News

From Sabine Hossenfelder at Aeon: A billion years ago, two dancing black holes make a final spin, merge, and – in a matter of seconds – release a cataclysmic amount of energy. Much as a falling pebble spreads waves on the surface of a still lake, the merger initiates gravitational waves in the space-time continuum. Fast-forward to planet Earth and the year 2015. After an immense journey, the gravitational waves from the black-hole merger pass through our solar system. On the morning of 14 September, they oh-so-slightly wiggle the arms of the twin Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) detectors in Louisiana and Washington state. A pattern of light-waves shifts in a distinctive, long-sought way. A computer sounds the alarm. Niayesh Read More ›

From Jag Bhalla at BigThink: 1. Life’s games are not all “red in tooth and claw” fights. And you need no brain to see that a “war of all against all” might not be the best way. Even single-celled bacteria “know” that. Stop, wait. Single-celled bacteria do not “know” anything and never will. The reason that they do not behave according to the survival of the fittest is that because the Darwinian theory of evolution is wrong. Better theory can explain how they behave co-operatively without attributing minds to them. To “know”what is going on in Bhalla’s sense is to have a mind like a human being. 2. In “Survival of the Friendliest” Kelly Clancy describes the evolutionary logic of relationships Read More ›

Is the field full of “undead” theories? From Ross Pomeroy at RealClearScience: Science is embattled in a raging replication crisis, in which researchers are unable to reproduce a number of key findings. On the front lines of this conflict is psychology. In a 2015 review of 98 original psychology papers, just 36 percent of attempted replications returned significant results, whereas 97 percent of the original studies did. “Don’t trust everything you read in the psychology literature,” reporter Monya Baker warned. “In fact, two thirds of it should probably be distrusted.” How did psychology reach such a sorry state of affairs? Back in 2012, when the replication crisis was just beginning to gain prominence in the popular media, psychology professors Moritz Read More ›

From Nick Hines at VinePair, on why we like to drink alcohol: The theory was originally put forth by Robert Dudley, a professor of integrative biology at the University of California, Berkeley, in a 2000 article called “Evolutionary origins of human alcoholism in primate frugivory.” The hypothesis proposes that apes and early humans evolved to seek out ethyl alcohol because it led them to food. These early primates are known as frugivores, referring to their preference for fruit over any other food. But in order to locate that desirable fruit and those crucial calories, frugivores couldn’t just hit the local Whole Foods. They had to rely on their sense of smell. And one thing that routinely led them to fruit Read More ›

They got smarter every time we noticed them again. From Sam Wong at New Scientist: A bone from a raven’s wing with seven regularly spaced notches carved into it is the strongest evidence yet that Neanderthals had an eye for aesthetics. Evidence that Neanderthals used pigments, buried objects alongside their dead, and collected bird feathers and claws had been taken as signs of behaviours that were once considered unique to our species of Homo sapiens. But interpreting the motives of ancient humans based on their relics is fraught with difficulty. Incisions in bones and stone objects could be the result of butchery or other practical activities, rather than artistic engravings. More. Yes but, at a certain point, even meat carving Read More ›

From BeauHD at Slashdot: Computer hardware is getting a softer side. A research team has come up with a way of genetically engineering the DNA of mammalian cells to carry out complex computations, in effect turning the cells into biocomputers. The group hasn’t put those modified cells to work in useful ways yet, but down the road researchers hope the new programming techniques will help improve everything from cancer therapy to on-demand tissues that can replace worn-out body parts. More. No, they were not “turned into” complex biocomputers. They always were that. The researchers found a way to potentially make them work for us instead of just themselves, somewhat like milking cows. See also: Cells communicate to navigate a crowded Read More ›

From Sarah Knapton at Telegraph: Scientists have discovered a link between the amount of fruit eaten by primates and the size of their brains. … The researchers suggest that the bigger brains probably evolved to recall fruit locations, and work out new ways to extract flesh from tough skins. Fruits also contain for more energy than plants, giving brains a boost. “Fruit is patchier in space and time in the environment, and the consumption of it often involves extraction from difficult-to-reach-places or protective skins,” said doctoral student Alex DeCasien, the lead author. “Together, these factors may lead to the need for relatively greater cognitive complexity and flexibility in fruit eating species. “Complex foraging strategies, social structures, and cognitive abilities, are Read More ›

