Category Archives: Evolution

Researchers have reconstructed the ancestral sequence of the great ape Y chromosome by comparing three existing (gorilla, human, and chimpanzee) and two newly generated (orangutan and bonobo) Y chromosome assemblies. The new research shows that many gene families and multi-copy sequences were already present in the great ape Y common ancestor and that the chimpanzee and bonobo lineages experienced accelerated gene death and nucleotide substitution rates after their divergence from the human lineage. Credit: Dani Zemba and Monika Cechova, Penn State

Researchers reconstruct the ancestral great ape Y and show its rapid evolution in bonobo and chimpanzee.

New analysis of the DNA sequence of the male-specific Y chromosomes from all living species of the great ape family helps to clarify our understanding of how this enigmatic chromosome evolved. A clearer picture of the evolution of the Y chromosome is important for studying male fertility in humans as well as our understanding of reproduction patterns and the ability to track male lineages in the great apes, which can help with conservation efforts for these endangered species.

A team of biologists and computer scientists at Penn State sequenced and assembled the Y chromosome from orangutan and bonobo and compared those sequences to the existing human, chimpanzee, and gorilla Y sequences. From the comparison, the team was able to clarify patterns of evolution that seem to fit with behavioral differences between the species and reconstruct a model of what the Y chromosome might have looked like in the ancestor of all great apes.

A paper describing the research was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The Y chromosome is important for male fertility and contains the genes critical for sperm production, but it is often neglected in genomic studies because it is so difficult to sequence and assemble, said Monika Cechova, a graduate student at Penn State at the time of the research and co-first author of the paper. The Y chromosome contains a lot of repetitive sequences, which are challenging for DNA sequencing, assembling sequences, and aligning sequences for comparison. There arent out-of-the-box software packages to deal with the Y chromosome, so we had to overcome these hurdles and optimize our experimental and computational protocols, which allowed us to address interesting biological questions.

The Y chromosome is unusual. It contains relatively few genes, many of which are involved in male sex determination and sperm production; large sections of repetitive DNA, short sequences repeated over and over again; and large DNA palindromes, inverted repeats that can be many thousands of letters long and read the same forwards and backwards.

Previous work by the team comparing human, chimpanzee, and gorilla sequences had revealed some unexpected patterns. Humans are more closely related to chimpanzees, but for some characteristics, the human Y was more similar to the gorilla Y.

If you just compare the sequence identitycomparing the As, Ts, Cs, and Gs of the chromosomeshumans are more similar to chimpanzees, as you would expect, said Kateryna Makova, Pentz Professor of Biology at Penn State and one of the leaders of the research team. But if you look at which genes are present, the types of repetitive sequences, and the shared palindromes, humans look more similar to gorillas. We needed the Y chromosome of more great ape species to tease out the details of what was going on.

The team, therefore, sequenced the Y chromosome of a bonobo, a close relative of the chimpanzee, and an orangutan, a more distantly related great ape. With these new sequences, the researchers could see that the bonobo and chimpanzee shared the unusual pattern of accelerated rates of DNA sequence change and gene loss, suggesting that this pattern emerged prior to the evolutionary split between the two species. The orangutan Y chromosome, on the other hand, which serves as an outgroup to ground the comparisons, looked about like what you expect based on its known relationship to the other great apes.

Our hypothesis is that the accelerated change that we see in chimpanzees and bonobos could be related to their mating habits, said Rahulsimham Vegesna, a graduate student at Penn State and co-first author of the paper. In chimpanzees and bonobos, one female mates with multiple males during a single cycle. This leads to what we call sperm competition, the sperm from several males trying to fertilize a single egg. We think that this situation could provide the evolutionary pressure to accelerate change on the chimpanzee and bonobo Y chromosome, compared to other apes with different mating patterns, but this hypothesis, while consistent with our findings, needs to be evaluated in subsequent studies.

In addition to teasing out some of the details of how the Y chromosome evolved in individual species, the team used the set of great ape sequences to reconstruct what the Y chromosome might have looked like in the ancestor of modern great apes.

Having the ancestral great ape Y chromosome helps us to understand how the chromosome evolved, said Vegesna. For example, we can see that many of the repetitive regions and palindromes on the Y were already present on the ancestral chromosome. This, in turn, argues for the importance of these features for the Y chromosome in all great apes and allows us to explore how they evolved in each of the separate species.

The Y chromosome is also unusual because, unlike most chromosomes it doesnt have a matching partner. We each get two copies of chromosomes 1 through 22, and then some of us (females) get two X chromosomes and some of us (males) get one X and one Y. Partner chromosomes can exchange sections in a process called recombination, which is important to preserve the chromosomes evolutionarily. Because the Y doesnt have a partner, it had been hypothesized that the long palindromic sequences on the Y might be able to recombine with themselves and thus still be able to preserve their genes, but the mechanism was not known.

