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DNA survives round trip to space on rocket
This week INSIGHT Benefits of immigration
Immigrants aid the economy, stupid economy, the World Bank said in a 2006 report that if 14.2 million workers moved from poor to rich countries between 2001 and 2025, raising the rich countries’ labour force by 3 per cent, the world’s yearly wages would grow by $772 billion by 2025. This is a net gain of wealth for the global economy, created by giving migrants more capital and technology
LAST week, US president Barack Obama announced an executive action offering temporary legal status to some 5 million undocumented immigrants resident in the US. His political opponents vowed to oppose the measure, saying it only rewards illegal behaviour. They are not alone in seeing immigration as a problem. British voters have just handed a second parliamentary seat to the UK Independence Party, which pledges to crack down on immigration. Yet, says Ian Goldin of the University of Oxford, research consistently finds that migrants boost the prosperity of their host countries. A study of the UK published on 4 November found that between 1995 and 2011, migrants from other European Union countries contributed more in taxes than they received in government benefits. Nor is this the only positive effect. It has been common knowledge for years that immigrant workers boost wages in host countries. Using a mathematical model of the global
DNA survives round trip to space on rocket NO WONDER life is crammed into every niche on the planet. DNA can survive blasting into space and back on the outside of a rocket. Cora Thiel at the University of Zurich in Switzerland and her colleagues mixed small loops of DNA, known as plasmids, with a liquid solution and painted it on the outside of a rocket. It flew for 13 minutes, 10 | NewScientist | 29 November 2014
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Debora MacKenzie
reaching a height of 270 kilometres before returning to Earth. Although atmospheric friction heated the DNA to more than 1000 °C during re-entry to the atmosphere, Thiel recovered molecules from many different points on the rocket. The highest level of survival was seen inside the grooves of screw heads, where 53 per cent of plasmids made it. The DNA of the plasmids encoded proteins for antibiotic resistance and fluorescence. When the team implanted the plasmids into E. coli and mouse cells, 35 per cent gave the cells these properties, suggesting the DNA
to work with than they would have had at home. And such wage gains feed back into global prosperity more readily than other kinds of economic boosts, such as profits, because wageearners use the money to buy more goods and services – precisely the economic stimulus governments have been trying to bring about since the crisis of 2008. Analysis conducted by Giovanni Peri of the University of California, Davis, cites economic data demonstrating that immigrants, even poorly educated ones, help economic growth. This is because businesses absorb more labour, creating new jobs for natives – often better ones as they capitalise on
their existing educational and language advantage. In February, Peri was co-author on the first study to use mathematical models to compare the effect of giving undocumented migrants legal status instead of deporting them. When the model was fed data from the US and Mexico, it found that more deportation resulted in fewer jobs for native-born US citizens by preventing migrants from stimulating job creation in US firms. Legalising these undocumented people boosts the economy and creates more jobs for migrants and locals alike. Where does this leave the argument that there aren’t enough jobs to go round? In May, a report by the UN’s International Labour Organization decried the notion that migrants are part of the problem. “Set against this are the empirically grounded assessments of the actual economic benefits of migration and the potential benefits of relaxation of limitations on it,” the report states. Goldin attributes the misconception to the perceived short-term downsides of migrants, whereas the benefits are long-term and diffuse. He says the answer is for governments to manage migration better by ensuring that migrants are documented, paying taxes and not competing unfairly with natives on wages and hours. That is what –We can work it out– Obama’s measure aims to do. n
was fully functional (PLoS One, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0112979). The result is exciting for fans of panspermia, the idea that life on Earth was seeded by microbes from space – although it is unclear whether DNA would survive such long journeys. But it could also pose a problem for finding alien life. When space agencies send robot explorers to other planets, they give them a deep
“The result is exciting for fans of the idea that life on Earth was seeded by microbes from space”
clean to remove all Earthly signs of life. The idea is to avoid contaminating another world, which would make it more difficult to detect genuine aliens. Thiel says her work suggests agencies should coat their robots with artificial DNA before cleaning, to confirm it has all been removed. “This is an interesting and provocative study,” says Christopher Carr at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Unprotected DNA in space would probably be destroyed by UV radiation, he says, but it is worth re-examining our methods of sterilising spacecraft. Jacob Aron n
