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    COP16 Talks in Colombia Adopt a Novel Way to Pay for Conservation

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    The meeting created a fund that would compensate countries for the use of genetic information.Diplomats from roughly 180 countries ended two weeks of environmental talks on Saturday after agreeing on a new fund that would shift some of the profits from nature’s DNA to global conservation efforts.The agreement calls for companies that make money from genetic information stored in databases, known as digital sequence information, to pay into a fund as a sort of fee for the use of biodiversity.Scientific advances have made it easier and cheaper for researchers to sequence genetic material. That means there are now vast amounts available in databases for pharmaceutical, cosmetic, biotechnology and other companies to analyze as they seek to develop new products.Delegates at the talks, known as COP16, shorthand for the 16th Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity, called the agreement an important breakthrough.“Conservation is mostly funded by governments and philanthropy,” said Amber Scholz, who leads the science policy department at Leibniz Institute DSMZ, a German research institute that focuses on microbial and cellular biodiversity. “Now, businesses that profit from biodiversity will pay into a new fund.”The final declaration made the fund voluntary, saying that companies “should” contribute.The agreement lays out specifics on how much they should pay: 1 percent of their profits or 0.1 percent of their revenue, as a guideline. Governments are “invited” to take legislative or other measures to require companies to contribute.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Hairballs Shed Light on Tsavo Man-Eating Lions’ Menu

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      The Tsavo man-eaters terrorized railroad workers in British East Africa in the 19th century, but their tastes went well beyond human flesh.In British East Africa in 1898, two lions living along the Tsavo River were hungry.This was bad news for the workers building a railroad there. They would retreat to their tents at night and, come morning, some of the men would be missing, the latest victims of big cats that had a hankering for human meat.“Bones, flesh, skin and blood, they devoured all, and left not a trace behind them,” wrote Lt. Col. John Henry Patterson, a British Army officer leading the railroad project.During the nine-month reign of the Tsavo man-eaters, the lions, which like most males of the area lacked manes, devoured around 35 workers. Eventually, construction of the railroad stopped completely until Colonel Patterson shot the two cats.The lions’ bodies were initially fashioned into trophy rugs. In 1925, the Field Museum in Chicago purchased the rugs for display. The two skulls ended up in the museum’s collection.It turns out that the Tsavo lions had a taste for more than men. Using hair fragments preserved in the lions’ broken teeth, scientists discovered DNA from several species. Their findings were published Friday in the journal Current Biology, offering a snapshot of the surprisingly diverse buffet of wildlife once consumed by a top predator in what is today Kenya.In the 1990s, Thomas P. Gnoske, a collections manager at the Field Museum, got a chance to examine the Tsavo lions’ skulls. He noticed hair fragments in the cats’ cracked canine teeth. In 2001, Mr. Gnoske contributed to a paper positing that the lions had developed a preference for human prey because the cats’ teeth were damaged, and our species’ flesh was easier to chew.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Officials Confirm Body Found Near Site of Kentucky Highway Shooting Was Suspect’s

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      The identification, made through DNA testing, affirmed the belief of officials. The body was discovered Wednesday after a 12-day manhunt.DNA testing of a body found this week near the site of a Kentucky highway shooting that led to an extensive manhunt confirmed the identity as the suspect, officials said on Friday.Gov. Andy Beshear of Kentucky said in a release that the body belonged to Joseph A. Couch, 32, who authorities said shot at passing vehicles on Interstate 75 near London, a city about an hour south of Lexington. The attack on Sept. 7 seriously injured five people and hit a dozen vehicles with bullets.Authorities had expressed confidence on Wednesday, when the body was discovered, that it had belonged to the suspect, but Friday’s confirmation officially brought closure to the case. An autopsy revealed that the cause of death appeared to be a self-inflicted gunshot to the head, the authorities said.The state’s chief medical examiner, William Ralston, said in the release that the commonwealth could now “move forward from this tragic situation.”The attack led to an intense manhunt of nearly two weeks across tens of thousands of acres of densely forested land near where the shooting occurred, leaving the local community in fear. Several schools canceled classes, and the police stepped up their presence at sporting events, bus routes and other places where people gathered.On the 12th day of the pursuit, the authorities announced that they, along with a married couple who had been searching for the suspect on their own, had found a body in a dense brush behind the highway exit where the shooting took place. Items were found with the body, including a weapon, that the authorities believed belonged to Mr. Couch.According to the release, officials were initially unable to identify the body through a soft tissue DNA test because of the “extreme decomposition” of the body. (It is unclear how long the body had been there before it was discovered.) Instead, they used DNA extracted from a bone to confirm the identity, the release said.The motive for the attack remains unclear. According to court records, Mr. Couch, who served in the Army Reserve, had several charges on his criminal record, including an arrest where he was charged with terroristic threatening in February. More