We used the data from a technique called Hi-C, which captures the three-dimensional organization of the chromosome, to try to see how this self-recombination is facilitated, said Cechova. What we found was that regions of the chromosome that recombine with each other are kept in close proximity to one another spatially by the structure of the chromosome.

Working on the Y chromosome presents a lot of challenges, said Paul Medvedev, associate professor of computer science and engineering and of biochemistry and molecular biology at Penn State and the other leader of the research team. We had to develop specialized methods and computational analyses to account for the highly repetitive nature of the sequence of the Y. This project is truly cross-disciplinary and could not have happened without the combination of computational and biological scientists that we have on our team.

Reference: Dynamic evolution of great ape Y chromosomes by Monika Cechova, Rahulsimham Vegesna, Marta Tomaszkiewicz, Robert S. Harris, Di Chen, Samarth Rangavittal, Paul Medvedev and Kateryna D. Makova, 5 October 2020, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2001749117

In addition to Cechova, Makova, Vegesna, and Medvedev, the research team at Penn State included Marta Tomaszkiewicz, Robert S. Harris, Di Chen, and Samarth Rangavittal. The research was supported by the U.S. National Institutes of Health, the U.S. National Science Foundation, the Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute, the Institute of Computational and Data Sciences, the Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences, and the Eberly College of Science of the Pennsylvania State University, and by the CBIOS Predoctoral Training Program awarded to Penn State by the National Institutes of Health.

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Genetic Analysis Reveals Evolution of the Enigmatic Y Chromosome in Great Apes - SciTechDaily

In 1939, Albert Einstein published a paper in Annals of Mathematics, arguing that black holes do not exist in nature. A quarter of a century later, Maarten Schmidt discovered quasars as powerful sources of light at cosmological distances. These enigmatic point-like sources were explained in the mid-1960s by Yakov Zeldovich in the East and Ed Salpeter in the West as supermassive black holes that are fed with gas from their host galaxies. When gas flows towards the black hole, it swirls like water going down the drain. As the gas approaches a fraction of the speed of light at the innermost stable circular orbit (ISCO) around the black hole, it heats-up by rubbing against itself through turbulent viscosity.

Consequently, its accretion disk glows brightly, radiating away about a tenth of its rest mass and exceeding by orders of magnitude the total luminosity from stars in its host galaxy. High feeding rates make quasars visible all the way out to the edge of the visible Universe. Decades later, astronomers found that almost every galaxy hosts a supermassive black hole at its center, which is starved most of the time but bursts sporadically for merely tens of millions of years during each burst. The quasars resemble a baby that tends to remove food off the dining table as soon as it is fed by virtue of becoming too energetic.

This year, the Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Andrea Ghez and Reinhard Genzel for providing conclusive evidence that a black hole, albeit starved at the present time, lurks also at the center of our own Milky Way galaxy. This monster, weighing four million Suns, is dormant right now, glowing as the feeble radio source Sagittarius A* (abbreviated SgrA*), which is a billion times fainter than it would have been if it was fed as generously as a quasar.

Even though SgrA* is dim right now, we have clues that it must have experienced episodes of vigorous feeding in the past. This is not a surprise, given that a gas cloud approaching the Galactic center or a star passing within ten times the horizon scale of SgrA* (which translates to roughly the Earth-Sun separation), would get spaghettified by the strong gravitational tide there and turn into a stream of gas that triggers a quasar-like flare.

The smoking gun evidence for recent feeding episodes of SgrA* by massive quantities of gas is that young stars around SgrA* orbit in preferred planes. This implies that these stars formed out of planar gas disks, just like the planets in the Solar system plane or the stars in the Milky Way disk. Since the age of the stars near SgrA* is less than a percent of the age of the Milky Way galaxy, major accretion episodes from disruption of gas clouds must have occurred at least a hundred of times around SgrA*, based on the Copernican principle that the present time is not special. Indeed, a pair of giant blobs of hot gas, called the Fermi bubbles, are observed to emanate from the Galactic center along the rotation axis of the Milky Way, implying a recent accretion episode around SgrA* that could have powered them. Theoretical calculations imply that in addition to disruption of massive gas clouds, individual stars are also scattered into the vicinity of the black hole and get tidally disrupted once every ten thousand years. The intense feeding from the resulting debris streams could lead to the brightest flares from SgrA*. Such tidal disruption events of stars are indeed observed in other galaxies at the expected rate.

