From UT San Diego News We’ve put men on the moon, sequenced the human genome and connected most people on Earth with cellphones. Techno wizards. That’s what we are — except when it comes to deciphering the workings of the brain, an organ that seems to defy comprehension. And that is a surprise, why? See also: the human mind Hat tip: Stephanie West Allen at Brains on Purpose
The Scientist asks, Diverse mammals, including humans, have been found to carry distinct genomes in their cells. What does such genetic chimerism mean for health and disease? … One common cause of such microchimerism is maternal-fetal trafficking of cells during pregnancy. The placenta is not an unbreachable barrier. Evidence of two-way cell transport across the placenta was reported as early as the 1950s and ’60s. While the mother’s immune system gets rid of most of her baby’s cells shortly after delivery, small numbers of fetal cells have been observed in mothers decades after they have given birth. In fact, because even spontaneous abortions cause fetal cells to be released into the mother’s body, women who become pregnant but never give Read More ›
Someone at the Guardian asked: But who cares what language science is in, especially – you or I might ask – when it’s one we speak? In 2001, an editorial in the journal Nature Cell Biology argued (in English): “The use of a universal language for communication in science is unavoidable, and resisting this concept for the sake of cultural difference would seem to be counterproductive.” Maybe language barriers in print aren’t all that important. A chemist might reasonably say that they can follow a paper published in another language pretty easily: once you know what you’re doing, you can get pretty far just by reading the equations. The English used in scientific publications tends to be more standardised and simplified Read More ›
Is there a new term we could use that would make more sense? John Harnett writes Science has become the new religion. Those who dare challenge the dictates of ‘science’ are often declared crackpots, pseudo-scientists or just plain crazy. If you deny or doubt evolution, or anthropogenic global warming (AGW), now called ‘climate change’, or the effectiveness or safety of certain vaccines, or the universal safety of genetically modified foods, as compared with natural breeding and hybridization practices, you are called nasty names. These might include ‘flat-earther’, particularly if you deny Darwinian evolution. It has come to a point now that to be called a ‘creationist’ is a big negative, like you are a pseudo-scientist, or follower of astrology, or Read More ›
From ScienceDaily: At some point, probably 50,000 to 100,000 years ago, humans began talking to one another in a uniquely complex form. It is easy to imagine this epochal change as cavemen grunting, or hunter-gatherers mumbling and pointing. But in a new paper, an MIT linguist contends that human language likely developed quite rapidly into a sophisticated system: Instead of mumbles and grunts, people deployed syntax and structures resembling the ones we use today. “The hierarchical complexity found in present-day language is likely to have been present in human language since its emergence,” says Shigeru Miyagawa, Professor of Linguistics and the Kochi Prefecture-John Manjiro Professor in Japanese Language and Culture at MIT, and a co-author of the new paper on Read More ›
That’s reasonable because if you look carefully, there are only two holes, which would be consistent with an animal biting down. They need to find one with three equally spaced holes. Or a hyena with three equally spaced fangs. See also: Human evolution at your fingertips
Here. In the 1970s, Hawking proposed that black holes were capable of radiating particles, and that the energy lost through this process would cause the black holes to shrink and eventually disappear. Hawking further concluded that the particles emitted by a black hole would provide no clues about what lay inside, meaning that any information held within a black hole would be completely lost once the entity evaporated. Though Hawking later said he was wrong and that information could escape from black holes, the subject of whether and how it’s possible to recover information from a black hole has remained a topic of debate. Stojkovic and Saini’s new paper helps to clarify the story. Instead of looking only at the Read More ›
Blow us away. No, really, from ScienceDaily: Scientists studied proteins found in cells, known as histones, which are not part of the genetic code, but act as spools around which DNA is wound. Histones are known to control whether or not genes are switched on. Researchers found that naturally occurring changes to these proteins, which affect how they control genes, can be sustained from one generation to the next and so influence which traits are passed on. The finding demonstrates for the first time that DNA is not solely responsible for how characteristics are inherited. It paves the way for research into how and when this method of inheritance occurs in nature, and if it is linked to particular traits Read More ›
