$83 billion has just been sitting there underground this whole time. We may earn commission if you buy from a link. A deposit of gold ore discovered in China isn't just giant. So much so, in fact, that Chinese experts claim it could be the largest deposit of any precious metal—not just gold ore—in existence today. Adding some more heft to the already weighty (literally) find was the report that the discovery features 138 grams of gold per metric ton of ore, a valuable rate not often found in gold mining. “Many drilled rock cores showed visible gold,” said Chen Rulin, an ore-prospecting expert at China's Hunan Province's Geological Bureau, according to Chinese state media. If the 1,100-ton figure holds up, that makes this new find the largest gold mine in the world, even outpacing South Africa's South Deep gold mine with its 1,025 tons of gold, according to Mining Technology. Already the world's top gold producer with about 10 percent of global production, China is heavily dependent on the metal, using about three times more gold than it mines annually. This new discovery has put the world's gold markets on notice, enough so that the price of gold rose to $2,700 per ounce, according to CCN.com. And the gold news may not stop there. According to Liu Yongjun, vice head of the bureau, additional gold ore was found when drilling around the site's peripheral areas. Tim Newcomb is a journalist based in the Pacific Northwest. He covers stadiums, sneakers, gear, infrastructure, and more for a variety of publications, including Popular Mechanics. Mystery on Easter Island: More Moai Found in Lake NASA Found a Secret U.S. Army Base Buried in Ice Archaeology Students Dug Up a Mass Viking Grave This Mosaic Shows a Lost Version of the Trojan War Experts Found a Scientific Triumph in Human Hair

Growing older brings a higher risk of serious illnesses such as cancer, heart disease, and dementia. Now, many scientists are stepping back to ask a broader question. A new study published in Science offers an unprecedented look at that process. By examining nearly 7 million individual cells from mice at three different ages, the team identified which cells are most vulnerable over time and what factors may be driving their decline. "Our goal was to understand not just what changes with aging, but why," says Junyue Cao, who heads the Laboratory of Single Cell Genomics and Population Dynamics. "By mapping both cellular and molecular changes, we can identify what drives aging. One of the most striking findings was that many age-related shifts happen in sync across multiple organs. The researchers also found that nearly half of these changes differ between males and females. To map aging at this scale, Cao's team, led by graduate student Ziyu Lu, refined a method known as single-cell ATAC-seq. This approach looks at how DNA is packaged inside each cell, revealing which regions of the genome are accessible and active, a key indicator of a cell's state and function. The researchers applied this technique to millions of individual cells taken from 21 organs in 32 mice at three ages: one month (young adult), five months (middle-aged), and 21 months (elderly). "What's remarkable is that this entire atlas was generated by a single graduate student," Cao says. In total, the lab identified more than 1,800 distinct cell subtypes, including many rare groups that had never been fully described. About one quarter of all cell types showed significant changes in abundance over time. Certain muscle and kidney cell populations declined sharply, while immune cells expanded considerably. "The system is far more dynamic than we realized," says Cao. By five months of age, some cell populations had already begun to decline. Similar cellular states rose and fell together across different organs. For example, females showed much broader immune activation as they aged. "It's possible this could explain the higher prevalence of autoimmune diseases in women," Cao speculates. Out of 1.3 million genomic regions analyzed, about 300,000 displayed significant aging-related alterations. Many of these shared regions were linked to immune function, inflammation, or stem cell maintenance. "This challenges the idea that aging is just random genomic decay," Cao says. When the team compared their findings with earlier research, they discovered that immune signaling molecules called cytokines can trigger many of the same cellular changes observed during aging. Cao suggests that drugs designed to adjust these cytokines could potentially slow coordinated aging processes across multiple organs. Now the question is whether we can develop interventions that target these specific aging processes. Study of 1.2 Million Infants Reveals the Truth About Vegan Baby Diets What Happens to Your Brain When You Eat 30% Less for 20 Years? Scientists Fix a Hidden Flaw in Perovskite Solar Cells With Tiny Crystal Seeds Aging Isn't Random, and It Starts Earlier Than You Think Stay informed with ScienceDaily's free email newsletter, updated daily and weekly. Keep up to date with the latest news from ScienceDaily via social networks: Tell us what you think of ScienceDaily -- we welcome both positive and negative comments.

Cells read genetic instructions in sets of three letters called codons, and each codon corresponds to a specific amino acid. Those amino acids are linked together in a defined order to build proteins, the molecules that carry out most of life's essential tasks. Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley have now identified a microorganism that challenges this long accepted rule. Other times it inserts an amino acid and keeps going. This produces two distinct proteins from the same genetic instruction. The microbe, Methanosarcina acetivorans, appears to function normally despite this flexible interpretation, demonstrating that life can operate with a slightly imprecise code. Scientists think this ambiguity may have evolved to allow the organism to insert a rare amino acid called pyrrolysine into an enzyme that breaks down methylamine, a compound commonly found in the environment and in the human gut. "But biological systems are more ambiguous than we give them credit to be and that ambiguity is actually a feature -- it's not a bug." When people eat red meat, the liver converts certain byproducts into trimethylamine N-oxide, a compound associated with cardiovascular disease. These conditions account for roughly 10% of inherited diseases, including cystic fibrosis and Duchenne muscular dystrophy. Genetic information stored in DNA is first copied into RNA. Cellular machinery then reads that RNA to assemble proteins. RNA is built from four chemical letters: adenine (A), cytosine (C), guanine (G) and uracil (U). In nearly all organisms studied so far, every three letter codon either specifies one particular amino acid or signals the end of a protein. Even so, each codon has traditionally been understood to carry only one meaning. "You're taking something in one language and translating it into another, nucleotides to amino acids." For years, scientists have known that many Archaea can produce pyrrolysine, giving them 21 amino acids to work with instead of the usual 20. That extra building block can expand their biochemical capabilities. "Now that you have a new amino acid, the world's your oyster," she said. "You can start playing around with the much larger code. Researchers had assumed that these organisms simply reassigned the UAG stop codon to represent pyrrolysine. In the new study, Nayak and former graduate student Katie Shalvarjian surveyed a wide range of Archaea and found that many lineages produce pyrrolysine. "We found that the machinery required to create pyrrolysine is widespread in the Archaea, especially amongst these methanogenic archaea that consume methylated amines," said Shalvarjian, now a postdoctoral researcher at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. She wanted to understand how carrying 21 amino acids instead of 20 influences these organisms. While studying how the methanogen controls pyrrolysine production, she noticed something unexpected. The UAG codon was not always translated as pyrrolysine (Pyl). "We think whether or not a protein exists primarily in its elongated or in its truncated form might form a regulatory cue for the cell." The researchers searched for specific sequence or structural signals that might determine how UAG is interpreted, but they did not find any clear triggers. When pyrrolysine is scarce, the same codon functions as a stop signal. Note: Content may be edited for style and length. Study of 1.2 Million Infants Reveals the Truth About Vegan Baby Diets What Happens to Your Brain When You Eat 30% Less for 20 Years? Scientists Fix a Hidden Flaw in Perovskite Solar Cells With Tiny Crystal Seeds Aging Isn't Random, and It Starts Earlier Than You Think Stay informed with ScienceDaily's free email newsletter, updated daily and weekly. Or view our many newsfeeds in your RSS reader: Keep up to date with the latest news from ScienceDaily via social networks: Tell us what you think of ScienceDaily -- we welcome both positive and negative comments.