Would the resulting flares of SgrA* have any implications for life on Earth? In principle, they could, since they carry damaging X-ray and Ultraviolet (XUV) radiation. In collaboration with my former postdoc, John Forbes, we showed in 2018 that the XUV radiation emitted during such flares has the capacity to evaporate the atmospheres of Mars or Earth if the Solar system had only been ten times closer to the center of the Milky Way. But even at larger distances, the XUV radiation could suppress the growth of complex life, creating an effect similar to stepping on a lawn so frequently that you inhibit its growth.

At the current location of the Sun, terrestrial life is safe from XUV flares of SgrA*. However, recent studies indicate that the birthplace of the Sun may have been significantly closer to the Galactic center and that the Sun migrated to its current location through gravitational kicks. The exposure to past XUV flares from SgrA* at closer distances, could have harmed complex life during the early evolution of the Earth. This might explain why the oxygen level in the Earths atmosphere rose to its currently high level only after two billion years, perhaps only after the Earth was sufficiently far away from SgrA*. In collaboration with Manasvi Lingam, I am currently exploring this possible connection between terrestrial life and the migration of the Sun away from the Galactic center.

Traditionally, the Sun was thought to be the only astronomical source of light that affected life on Earth. But it is also possible that the black hole, SgrA* played an important role in shaping the history of terrestrial life. A surprising realization of this sort is similar to figuring out that a stranger might have impacted your family history before you were born. If a link between SgrA* and terrestrial life can be established, then this supermassive black hole might trigger a second Nobel Prize.

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Did a Supermassive Black Hole Influence the Evolution of Life on Earth? - Scientific American

Since 2019, government-sponsored initiatives around AI have proliferated across Asia Pacific. Such initiatives include the setting up of cross-domain AI ethics councils, guidelines and frameworks for the responsible use of AI, and other initiatives such as financial and technology support. The majority of these initiatives builds on the country's respective data privacy and protection acts. This is a clear sign that governments see the need to expand existing regulations when it comes to leveraging AI as a key driver for digital economies. All initiatives to date are voluntary in nature, but there are indications already that existing data privacy and protection laws will be updated and expanded to include AI. To anticipate this, data and technology governance initiatives must evolve now.

Traditionally, data governance and the governance of tech associated with data has focused on topics such as master data management, data quality, and data retention -- all primarily operational. With the rise of privacy laws and data protection acts such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the EU and the Personal Data Protection Act (PDPA) in Singapore, the scope of data governance has been expanded to include data privacy, personal data protection, and data sovereignty. This has shifted data governance out of the operational corner and into the spotlight of regulatory compliance and enforceable laws.

With AI being ready for prime time -- that means large-scale production deployments -- data and technology governance must step up again and include data and AI ethics and AI risk management.

Like cybersecurity risk before it, regulatory initiatives and consumer demand join forces to drive AI risk management to the top of the corporate agenda. Evaluate your data and technology governance initiatives now to identify gaps and maturity challenges when it comes to the responsible use of data and AI. Prepare for AI risk management to follow cybersecurity risk to the boardroom and kick off corporate collaborations and cross-functional initiatives, including governance, risk, corporate social responsibility, and ethics. Ultimately, understand how you can build trust with your customers, partners, and employees into your responsible use of data and AI -- and turn this trust into your competitive advantage!

For more business and technology trends critical for the year head, download Forrester's 2021Asia PacificPredictions Guidehere.

This post was written by Principal Analyst Achim Granzen, and it originally appearedhere.

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AI drives the evolution of technology and data governance - ZDNet

Mathematical modeler and statistics. Credit: Image is provided by the Anthro Illustrated project (https://anthroillustrated.com)

Current reforms to end the rat race between scientists can help; but are they enough?

Science is societys best method for understanding the world. Yet many scientists are unhappy with the way it works, and there are growing concerns that there is something broken in current scientific practice.

Many of the rules and procedures that are meant to promote innovative research are little more than historical precedents with little reason to suppose they encourage efficient or reliable discoveries. Worse, they can have perverse side-effects that harm both science and scientists. A well-known example is the general preference for positive over negative results, which creates a publication bias giving the false impression that certain effects exist, where in reality the dissenting evidence simply fails to be released.

Arizona State University researchers Thomas Morgan and Minhua Yan, working with ASU graduate Leonid Tiokhin, now at University of Technology Eindhoven in the Netherlands, have developed a new model, published this week in Nature Human Behaviour, to better understand the challenges facing the scientific process and how we can make it better. They focused on the priority rule: the tendency for the first scientist to document a finding to be disproportionately rewarded with prestige, prizes and career opportunities while those in second place get little to no recognition.

Many scientists have sleepless nights worrying about being scooped fearing that their work wont be considered novel enough for the highest-impact scientific journals because a different group working on the same topic manages to publish first. The priority rule has been around for centuries. In the 17th century, Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz haggled over who invented calculus. And in the 19th century, Charles Darwin rushed to publish On the Origin of Species to avoid being scooped by Alfred Russel Wallace.