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      Lake Elsinore Serial Killer Confesses to 1986 Murder of 19-Year-Old Woman

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      William Lester Suff, 70, was already on death row for a dozen murders in Southern California. Now, he has confessed to killing a 19-year-old woman, shutting a 1986 cold case, officials said.A convicted serial killer on California death row for murdering a dozen people in the 1980s and ’90s confessed to the 1986 murder of a 19-year-old woman in Los Angeles County, the police announced on Tuesday.William Lester Suff, 70, confessed in May 2022 to stabbing Cathy Small to death and dumping her body on a South Pasadena, Calif., cul-de-sac, where her body was discovered by police on Feb. 22, 1986, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department announced at a news conference on Tuesday. Why the announcement came more than two years after the confession was not clear.Ms. Small’s body was found in the morning wearing a nightgown, and she died from multiple stab wounds and strangulation, Lt. Patricia Thomas said.Ms. Small’s body was identified three days later by a man who had read about the killing in the news and had called detectives to say he was concerned that the victim could be his roommate.He told detectives that she had worked as a prostitute in the Lake Elsinore area and had lived at his house for a few months, Lieutenant Thomas said.The man said that Ms. Small left their house on the night of Feb. 21, 1986 wearing a nightgown. Ms. Small, he added, told him that a man named Bill was paying her $50 to join him on a drive to Los Angeles.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Mammoth DNA Discovery Helps Map an Ancient Genome in 3-D

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      In 2018 an international team of scientists — from labs in Houston, Copenhagen, Barcelona and beyond — got their hands on a remarkable biological specimen: a skin sample from a 52,000-year-old woolly mammoth that had been recovered from the permafrost in Siberia. They probed the sample with an innovative experimental technique that revealed the three-dimensional architecture of the mammoth’s genome. The resulting paper was published on Thursday in the journal Cell.Hendrik Poinar, an evolutionary geneticist at McMaster University in Canada, was “floored” — the technique had successfully captured the original geometry of long stretches of DNA, a feat never before accomplished with an ancient DNA sample. “It’s absolutely beautiful,” said Dr. Poinar, who reviewed the paper for the journal.The typical method for extracting ancient DNA from fossils, Dr. Poinar said, is still “kind of cave man.” It produces short fragments of code composed of a four-letter molecular alphabet: A (adenine), G (guanine), C (cytosine), T (thymine). An organism’s full genome resides in cell nuclei, in long, unfragmented DNA strands called chromosomes. And, vitally, the genome is three-dimensional; as it dynamically folds with fractal complexity, its looping points of contact help dictate gene activity.“To have the actual architectural structure of the genome, which suggests gene expression patterns, that’s a whole other level,” Dr. Poinar said.“It’s a new kind of fossil, a fossil chromosome,” said Erez Lieberman Aiden, a team member who is an applied mathematician, a biophysicist and a geneticist and directs the Center for Genome Architecture at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. Technically, he noted, it is a non-mineralized fossil, or subfossil, since it has not turned to stone.Erez Lieberman Aiden, director of the Center for Genome Architecture at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston.Brandon Thibodeaux for The New York TimesThe trunk of a 39,000-year-old woolly mammoth nicknamed Yuka that also yielded fossil chromosomes in the study.Love Dalén/Stockholm UniversityWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Killer of 2 Women in National Park in 1996 Has Been Identified, F.B.I. Says

