a breakthrough in manmade DNA

and what religion and pornography have in common.

So let's get to it.

It's the end of an era at nasa but also the start of a new one last week nasa's

and discovery

the first of its three retired space shuttles to its final destination

at the National Air and Space Museum.

and in the next week or two a huge step will be taken in the replacement

of the space shuttle program. Early in May the private spaceflight company

SpaceX is expected to launch

its new cargo vehicle The Dragon from Cape Canaveral to rendezvous

with the International Space Station. If successful the Dragon will be the first

private spacecraft

to birth with the ISS and offload cargo The launch was originally scheduled for this

coming Monday that earlier this week SpaceX founder Elon Musk tweeted

that he wanted to spend more time testing the code that the Dragon will

use to dock with the ISS this is how we

disseminate information now apparently lift off is now tentatively scheduled

for May 7 and its marquee contest SpaceX already has a 1.6 billion dollar

contract with Nasa to fly 12 missions to the ISS

but a lot is riding on how this first one goes. In addition it is launching

and getting into orbit successfully SpaceX will also have to prove their

time and space craft can perform some tricky maneuvers before actually docking

essentially taking one long lap around the ISS at about twenty seven thousand

kilometers per hour. If all goes well Dragon will dock on day four of the

mission unloading more than 500 kilograms of equipment

and some nonessential supplies so don't worry it's not like the six astronauts

aboard the ISS

are in danger of running out of water oxygen or anything if the test fails

the plan is for the dragon to stay docked for 18 days at which point it will

return to Earth with 660 kilograms of cargo

which is notable because that more weight than the Russian Soyuz capsules

can carry.

SpaceX isn't the only company that's developing a taxi cargo service for Nasa

but

it's the first to demonstrate that it can launch vehicle into space and return

it safely to earth, which it did in December 2010. The company is also

working on a prototype seven-person crew cabin for the Dragon that could be ready

for testing within a year or two

I'd totally voluntier to be one of Dragon's first passengers but you now

the air sickness

Next big news in the world a synthetic biology a field that we talked about a

few weeks ago

this week SynBio saw maybe it's biggest advance

yet, with news that synthetic alternatives to DNA and RNA can not only

replicate

but also adapt overtime. These man-made alternatives called xenonucleic acids

XNA's have been around for a few years, the ones that were talking about

have the same genetic code is DNA with the bases

A G T and C but the sugars that make up the backbones are different

and they actually make XNA's structurally stronger than DNA.

The first breakthrough came last week when an international team of chemists

said that they created

enzymes that replicate XNA molecules just like the enzymes

that replicate DNA. The team put these polymers enzymes to work

copying DNA into XNA and then use them to copy the XNA's back over and over

This kind of replication is exactly what polymerases are doing with DNA

in your cells right now but it's never been done with anything other than DNA

or RNA in like the history of the world. In another, possibly even cooler

experiment, the scientist tested whether XNA's could adapt under pressure

in this case they wanted to see if random sequences of an XNA molecule

could evolve to bind

to two specific target proteins, they used their new enzymes to produce batches

of XNA segments

and then selected the ones that found their target successfully, those segments

were then replicated by the new

enzymes and the new copies were put to the same task.

After eight generations the resulting XNA sequences had essentially been bred to

bind perfectly with the proteins much like we breed

animals and plants. This research means that life doesn't necessarily depend on

two molecules DNA and RNA

there could be all kinds of other maybe simpler maybe better ways of storing

and sharing genetic information in the universe

so when we find extraterrestrial life, and we will

The code that it will carrying its alien blood could look a lot like XNA

Finally new discoveries about two things that make your brain turn off

religion and porn. Let's start out with the porn because that's the kind of day I'm having the

Journal of Sexual Medicine reports this week that when women watch porn

they stop using their visual cortex the part of the brain that's responsible not

just for observing but also processing what's observed. I don't know if you've seen porn

but there's not a whole lot there to process.

Anyway, 12 women were given PET scans have their brains while they watched 3 videos

the first was a totally unsexy nature documentary the second showed some kinda

r-rated action and the third

was what the team of Dutch physicians called high-intensity erotic film only

when the woman watch the porn did the blood flow to their visual cortex drop

dramatically

the researchers believe that this is because the blood was redirected to

regions of the brain involved in sexual arousal

and also because porn and I quote

"Does not require precise scanning" Like I said not a lot to actually process there the

researchers noted though, that the visual cortex is also the region of the brain

associated with anxiety

which might suggest that sexual arousal can quiet anxious behavior. Sex good,

anxiety bad. As for religion let me be the one to tell you, you don't

have a god spot that's the term some researchers have been using to describe

a hypothetical region of the brain

supposedly associated with spirituality, but research at the University of

Missouri has confirmed

earlier studies that say that no such spot exists

instead spirituality is just something that your whole brain

does together. Still some regions of the brain contribute to this more than

others. Lead scientist Brick Johnstone, what an amazing name

anyway he studied 20 people with severe injuries to the right parietal lobe

that's the area just above your right ear that's responsible for things like

spatial relationships and self-awareness

He found that subjects with the most severe injuries there, felt most associated with

and closest to a higher power. This kind of makes sense because the whole right side

your brain tends to be dedicated to you and for looking out for yourself. And a lot of

research has found that monks and nuns and the like

tend to use that self centered part of their brains a lot less. The main thing is;

there's no like structural part of the brain that's responsible for religion and

spirituality. Thanks for watching this episode of scishow news, if

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