So wonders New Scientist: BURSTS of radio waves flashing across the sky seem to follow a mathematical pattern. If the pattern is real, either some strange celestial physics is going on, or the bursts are artificial, produced by human – or alien – technology. Telescopes have been picking up so-called fast radio bursts (FRBs) since 2001. They last just a few milliseconds and erupt with about as much energy as the sun releases in a month. Ten have been detected so far, most recently in 2014, when the Parkes Telescope in New South Wales, Australia, caught a burst in action for the first time. The others were found by sifting through data after the bursts had arrived at Earth. No Read More ›
Not for lack of trying. From The Guardian: Men and women aren’t authors of themselves, as a character in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus remarks of its proud protagonist, but neither are they slaves of their genes. When Richard Dawkins describes human beings as “survival machines – robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes”, his language is redolent of neoliberal capitalism as well as the scientist’s laboratory. To see people in this demeaning way is simply the flipside of the idealising talk of pure autonomy. If the former captures something of the bleak reality of the marketplace, the latter belongs to the heady rhetoric that helps to legitimate it. Some neuroscientists imagine they have dispatched the idea of freedom Read More ›
So The Scientist wonders: “It’s always difficult to claim absolutely a new lineage until you’ve done some biochemical tests,” said microbial ecologist Jack Gilbert of Argonne National Laboratory and the University of Chicago, who was not involved with the study, “but, genomics-wise, this thing appears to fit outside of our current understanding.” Genomic analyses place Kryptonia in the Bacteroidetes superphylum, whose members thrive in the gut and in marine environments. If confirmed, Kryptonia would be the first extreme thermophile found in this group. Kryptonia appears to have acquired this characteristic through horizontal gene transfer from Archaea.
For the same reasons as he once “believed in” Freudian psychiatry, according to Laszlo Bencze: Freudianism triumphed (for a while) not because of its scientific value but because of its language. Freud was a high grade intellectual fully immersed in the ancient classics and literarily sophisticated. He used the language of writers, artists, and critics in crafting psychoanalysis. When people read Freud they were exposed to unusual ideas in language that felt like an old shoe. An ex British schoolboy who had struggled with Latin and Greek felt masterful in encountering discussions of the Oedipus Complex. It flattered him to know that his literary wrestling matches had finally paid off in deep understanding. There never was anything truly demanding in Read More ›
Here: The new fossil is the only record of an adult female insect from the Mesozoic, an era that spanned roughly 180 million years. The Mesozoic era was the age of the reptiles and saw both the rise and fall of the dinosaurs, as well as the breakup of the supercontinent Pangaea. The female ensign scale insect is preserved in a piece of amber retrieved from a mine in northern Myanmar (Burma). The specimen was trapped while carrying around 60 eggs and her first freshly hatched nymphs. The eggs and nymphs are encased in a wax-coated egg sac on the abdomen. This primitive form of brood care protects young nymphs from wet and dry conditions and from natural enemies until Read More ›
U Chicago Darwin prof: Must be true: Yet while there’s no doubt that we’re changing the planet, the claim that we’re completely changing evolution on the planet does not follow. Let’s take those fish that are evolving to reproduce smaller and younger. This phenomenon has been documented in many species that we eat, but this is just a minuscule fraction of the 30,000 known species of fish. WHAT? Which third rate Darwin high school teacher knew this fact? When the authors examine our own species, the evidence is even less convincing. Recent increases in diagnoses of autism, allergies and obesity are certainly real, but they have no obvious connection with how we’re evolving. … No, but Darwinism is a cultural Read More ›
Against would-be US prez Ted Cruz (who was born in Canada, so that’ll be the next big thing): Here: Virtually all of modern biology and medicine has its basis in evolution. No serious scientist disputes that evolution is by far the best explanation for the species around us, and for a thousand other phenomena that scientists study every day. The debate about the fact of evolution is long over. As a scientist, I find it just embarrassing to have prominent U.S. politicians publicly deny evolution. Aw, get real for once: 1. Virtually all of modern biology has its basis in the cell theory of life and the germ theory of disease. Even a seven-year-old can understand this: The history of Read More ›