UC Science Today

Why do Tibetans have a genetic adaptation that allows them to survive in the low-oxygen environments of the Tibetan Plateau? An international team of researchers led by the University of California, Berkeley have found that Tibetans acquired the gene by interbreeding with Denisovans, an extinct human ancestor. Study leader Rasmus Nielsen explains.

"There was almost a complete match between the DNA sequence we found in Tibetans and the DNA sequence that was found in Denisovans. We could show that the DNA must have come from Denisovans into modern humans and like what allowed Tibetans to have this physiological adaptation and allowed them to settle and live on the Tibetan Plateau."

This is what’s called adaptive integration, or the process of getting DNA from one species to another.

"So, that’s what we think is going on in this case. And to us, as evolutionary biologists, the reason why this is particularly interesting is because it might point to the fact that adaptive integration might have been more important in human evolution than people have previously thought."

Since 1976, over 700 companies were founded on patents that were based on University of California inventions. And these aren’t just small companies – some have turned out to be industry giants like Genentech and Broadcom. At UCLA, doctoral student David Wernick and his colleagues are working on how to genetically re-engineer protein waste to produce renewable forms of energy. In the process, their lab has one patent and three more in the works.

"In an academic setting, we don’t have to have immediate results and we’re allowed to explore the science around us and we have a little more freedom to investigate basic science, generate new theories that you might not be able to do in a corporate setting. And because of this, we can be sort of an engine for generating new ideas; the ideas don’t have to immediately make a profit, but they can formulate ideas that people can then think about 10, 20 years down the line and perhaps in the future they will help aid the new science breakthrough that does result in jobs, does make new technology that is usable in industry."

For the first time ever, scientists have gathered direct evidence of a rare Wolf-Rayet star being linked to a specific type of stellar explosion known as a Type IIb supernova. Peter Nugent of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory says the Wolf-Rayet star, which 360 million light years away, has

"We never had a nearby example where we could say, “oh this star became this supernova.” So this was the first time we can directly point to it and say because we heated up this wind and because we could see the wind that looks just like a Wolf-Rayet star, we know that the Wolf-Rayet star blew up and then became this type of supernova."

Nugent says they caught this star – a whopping 360 million light years away – just a few hours after it exploded.

"And so we were able to start monitoring it very, very closely all the way through the first few days where things were rapidly changing, where we could see the star and then the star vanished."

*Coming soon: Nugent talks about how cosmologists can refer to studying stars in 'real time'....