Rewarding priority is understandable and has some benefits. However, it comes at a cost, Tiokhin said. Rewards for priority may tempt scientists to sacrifice the quality of their research and cut corners.

The idea is that competition encourages scientists to work hard and efficiently, such that discoveries are made quickly, said Morgan, a research affiliate with theInstitute of Human Originsand associate professor with theSchool of Human Evolution and Social Change.But if everyone is working hard, and you need to come in first to be successful, then theres a temptation to cut corners to maximize your chances, even if it means the science suffers.

This is partly why some academic publishers, such as PLOS and eLife, now offer scoop protection, allowing researchers to publish findings identical to those already published within a certain timeframe. The problem is that science and publishers currently dont have a good idea about whether these reforms make sense.

To figure out how exactly the preference for priority affects science, and whether recent reforms offer any solution for its potential drawbacks, the collaborators developed an evolutionary agent-based model. This computer model simulates how a group of scientists investigate or abandon research questions, depending on their own results and the behavior of other scientists they compete against.The benefit of an evolutionary simulation is that we dont need to specify in advance how scientists behave. We just create a world in which success is rewarded, and we let selection figure out what kinds of behavior this favors, Morgan said. We can then vary what it means to successful for instance, whether or not its critical to come first and see how selection changes the behavior of scientists in response. We can also measure the benefit to society are scientists being efficient? Are their findings accurate? And so on.

The researchers found that a culture of excessive rewards for priority can have harmful effects. Among other things, it motivates scientists to conduct quick and dirty studies, so that they can be first to publish. This reduces the quality of their work and harms the reliability of science as a whole.

The model also suggests that scoop protection, as introduced by PLOS and eLife, works.

It reduces the temptation to rush the research and gives researchers more time to collect additional data, Tiokhin said. However, scoop protection is no panacea.

This is because scoop protection motivates some scientists to continue with a research line even after several results on that topic have been published, which reduces the total number of research questions the scientific community can address.

Scoop protection reforms in themselves, while helpful, are not sufficient to guarantee high-quality research or a reliable published literature. The model also shows that even with scoop protection, scientists will be tempted to run many small studies if new studies are cheap and easy to set up and the rewards for negative results are high. This suggests that measures that force scientists to invest more heavily in each study, such as asking scientists to preregister their studies or get their research plans criticized before they begin collecting data, can help.

We also learned that inefficiency in science is not always a bad thing. On the contrary inefficiencies force researchers to think twice before starting a new study, Tiokhin said.

Another option is to make large-scale data collection so straightforward that there is less incentive to skimp on data, alternatively, reviewers and journals could be more vigilant in looking out for underpowered studies with small sample sizes.

This project is an example of metascience, the use of the scientific method to study science itself.

It was a great pleasure to be part of this project. I got to use my modeling skills not only to make specific scientific discoveries, but also to shed light on how the scientific procedure itself should be designed to increase research quality and credibility. This benefits the whole scientific community and ultimately, the whole society, said Yan, a graduate student in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change.

Reference: Competition for priority harms the reliability of science, but reforms can help by Leonid Tiokhin, Minhua Yan and Thomas J. H. Morgan, 28 January 2021, Nature Human Behaviour.DOI: 10.1038/s41562-020-01040-1

Written by Julie Russ (ASU) and H.G.P van Appeven (Eindhoven University of Technology).

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Ending the Rat Race: How Evolution Can Change Science for the Better - SciTechDaily

E! has set a premiere date for Overserved with Lisa Vanderpump, its latest entre into the pop culture reality sphere.

The new half-hour series from Evolution Media sees the British restauranteur, author and TVpersonality invite audiences into her Villa Rosa garden where she hosts two to three celebrity guests for an unforgettable night full of cocktails, games, and delicious feasts, all crafted by Vanderpump (pictured).

Fans of Evolutions Real Housewives franchise will recognize the celeb from Real Housewives of Beverly Hills before she expanded her personal brand of over the top lifestyle with Vanderpump Rulesand an appearance on ABCs Dancing With the Stars. In Overserved,Vanderpump creates themes like Diva Tea, Beverly Hills Comfort Food and Ladies who Brunch, and more alongside her trademark games of ros pongand diva croquet.

Guests for season one include Anna Camp, Cheryl Burke, Cheryl Hines, Gabriel Iglesias, Iggy Azalea, Jaleel White, James Kennedy, Jeannie Mai, Jeff Lewis, Jim Jeffries, Joel McHale, Kym Whitley, Lala Kent, Lance Bass, Loni Love, Margaret Cho, Mario Lopez, Meagan Good, Sheryl Underwood, Steve-O, Dr. Terry Dubrow and Heather Dubrow, Tori Spelling, Trixie Mattel, and Vivica A. Fox.

