between charged particles released from the sun's atmosphere and gaseous particles in Earth's atmosphere.

After one particularly amazing show, he wrote on YouTube, "The lights were dancing, rolling, and twisting, and at times looked like they were close enough to touch!" (Watch his time-lapse video of the northern lights.)

Published December 14, 2012

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Photos: Conn. Community in Sorrow After School Shooting

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Zebrafish made to grow pre-hands instead of fins

PERHAPS the little fish embryo shown here is dancing a jig because it has just discovered that it has legs instead of fins. Fossils show that limbs evolved from fins, but a new study shows how it may have happened, live in the lab.

Fernando Casares of the Spanish National Research Council and his colleagues injected zebrafish with the hoxd13 gene from a mouse. The protein that the gene codes for controls the development of autopods, a precursor to hands, feet and paws.

Zebrafish naturally carry hoxd13 but produce less of the protein than tetrapods - all four-limbed vertebrates and birds - do. Casares and his colleagues hoped that by injecting extra copies of the gene into the zebrafish embryos, some of their cells would make more of the protein.

One full day later, all of those fish whose cells had taken up the gene began to develop autopods instead of fins. They carried on growing for four days but then died (Cell, DOI: 10.1016/j.devcel.2012.10.015).

"Of course, we haven't been able to grow hands," says Casares. He speculates that hundreds of millions of years ago, the ancestors of tetrapods began expressing more hoxd13 for some reason and that this could have allowed them to evolve autopods.

If you would like to reuse any content from New Scientist, either in print or online, please contact the syndication department first for permission. New Scientist does not own rights to photos, but there are a variety of licensing options available for use of articles and graphics we own the copyright to.

All comments should respect the New Scientist House Rules. If you think a particular comment breaks these rules then please use the "Report" link in that comment to report it to us.

If you are having a technical problem posting a comment, please contact technical support.

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Obama picks Kerry for top diplomatic post: TV

WASHINGTON - President Barack Obama has chosen Senator John Kerry to succeed Hillary Clinton as US secretary of state, news networks CNN and ABC reported Saturday.

CNN cited a Democratic source who had spoken to Kerry, while ABC mentioned unnamed sources. Asked for comment by AFP, the White House did not immediately confirm the reports, but Kerry is seen as a frontrunner for the role.

The defeated 2004 Democratic presidential candidate, Kerry is currently head of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations committee.

On Thursday, Obama's ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, withdrew her name from consideration for the secretary of state post, effectively elevating Kerry to the prohibitive favorite.

Rice had come under fire over controversial statements about the deadly September 11 attack on a US mission in Libya, and some Republican lawmakers had vowed to block her path to becoming top diplomat.

- AFP/ir

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Apple rumors never cease

The iPad Mini will be a magnet for lots of rumors in the coming months.

(Credit:
Apple)

Apple rumors are a fact of life.

And it's silly to think that tech sites will begin writing fewer stories about the latest
iPad/iPhone chatter.

It's like asking the Washington press corps to stop writing about Beltway scuttlebutt or Hollywood reporters to cease scribbling about la la land -- however frivolous. Ain't gonna happen.

Let's take the
iPad Mini Retina rumor-machine (which is just getting started, by the way).

Retina chatter: A Retina iPad Mini is an intriguing prospect, but it's hardly a fait accompli. If it were, Apple would have announced one on October 23.

So my guess is that any remotely tantalizing Retina rumor that surfaces will be picked up and propagated across the Apple universe.

Usually (but not always) for good reason. Getting a 300-pixel-per-inch display into the Mini's tiny chassis is really, really hard. One phone call and any analyst at NPD DisplaySearch -- who analyze the display industry for a living -- will tell you this.

So, a supply chain tidbit from DigiTimes, for example, that cites "backlighting industry" sources talking about a higher-resolution iPad Mini is definitely interesting.

A Retina Mini would require a smaller LED light apparatus than is used in conventional Retina-class displays, as the DigiTimes story alludes to.

DigiTimes: The Asia supply chain gossip sheet is invariably the source of more than a few rumors. The problem is it's accuracy is a reflection of the unpredictable supply chain it covers. I've discussed this with DisplaySearch analysts more than a few times.

It goes something like this. Some big component supplier gets an order from some big device maker, and a Taipei newspaper reports it. Then a few months pass and said supplier runs into a serious unexpected snag in ramping up production (like Sharp, for example, trying to ramp up IGZO display production and failing initially).

So the device maker has to turn to another supplier for a more practical (and less innovative) solution.

As a result, the Taipei newspaper's story doesn't pan out. But that doesn't mean the newspaper was just passing along bogus rumors. It means it reported what it was hearing as a credible development at the time.

These on-again, off-again scenarios occur constantly in the supply chain, according to DisplaySearch. And it's a real challenge for supply chain analysts to determine what is panning out and what isn't.