We are talking about events of over 600 million years ago. Could be blurry. From Amy Maxmen at Nature: For the better part of the past century, zoologists arranged these branches according to their judgements of what was simple and what was complex. Sponges fell to the bottom branch, and bilaterally symmetrical animals resided higher up. But in 2008, a genetic analysis published in Nature put comb jellies, rather than sponges, near the root of the evolutionary tree. This arrangement rattled evolutionary biologists because it upended the idea that animal complexity increased over time. It implied that nerves and other characteristics evolved independently in different lineages, and were subsequently lost in sponges. Since then, studies have supported or contradicted the Read More ›

In place of “research misconduct.” From Helen Briggs at BBC News: The scale of “fake research” in the UK appears to have been underestimated, a BBC investigation suggests. Official data points to about 30 allegations of research misconduct between 2012 and 2015. However, figures obtained by the BBC under Freedom of Information rules identified hundreds of allegations over a similar time period at 23 universities alone. … Co-founder of Retraction Watch, Dr Ivan Oransky, told BBC News: “We do not have a good handle on how much research misconduct takes place, but it’s become quite clear that universities and funding agencies and oversight bodies are not reporting even a reasonable fraction of the number of cases that they see.” More. Read More ›

From Jennifer Frazer at Scientific American: Gemmata obscuriglobis excels at breaking rules. Like the platypus, to whom these bacteria have been compared, they possess a baffling arsenal of oddities. Although it has been controversial, they seem to contain membrane-bound compartments. One of those compartments surrounds their DNA. That would make it, apparently, a nucleus. But bacteria are thought to be devoid of nuclei – hence the terms prokaryote (“pre-kernel”) for bacteria and archaea, and eukaryote (“true kernel”) for all nucleated life (which includes all multicellular organisms). The eye-popping apparent commonalities don’t end there. … If that is the case, it means one of two equally astounding things must be true: either this humble bacterium, isolated from freshwater near the Maroon Read More ›

From Eugenia Cheng at ScienceFriday: What has gone wrong? The problem is that we have manipulated equations as if infinity were an ordinary number, without knowing if it is or not. One of the first things we’re going to see in this book is what infinity isn’t, and it definitely isn’t an ordinary number. We are gradually going to work our way toward finding what type of “thing” it makes sense for infinity to be. This is a journey that took mathematicians thousands of years, involving some of the most important developments of mathematics: set theory and calculus, just for starters. The moral of that story is that although the idea of infinity is quite easy to come up with, Read More ›

From Linda Geddes at New Scientist: Metabolism may be older than life itself and start spontaneously However, the enzyme-free Krebs cycle that Ralser observed isn’t the complete biochemical cycle as it operates in modern cells. That may have come later, after enzymes evolved. Furthermore, the sulphate-driven cycle has so far only been shown to run in one direction (the oxidative one). In some species, the Krebs cycle can also run in reverse and help to incorporate CO2 into the building of new carbohydrates. Some think it may therefore have been involved in early carbon fixation, in which case you’d expect to see the cycle spontaneously turning in this direction too. Until researchers can demonstrate both these things, they cannot claim Read More ›

Much useful information/links/sources from Jonathan Latham at CounterPunch: As early as the death of Charles Darwin (1882) it was said that his thought (which for the most part meant Huxley’s interpretations) could be found “under a hundred disguises in works on law and history, in political speeches and religious discourses…if we try to think ourselves away from it we must think ourselves entirely away from our age” (John Morley, 1882, cited in Desmond 1998) Thus the belief system that humans are controlled by an internal master molecule has become woven into myriad areas of social thought. It is far beyond the scope of this article to describe the consequences of genetic determinism at either the personal or the societal level Read More ›

Could vertebrates once have relied on a different mechanism for developing neurons in the gut? From ScienceDaily: Lamprey are slimy, parasitic eel-like fish, one of only two existing species of vertebrates that have no jaw. While many would be repulsed by these creatures, lamprey are exciting to biologists because they are so primitive, retaining many characteristics similar to their ancient ancestors and thus offering answers to some of life’s biggest evolutionary questions. … “We were interested in the origins of lamprey gut neurons because in other vertebrates they arise from a particular embryonic cell type, called neural crest cells,” says Stephen Green, postdoctoral scholar in biology and biological engineering and co-first author on the paper. “We knew that lamprey have Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: When an individual cell needs to move somewhere, it manages just fine on its own. It extends protrusions from its leading edge and retracts the trailing edge to scoot itself along, without having to worry about what the other cells around it are doing. But when cells are joined together in a sheet of tissue, or epithelium, they have to coordinate their movements with their neighbors. It’s like walking by yourself versus navigating a crowded room. To push through the crowd, you have to communicate with others by talking (“Pardon me”) or tapping them on the shoulder. Cells do the same thing, but instead of verbal cues and hand gestures, they use proteins to signal to each other. Read More ›