Overserved with Lisa Vanderpump is produced by Evolution Media with Douglas Ross, Alex Baskin, Lisa Vanderpump, Aliyah Silverstein, Bill Langworthy and Brian McCarthyserving as executive producers.

E! will broadcast the series debut on March 18 at 9 p.m. ET/PT. A trailer for Overserved with Lisa Vanderpumpcan be found below:

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E! sets the table with Evolution Media's Overserved with Lisa Vanderpump - Realscreen

NuOrder is a wholesale e-commerce platform digitising the buying and selling process for leading global brands and retailers. Hosting more than 3,000 labels, such as Tom Ford, Ermenegildo Zegna, Acne Studios and Shiseido, and 500,000+ retailers, including Nordstrom, Bloomingdales and Saks Fifth Avenue, the B2B platform supports thousands of market appointments and processes over $38 billion in orders globally across more than 100 currencies.

As business moved online overnight in 2020 to account for pandemic restrictions and non-advisable travel, NuOrders digital solutions buoyed many of fashions grounded physical events, partnering with the likes of Milan, Copenhagen and New York fashion weeks and American trade show group Informa Markets Fashion, which owns industry stalwarts Coterie, Magic and Micam requiring just an internet connection and login for event attendance.

NuOrder Co-Founder and Co-CEO Heath Wells. NuOrder.

Keen to learn from their community of users during the disruption of 2020, NuOrder conducted multiple surveys to gather the concerns and strategies of an industry in flux. In its report, The Future of Wholesale, NuOrder found 87 percent do not plan to move away from wholesale into DTC. Forty-three percent of respondents hold a positive outlook for the future of wholesale distribution, while some 21 percent hold a negative outlook a view predominantly held by smaller companies with $5 million or less in revenue.

Now, BoF sits down with co-founder and co-CEO Heath Wells to discuss the future of wholesale and what NuOrder has learnt about what to expect in 2021.

How do you expect wholesale to evolve in 2021?

The pandemic has forced everyone to adopt a technology platform. Before, you had buyers flying around the world, collecting samples or taking photos on iPhones and then trying to marry that with Excel sheets. You dont get any visualisation of a total assortment on a spreadsheet. It was ineffective, meaning retailers were doing their best, but really had one arm tied behind their back simply put wholesale was broken. Putting NuOrder aside, new technologies are just good for the industry because its going to be a win-win for everyone.

According to our Future of Wholesale report, nearly every respondent reported using a B2B software solution in 2020. We think about B2B e-commerce for both the brand and the retailer. On one side, a brand needs selling tools, visual line sheets, virtual showrooms, inventory, et cetera. On the other side, retail needs a cross-brand buying experience and an easy way to view the total assortment online.

Our USP is about how we pull both sides together into a single platform, and how we allow a brand to sell more effectively to unlock all the value for the retailer. For example, we ran an industry survey when Covid-19 hit to ask retailers questions like, How many orders are you going to cancel? We can then communicate to our customers findings on what we were anticipating from the retail community.

How is digital buying evolving as it becomes better embedded in the industry?

Our solution enables real-time collaboration, mimicking the virtual showroom experience. As a buyer, I could put together a live assortment with a counterpart in another city and even with the brand itself. It facilitates a back and forth, which is a key function of success for us. And the technology behind that sounds simple, but its damn hard.

New technologies are good for the industry.

We expose all of our data findings to buyers through pivot tables and visual components, which allows buyers to get back to what they are really great at selecting awesome product. We then have algorithms that work out the allocation of where those should go by region.

To pick the right product requires art and science, and buyers are really good at the art part. It is our job to help them with the data and science part.

How are you evolving the forecasting capabilities you offer?

Forecast and planning is also a pain point for people its a finger-in-the-wind type of thing. But we have the aggregate and standardised product data to inform our partners buying decisions, which we currently leverage on the retail side in terms of optimising size and allocation models. We help them make those decisions. Solutions around forecasting and planning is the area that the Future of Wholesale survey respondents reported as holding the highest value in the B2B market.

A view of the NuOrder platform. NuOrder.

We want to do the same thing with brands, which is to say, Heres what were seeing on the retail side, heres what you should be thinking about. For example, youre just about to place this order of military jackets NuOrder shows that they are trending so maybe you want to overcut that by 20 percent? or Youve only sold a hundred units in three weeks, maybe its time to retire it or cancel a future order.

How will the evolution in the marketplace impact smaller brands?

