Cloned sheep develop healthily

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/27/science/dolly-the-sheep-clones.html?_r=0

Dolly the sheep, well-known as the first animal cloned from an adult cell, was unfortunately short-lived, developing arthritis early on in life and dying at age 6 (a good bit earlier than expected for an average sheep).

This left scientists wondering whether cloned animals were inherently unhealthy or if Dolly's was a particularly unfortunate case.

According to the research described above, cell cloning has good potential to produce perfectly normal and healthy animals; four clones created from Dolly's cells in 2007 are alive to this day, and are expected to continue living into the next year.

Doubling the Exoplanet Population

NASA’s Kepler space telescope confirmed the existence of 1,284 newfound planets orbiting distant stars, more than doubling the number discovered since the mission was launched in 2009.  

A new statistical validation technique enables researchers to quantify the probability that any given candidate signal is in fact caused by a planet, without requiring any follow-up observations. This technique uses two different kinds of simulations-- both simulations of the detailed shapes of transit signals caused by both planets and objects, such as a star, masquerading as planets, and also simulations of how common imposters are expected to be in the Milky Way galaxy. Combining these two different kinds of information gives scientists a reliability score between zero and one for each candidate. Candidates with reliability greater than 99 percent are called “validated planets.”

NASA’s report is from results of a statistical analysis performed on 4,302 potential planets from the Kepler mission’s July 2015 planet candidate catalog. For 1,284 of the candidates, the probability of being a planet was greater than 99 percent – the minimum required to earn the status of “planet.” An additional 1,327 candidates were more likely than not to be actual planets, but did not meet the 99 percent threshold and will require additional study. The remaining 707 candidates were more likely to be some other astrophysical phenomena. This analysis also revalidated 984 candidates that were previously verified by other techniques.

From:  The Week magazine, May 27, 2016, Health & Science page, pg. 21.

Further details from:  www.nasa.gov/feature/ames/kepler/briefingmaterials160510

Increasing amounts of bots are used in Facebook Messenger

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