Immigrants aid the economy, stupid economy, the World Bank said in a 2006 report that if 14.2 million workers moved from poor to rich countries between 2001 and 2025, raising the rich countries’ labour force by 3 per cent, the world’s yearly wages would grow by $772 billion by 2025. This is a net gain of wealth for the global economy, created by giving migrants more capital and technology
LAST week, US president Barack Obama announced an executive action offering temporary legal status to some 5 million undocumented immigrants resident in the US. His political opponents vowed to oppose the measure, saying it only rewards illegal behaviour. They are not alone in seeing immigration as a problem. British voters have just handed a second parliamentary seat to the UK Independence Party, which pledges to crack down on immigration. Yet, says Ian Goldin of the University of Oxford, research consistently finds that migrants boost the prosperity of their host countries. A study of the UK published on 4 November found that between 1995 and 2011, migrants from other European Union countries contributed more in taxes than they received in government benefits. Nor is this the only positive effect. It has been common knowledge for years that immigrant workers boost wages in host countries. Using a mathematical model of the global
DNA survives round trip to space on rocket NO WONDER life is crammed into every niche on the planet. DNA can survive blasting into space and back on the outside of a rocket. Cora Thiel at the University of Zurich in Switzerland and her colleagues mixed small loops of DNA, known as plasmids, with a liquid solution and painted it on the outside of a rocket. It flew for 13 minutes, 10 | NewScientist | 29 November 2014
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Debora MacKenzie
reaching a height of 270 kilometres before returning to Earth. Although atmospheric friction heated the DNA to more than 1000 °C during re-entry to the atmosphere, Thiel recovered molecules from many different points on the rocket. The highest level of survival was seen inside the grooves of screw heads, where 53 per cent of plasmids made it. The DNA of the plasmids encoded proteins for antibiotic resistance and fluorescence. When the team implanted the plasmids into E. coli and mouse cells, 35 per cent gave the cells these properties, suggesting the DNA
to work with than they would have had at home. And such wage gains feed back into global prosperity more readily than other kinds of economic boosts, such as profits, because wageearners use the money to buy more goods and services – precisely the economic stimulus governments have been trying to bring about since the crisis of 2008. Analysis conducted by Giovanni Peri of the University of California, Davis, cites economic data demonstrating that immigrants, even poorly educated ones, help economic growth. This is because businesses absorb more labour, creating new jobs for natives – often better ones as they capitalise on
their existing educational and language advantage. In February, Peri was co-author on the first study to use mathematical models to compare the effect of giving undocumented migrants legal status instead of deporting them. When the model was fed data from the US and Mexico, it found that more deportation resulted in fewer jobs for native-born US citizens by preventing migrants from stimulating job creation in US firms. Legalising these undocumented people boosts the economy and creates more jobs for migrants and locals alike. Where does this leave the argument that there aren’t enough jobs to go round? In May, a report by the UN’s International Labour Organization decried the notion that migrants are part of the problem. “Set against this are the empirically grounded assessments of the actual economic benefits of migration and the potential benefits of relaxation of limitations on it,” the report states. Goldin attributes the misconception to the perceived short-term downsides of migrants, whereas the benefits are long-term and diffuse. He says the answer is for governments to manage migration better by ensuring that migrants are documented, paying taxes and not competing unfairly with natives on wages and hours. That is what –We can work it out– Obama’s measure aims to do. n
was fully functional (PLoS One, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0112979). The result is exciting for fans of panspermia, the idea that life on Earth was seeded by microbes from space – although it is unclear whether DNA would survive such long journeys. But it could also pose a problem for finding alien life. When space agencies send robot explorers to other planets, they give them a deep
“The result is exciting for fans of the idea that life on Earth was seeded by microbes from space”
clean to remove all Earthly signs of life. The idea is to avoid contaminating another world, which would make it more difficult to detect genuine aliens. Thiel says her work suggests agencies should coat their robots with artificial DNA before cleaning, to confirm it has all been removed. “This is an interesting and provocative study,” says Christopher Carr at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Unprotected DNA in space would probably be destroyed by UV radiation, he says, but it is worth re-examining our methods of sterilising spacecraft. Jacob Aron n