When Covid unfolded, we knew smaller brands had no other choice than to sign up to platforms like NuOrder, despite the challenge they have to afford a service like ours. Indeed, 37 percent of surveyed respondents not using a B2B solution said it was due to budget restraints. We felt it was our duty to help as best we can, so we started NuOrder Now. It is a free service that allows smaller companies to create and share product catalogues and line sheets, with up to 3 brand users and unlimited access for retailers, as well as learning guides and webinars.

We now have a full-time employee who handles education. They run webinars and teach people not just the basics but also how to set up your range and go to market. Tommy [Fazio], our fashion director, has been a strong advocate with New York Fashion Week and Informa Markets Fashion about helping smaller brands and being an advisor to them.

How did your experiences in 2020 inform your strategy?

Last year was a bit of a sprint. We launched a digital trade show in September, which generated a lot of traction, connections and leads after all, 36 percent of the Future of Wholesale respondents said they rely heavily on tradeshows to secure retail accounts. From that event, we learnt that buyers want curation.

For example, the keywords that buyers searched for the most during Informa Markets digital trade shows were sustainability and dropship when the brand will ship inventory directly to the customer on behalf of the retailer. The great thing about digital is that you dont need to set up a new trade show to implement findings. We are taking these mass experiences and curating them for specific segments.

The luxury industry is looking for an upgraded solution.

Then, with the fashion weeks, were moving to a more commerce-based model. From your seat on the runway, how do you now start shopping? We threw a lot of things at the wall last year and learned a lot. It looks again like we may not be able to see collections and events in-person for another six months or so, which is disappointing, but we are here.

What are your main priorities for 2021?

The luxury market is a big focus for us. That industry is looking for an upgraded solution. Theyve got so many big business problems, and we offer assistance from merchandising to virtual showrooming to collecting an order. Weve seen a lot of pickup demand from brands seeking a deeper and integrated company solution.

As a sidestep to luxury, Europe follows. Weve got 200 people in the company and were growing as quick as we can in Europe. Theres a decent-sized team in Milan, London and Paris, but Id say that would probably triple in the next year or 18 months. So, the next biggest priority is people. The growth that were experiencing is so large and were trying to hire as quickly as possible, but what you want to ensure is that you are hiring with culture in mind, with all the specific skillsets in mind, to make sure that the team is A+.

Finally, we are also building some cool stuff in product. Were soon to be supporting a full 3D CAD. You can move it; you can turn it upside down. Then, youll be able to put it in situ to see what it looks like on the shop floor, for example. Were also rolling out a Shop by Look feature and taking our digital trade show 365 into an advanced marketplace.

This is a sponsored feature paid for by NuOrder as part of a BoF partnership.

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At NuOrder, the Evolution of the Wholesale Industry | Sponsored Feature | BoF - The Business of Fashion

Photo: Skull fragment, Homo erectus, by Commie cretan (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons.

Yesterday I discussed an academic article in the journal Evolution: Education and Outreach that cites me and others in the ID movement, with the authors not seeming to realize that scientists who doubt Darwin do so because of the evidence. All of this was eyebrow-raising, but what about the articles citation of my work? I found it in a section where they discuss misconceptions about evolution that are promoted by what they call detractors of evolutionary theory:

The misconception that human beings came from the ape and not from a common ancestor and the idea claimed by the intelligent design movement that God participated in human origin (Luskin 2005).

The citation is to one of my earliest writings on the topic of human origins, an article I published in an old ID journal, Progress in Complexity, Information, and Design back in 2005. Because I wrote this article many years ago, its hardly what I would consider my best or most current writing on the subject. But its still available on the Internet, and I suppose I appreciate the citation, even if theyre ignoring my more recent work. What I dont appreciate much is the authors misrepresenting my 2005 paper as if it promoted misconceptions about evolution.

The authors attribute two misconceptions to my article. The first is The misconception that human beings came from the ape and not from a common ancestor. If my paper did state this then it would indeed be promoting a misconception about standard evolutionary thinking. So I reread my paper and nowhere does it claim evolutionary biology holds that human beings came from the ape, or anything close to that. Quite the opposite, my paper accurately represents evolutionary theory as proposing that humans share a common ancestor with living apes. Heres the relevant quote:

The chance-law hypothesis, neo-Darwinism, states that humans, apes, and monkeys are related through common ancestry.

Now lets be clear: I understand full well that modern evolutionary biology holds that humans share a common ancestor with apes, not that we evolved from the ape (although it would be fair to say that many paleoanthropologists would agree that we evolved from apelike species). This is nothing new, and my article accurately represents evolutionary thinking.

What about the second misconception? They claim that it is a misconception to teach that that God participated in human origin [sic]. Dont fail to appreciate what you just read, and recall that the full quote is above. This journal Evolution: Education and Outreach affiliated with the NCSE, which claims to be a religion-friendly activist group just published a paper that directly claimed that if you believe God participated in human origin then that is wrong, a misconception. Thats not very religion-friendly!

