A report has it that tiny fossils found in mudrock in the barren wilderness of the Canadian Arctic are the remains
of the oldest known fungus on Earth.The tiny organisms were discovered in shallow water shale, in a region south
of Victoria Island on the edge of the Arctic Ocean. After chemical and structural analyses, the ancient organism
is identified as Ourasphaira giraldae. Tests on the shale (a kind of fine-grained sedimentary rock) revealed it was
formed between 900m and 1bn years ago. The age of the rock determines the fungus half a billion years older than
a 450m-year-old fungus (the previous record holder) that was discovered in Wisconsin.The fungus was trapped in
solidified mud which prevented oxygen from seeping in and decomposing the fungi.Now, you don’t have to rush to doctor immediately
if your child is having an ear infection. As per a report,
researchers at the University of Washington have
developed a new smartphone app, which can detect fluid
behind the eardrum by using a piece of paper, the phone’s
microphone and a speaker. The smartphone makes a series
of soft audible chirps into the ear through a small paper
funnel and, depending on the way the chirps are reflected
back to the phone, the app determines the probability of
fluid presence in the eardrum with 85 per cent accuracy.
One key advantage of this technology is that it ‘does not
require any additional hardware other than a piece of
paper and a software app running on the smartphone.’Researchers at the Medical Research Council’s
Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge created
the world’s first living organism that has a fully synthetic
and radically altered DNA code. It is a milestone in
the field of synthetic biology. It took two years for
the researchers to redesign the DNA of the bacterium
Escherichia coli (E coli), before creating cells with a
synthetic version of the altered genome which contains
4m base pair. The new genome was arrived after 18,000
edits. The redesigned genetic code was then chemically
synthesised and inserted piece by piece to replace the
natural genome. The human-made microbe can act
according to a new set of biological rules. It may be
repurposed to provide designer enzymes, proteins and
drugs.74 neScholar^0 vol 4^0 issue 4