DigiTimes' problem is that it doesn't filter the rumors as well as, let's say, a DisplaySearch analyst would. But maybe that's not the intention anyway. Maybe DigiTimes feels it needs to pass along gossip as it hears it. Maybe that's what its Asia-based supply chain readership wants.

And analysts are hardly infallible, either. Some analysts in the financial community come up with much whackier Apple theories, masquerading as erudite analysis, that end up being reported as credible speculation.

But reporters will still regurgitate financial analyst musings, complaints about "dumb" Apple rumors notwithstanding.

Like I said, it's a fact of life.

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Space Pictures This Week: Frosty Mars, Mini Nile, More

Photograph by Mike Theiss, National Geographic

The aurora borealis, also known as the northern lights, illuminates the Arctic sky in a recent picture by National Geographic photographer Mike Theiss.

A storm chaser by trade, Theiss is in the Arctic Circle on an expedition to photograph auroras, which result from collisions between charged particles released from the sun's atmosphere and gaseous particles in Earth's atmosphere.

After one particularly amazing show, he wrote on YouTube, "The lights were dancing, rolling, and twisting, and at times looked like they were close enough to touch!" (Watch his time-lapse video of the northern lights.)

Published December 14, 2012

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Conn. Victim's Father Remembers 'Loving' Daughter

(Image credit: Emilie Parker Fund/Facebook)

Emilie Parker, the little girl with the blond hair and bright blue eyes, would have been one of the first to comfort her classmates at Sandy Hook Elementary School, had a gunman’s bullets not claimed her life, her father said.

“My daughter Emilie would be one of the first ones to be standing and giving support to all the victims because that’s the kind of kid she is,” her father, Robbie Parker said as he fought back tears, telling the world about his “bright, creative and loving” daughter who was one of the 20 young victims in the Newtown, Conn., shooting.

“She always had something kind to say about anybody,” her father said.  ”We find comfort reflecting on the incredible person Emilie was and how many lives she was able to touch.”

Emilie, 6, was helping teach her younger sisters to read and make things, and she was the little girls would go to for comfort, he said.

“They looked up to her,” Parker said.

READ: Complete List of Sandy Hook Victims

Parker moved his wife and three daughters to Newtown eight months ago after accepting a job as  a physician’s assistant at Danbury Hospital. He said Emilie, his oldest daughter, seemed to have adjusted well to her new school, and he was very happy with the school, too.

“I love the people at the school. I love Emilie’s teacher and the classmates we were able to get to know,” he said.

      (Image Credit: Alex von Kleydorff/AP Photo)

The family dealt with another tragic loss in October when Emilie lost her grandfather in an accident.

“[This] has been a topic that has been discussed in our family in the past couple of  months,” Parker said. “[My daughters ages 3 and 4] seem to get the idea that there’s somebody who they will miss very much.”

Emilie, a budding artist who carried her markers and pencils everywhere, paid tribute to her grandfather by slipping a special card she had drawn into his casket, Parker said.  It was something she frequently did to lift the spirits of others.

“I can’t count the number of times Emilie would find someone feeling sad or frustrated and would make people a card,” Parker said. “She was an exceptional artist.”

The girl who was remembered as “always willing to try new things, other than food” was learning Portuguese from her father, who speaks the language.

(Image Credit: Emilie Parker Fund/Facebook)

On Friday morning, Emilie woke up before her father left for his job and exchanged a few sentences with him in the language.

“She told me good morning and asked how I was doing,” Parker said. “She said she loved me, I gave her a kiss and I was out the door.”

Parker found out about the shooting while on lockdown in Danbury Hospital and found a television for the latest news.

“I didn’t think it was that big of deal at first,” he said. “With the first reports coming in, it didn’t sound like it was going to be as tragic as it was. That’s kind of what it was like for us.”

CLICK HERE for full coverage of the Sandy Hook shooting.

Parker said he knows that God can’t take away free will and would have been unable to stop the Sandy Hook shooting. While gunman Adam Lanza used his free agency to take innocent lives, Parker said he plans to use his in a positive way.

“I’m not mad because I have my  [free] agency to use this event to do whatever I can to make sure my family and my wife and my daughters are taken care [of],” he said. “And if there’s anything I can do to help to anyone at any time at anywhere, I’m free to do that.”

(Image credit: Emilie Parker Fund/Facebook)

Friday night, hours after he learned of his daughter’s death, Parker said he spoke at his church.

“I don’t know how to get through something like this. My wife and I don’t understand how to process all of this,” he said today. “We find strength in our religion and in our faith and in our family. ”

“It’s a horrific tragedy and I want everyone to know our hearts and prayers go out to them. This includes the family of the shooter. I can’t imagine how hard this experience must be for you and I want you to know our family … love and support goes out to you as well.”

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