And yet in this same article, a few pages later, they launch into standard evolutionary apologetics talking points about how religion and evolution are fully compatible:

In this way, religious precepts can be accommodated in the face of scientific knowledge, since conflict is unnecessary and counterproductive, and there is no need to abandon religious conceptions in order to understand and accept biological evolution, something already perceived by Charles Darwin himself in one of his last letters.

So which is it? In one breath were told that there is no need to abandon religious conceptions when we accept biological evolution. But in another breath were told that its a misconception to claim that God participated in human origin. So much for the articles clumsy posturing that conflict between evolution and religion is unnecessary.

It seems clear enough that the article is using double-speak to pretend that evolution has no conflicts with religion. But does my article even argue that God is responsible for human origins? No. Search the paper: the word God is not there. The article does propose that intelligent design might be a better explanation than neo-Darwinian evolution for human origins:

The abrupt appearance of Homo as a novel and distinct form, significantly different from earlier fossil forms and without links to previous fossil forms, implicates intelligent design as a cause involved in the origin of Homo.

But nowhere does the article attribute human origins to God. Just as the Evolution: Education and Outreach article accuses me of promoting common misconceptions about evolution, one might equally (and more accurately) say that article is promoting common misconceptions about intelligent design.

Now the immediate reaction we often hear says, Well, you ID proponents believe that the designer is God, so were not misrepresenting you. No, they are indeed misrepresenting us. I do believe that the designer is God and Ive always been open about that fact. But my belief that the designer is God is my personal religious belief not something that I have claimed to infer from biology alone via the scientific methods that I use to detect design. Ive discussed this many times before, such as here. Scientifically, all I can infer from the biological data is an intelligent cause, and because my paper takes a scientific approach, thats all it proposes.

For example, although I probably wouldnt frame some of my arguments for design in this old paper in exactly the same way today, I do still very much agree with this quote I provide from Stephen Meyer:

As Meyer et al. note:

[I]ntelligent design provides a sufficient causal explanation for the origin of large amounts of information, since we have considerable experience of intelligent agents generating informational configurations of matter.

This infusion of information could be revealed in the fossil record as a quantum or discontinuous increase in specified complexity or information.

My paper thus argues that the abrupt appearance of Homo in the fossil record is the precise kind of rapid input of information that could reflect design by intelligence. But this is an argument for an intelligent cause, and although that intelligent cause could be a divine being, the scientific data alone did not allow me to take the argument that far. Indeed, there are some atheist or agnostic ID-sympathizers who agree that there is evidence for design in nature, but they dont attribute that design specifically to God. When the Evolution: Education and Outreach article claims that I am arguing for God in the paper, it is simply misstating what I wrote. Tomorrow I will consider why the critics misrepresent intelligent design.

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Misconceptions about Misconceptions: Examining a Citation of My Work - Discovery Institute

"To think of where we started and where we are now, it's kind of hard to believe we got so big so fast," junior Kylie Doty said.

Wrestling practice at Colfax-Mingo High School looks like many others. The wrestlers file in, tape some ankles, warm up and practice. Except, there is one difference.

"Here at Colfax-Mingo, it's the norm to have girls involved in wrestling," Head Coach Erin Hume told Local 5.

To be fair though, it is slowly becoming the norm across the state.

Back in January, 476 girls competed at the IWCOA Girls High School State Championship.

"To think of where we started and where we are now, it's kind of hard to believe we got so big so fast," junior Kylie Doty said.

That weekend showed more than just how far girls wrestling has come.

"It's only going to help the sport here in Iowa and across the United States," Hume said. "To see more people involved, and female wrestlers is one way to grow it."

But at Colfax-Mingo, it is about more than just growing a sport.

"The more options we give them the more likely they are to be involved and feel connected to the school," Hume said.

It also provides a connection to the generations of girls that follow.

"I remember when I was just a small little girl here and there was no one else that was a girl," Doty said. "Having a role model is the best thing you can have."

"If they want to leave the program in a better place, and have it be a part of them and see it grow once they're done, then it's up to them to be the role model to the younger girls on the team," Hume said.

The 15 girls on last year's Tigerhawk team and the 10 this year are trying to provide a foundation for a sport and future girls to grow from.

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'It's the norm': Colfax-Mingo part of Iowa wrestling evolution - Local 5 - weareiowa.com

All things being equal, large, long-lived animals should have the highest risk of cancer.

The calculation is simple: Tumors grow when genetic mutations cause individual cells to reproduce too quickly. A long life creates more opportunities for those cancerous mutations to arise. So, too, does a massive body: Big creatures -- which have many more cells -- should develop tumors more frequently.