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      A convicted serial rapist who died in an Ohio prison in 2018 was responsible for the murder of a couple at Shenandoah National Park in a case that initially was believed to be a hate crime.It took the authorities one week to find the bodies of Julianne Williams and Laura Winans near their campsite at a national park in Virginia in 1996 after their family reported them missing. But it would take nearly three decades for the authorities to identify the person they believe killed them.The F.B.I. office in Richmond on Thursday announced that new DNA evidence showed that Walter Leo Jackson Sr., a convicted serial rapist from Ohio who died in prison six years ago, had killed the couple in what initially was believed to have been an anti-gay hate crime and led to charges against another man that were eventually dropped by prosecutors in 2004.“After 28 years, we are now able to say who committed the brutal murders of Lollie Winans and Julie Williams in Shenandoah National Park,” Christopher R. Kavanaugh, the U.S. attorney for the western district of Virginia, said in a news release. “I want to again extend my condolences to the Winans and Williams families and hope today’s announcement provides some small measure of solace.”An F.B.I. investigative team revisited the case in 2021, the agency said. It re-examined previous leads and interviews and evidence recovered from the site of the killings. Investigators submitted some of the evidence for DNA testing and found a match to Mr. Jackson’s DNA, the agency said.“Even though we had this DNA match, we took additional steps and compared evidence from Lollie and Julie’s murders directly to a buccal swab containing Jackson’s DNA,” Stanley M. Meador, the F.B.I. special agent in charge in Richmond, said in a news release.Mr. Jackson, who painted homes for a living, died in an Ohio prison in March 2018, officials said. He had an extensive criminal history, including convictions for rape, kidnapping and assault.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Ancient Maya Genomes Sequenced for First Time

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      Thousand-year-old DNA from Chichén Itzá offers eye-opening details of the religious rituals of ancient Maya.In the spring of 1967, workers building a small airport behind Chichén Itzá, the ancient Maya city in Mexico, ran into a problem: Their excavations had uncovered human remains in the pathway of the proposed runway. The airport was set to serve V.I.P.s who wanted to visit Chichén Itzá. But with the remains so close to a major archaeological site, the work had to be halted until the bones could be examined.Any hope for a quick resolution dissolved when archaeologists who were called to the scene uncovered a chultún — an underground rainwater-storage container that, in Maya mythology, was viewed as an entrance to the subterranean land of the dead. Connected to the cistern was a cave containing more than 100 sets of human remains, almost all belonging to children. In a push to finish the airport, researchers were given just two months to excavate and exhume the cache of bones.Nearly 60 years later, ancient DNA extracted from 64 of the children is offering new insights into the religious rituals of the ancient Maya and their ties to modern descendants. In a paper published on Wednesday in the journal Nature, an international cohort of researchers revealed that the children — sacrificial victims killed between 500 and 900 A.D. — were all local Maya boys that may have been specifically selected to be killed in sibling pairs.“These are the first ancient Maya genomes to be published,” said Johannes Krause, an archaeogeneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. The DNA work provided a previously unseen glimpse into the identities of the sacrificed children. “One feels quite moved by such a finding,” Dr. Krause said, noting that he himself has a young son.The search into the genome of the Maya boys did not start as an exercise in ancient Maya rituals. In the mid-2000s, Rodrigo Barquera — now an immunogeneticist at the Max Planck Institute — was hoping to discover the genetic legacy of Mesoamerica’s deadliest pandemic.In 1545, an outbreak of Salmonella enterica spread like wildfire across what is now Mexico. Over the next century, the disease killed up to 90 percent of the Indigenous population. Pandemics like these often leave their mark on the immune genes of survivors. To uncover this genetic legacy, Dr. Barquera and his colleagues needed to compare the DNA from the precolonial remains with that of people who were born after the calamity.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Rex Heuermann, Gilgo Beach Serial Killing Suspect, Is Charged With 2 More Murders