Why, then, does cancer rarely afflict elephants, with their long lifespans and gargantuan bodies? They are some of the world's largest land animals.

A new study delves into this sizeable mystery, showing that elephants possess extra copies of a wide variety of genes associated with tumor suppression.

But this phenomenon is not unique to elephants, scientists say: The research concluded that duplication of tumor suppressor genes is quite common among elephants' living and extinct relatives, including in small ones like Cape golden moles (a burrowing animal) and elephant shrews (a long-nosed insectivore). The data suggest that tumor suppression capabilities preceded or coincided with the evolution of exceptionally big bodies, facilitating this development.

The study was published on Jan. 29 in the journaleLifeby biologists Vincent Lynch at the University at Buffalo and Juan Manuel Vazquez at the University of California, Berkeley.

"One of the expectations is that as you get a really big body, your burden of cancer should increase because things with big bodies have more cells," says Lynch, PhD, assistant professor in the Department of Biological Sciences in the UB College of Arts and Sciences. "The fact that this isn't true across species -- a long-standing paradox in evolutionary medicine and cancer biology -- indicates that evolution found a way to reduce cancer risk."

In the new study, "We explored how elephants and their living and extinct relatives evolved to be cancer-resistant," Lynch says. "We have past research looking at TP53, a well-known tumor suppressor. This time, we said, 'Let's just look at whether the entire elephant genome includes more copies of tumor suppressors than what you'd expect.' Is the trend general? Or is the trend specific to one gene? We found that it was general: Elephants have lots and lots and lots of extra copies of tumor suppressor genes, and they all contribute probably a little bit to cancer resistance."

Elephants do have enhanced cancer protections, compared with relatives

Though many elephant relatives harbor extra copies of tumor suppressor genes, the scientists found that elephant genomes possess some unique duplications that may contribute to tumor suppression through genes involved in DNA repair; resistance to oxidative stress; and cellular growth, aging and death.

"By determining how big, long-lived species evolved better ways to suppress cancer, we can learn something new about how evolution works and hopefully find ways to use that knowledge to inspire new cancer treatments," says Vazquez, PhD, a postdoctoral researcher at UC Berkeley who completed much of the project while earning his PhD at the University of Chicago.

A related mystery: How did giant sloths and ancient mega-armadillos get so big?

Elephants are a great case study for understanding the evolution of cancer protection because they belong to a group of mammals -- the Afrotherians -- that are mostly small-bodied.

The study searched for extra copies of tumor suppressor genes in the DNA of Asian, African savanna and African forest elephants, as well as in the genomes of a number of fellow Afrotherians, such as Cape golden moles, elephant shrews, rock hyraxes, manatees, extinct woolly mammoths, extinct mastodons and more. The team also studied certain species belonging to a group of mammals called Xenarthra that is closely related to Afrotherians, and found some extra copies of tumor suppressors in those animals' genomes as well.

Given the findings, Lynch wonders whether the duplication of tumor suppressors may have aided the evolution of other ancient large bodies within these groups.

"If you pick a weird mammal, there's a good chance that it will be in these groups, the Afrotherians and Xenarthrans: armadillos, aardvarks, sloths, anteaters, all of these weird mammals," Lynch says. "We found that within these groups of organisms, the ones we studied all seem to have extra copies of tumor suppressor genes. That may be why in the last Ice Age, there were giant sloths and ancient mega-armadillos. There's even an extinct species of manatee relative called the Steller's sea cow that was elephant-big. Extra copies of tumor suppressors may have helped all of these animals get really, really big."

Reference:Vazquez JM, Lynch VJ. Pervasive duplication of tumor suppressors in Afrotherians during the evolution of large bodies and reduced cancer risk. Rokas A, ed. eLife. 2021;10:e65041. doi:10.7554/eLife.65041This article has been republished from the following materials. Note: material may have been edited for length and content. For further information, please contact the cited source.

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Investigating How Elephants Evolved To Become Resistant to Cancer - Technology Networks

The conservative evolution of America continues. Democrats admitted they're an insignificant minority when they resorted to cheating.

Millions of Make America Great Again voters saw, believe and wont forget the evidence mainstream media tried to hide.

Patriots are identifying Republican in Name Only Republicans and socialist Democrats to eliminate in the 2022 primaries. China Joes attacks on American values, jobs and economy will grow the patriot army.

Mainstream media is losing viewers and commercial value to conservative media. Higher taxes, higher cost energy, illegal immigration, attacks on police and gun owners are growing the patriot party.

"We the people" will not tolerate rule by a corrupt minority.

Gary Miller

Texas City

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The conservative evolution of America continues | Letters to the Editor | The Daily News - Galveston County Daily News