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      Rex Heuermann, who has been accused of killing four women, has been charged with the murders of two more.Rex Heuermann, who was arrested last summer and has been accused of murdering four women in the Gilgo Beach serial killings on Long Island, was indicted Thursday on murder charges in the deaths of two more women.Mr. Heuermann, 60, who has pleaded not guilty to all charges in connection with the first four women’s deaths, has remained in jail for nearly a year awaiting trial. In the meantime, investigators turned to the six other victims — four women, a man and a toddler — whose remains, like those of the first four women, were found along Ocean Parkway by Gilgo Beach.On Thursday, Mr. Heuermann was charged with killing one of them: Jessica Taylor, whose partial remains were found near Gilgo Beach in 2011 and then linked to other partial remains found eight years earlier in a remote wooded area in Manorville, a 45-minute drive east.He was also charged with killing Sandra Costilla, a 28-year-old New York woman whose remains were found in 1993 in the Hamptons. Her long unsolved murder had not previously been associated with the Gilgo Beach investigation.The new indictment followed a recent flurry of activity in the investigation: a nine-day canine search completed last month in Manorville and a wooded area in Southampton where Ms. Costilla’s body was found. Last month, investigators also conducted a six-day search of Mr. Heuermann’s home in Massapequa Park, which had been exhaustively searched for two weeks last summer after his arrest.The Gilgo investigation dates back to late 2010, when investigators discovered the first of 10 victims left along a desolate stretch of Ocean Parkway running east from Jones Beach.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Google Unveils A.I. for Predicting Behavior of Human Molecules

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      The system, AlphaFold3, could accelerate efforts to understand the human body and fight disease.Artificial intelligence is giving machines the power to generate videos, write computer code and even carry on a conversation.It is also accelerating efforts to understand the human body and fight disease.On Wednesday, Google DeepMind, the tech giant’s central artificial intelligence lab, and Isomorphic Labs, a sister company, unveiled a more powerful version of AlphaFold, an artificial intelligence technology that helps scientists understand the behavior of the microscopic mechanisms that drive the cells in the human body.An early version of AlphaFold, released in 2020, solved a puzzle that had bedeviled scientists for more than 50 years. It was called “the protein folding problem.”Proteins are the microscopic molecules that drive the behavior of all living things. These molecules begin as strings of chemical compounds before twisting and folding into three-dimensional shapes that define how they interact with other microscopic mechanisms in the body.Biologists spent years or even decades trying to pinpoint the shape of individual proteins. Then AlphaFold came along. When a scientist fed this technology a string of amino acids that make up a protein, it could predict the three-dimensional shape within minutes.When DeepMind publicly released AlphaFold a year later, biologists began using it to accelerate drug discovery. Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, used the technology as they worked to understand the coronavirus and prepare for similar pandemics. Others used it as they struggled to find remedies for malaria and Parkinson’s disease.The hope is that this kind of technology will significantly streamline the creation of new drugs and vaccines.A segment of a video from Google DeepMind demonstrating the new AlphaFold3 technology.Video by Google Deepmind“It tells us a lot more about how the machines of the cell interact,” said John Jumper, a Google DeepMind researcher. “It tells us how this should work and what happens when we get sick.”The new version of AlphaFold — AlphaFold3 — extends the technology beyond protein folding. In addition to predicting the shapes of proteins, it can predict the behavior of other microscopic biological mechanisms, including DNA, where the body stores genetic information, and RNA, which transfers information from DNA to proteins.“Biology is a dynamic system. You need to understand the interactions between different molecules and structures,” said Demis Hassabis, Google DeepMind’s chief executive and the founder of Isomorphic Labs, which Google also owns. “This is a step in that direction.”Demis Hassabis, Google DeepMind’s chief executive and the founder of Isomorphic Labs.Taylor Hill/Getty ImagesThe company is offering a website where scientists can use AlphaFold3. Other labs, most notably one at the University of Washington, offer similar technology. In a paper released on Tuesday in the scientific journal Nature, Dr. Jumper and his fellow researchers show that it achieves a level of accuracy well beyond the state of the art.The technology could “save months of experimental work and enable research that was previously impossible,” said Deniz Kavi, a co-founder and the chief executive of Tamarind Bio, a start-up that builds technology for accelerating drug discovery. “This represents tremendous promise.” More