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From Keith Cooper at Space.com: Venus has long been a focus of Russian planetary science, which has the proud legacy of the record-breaking Venera space probes that landed on the Venusian surface in the late 1970s and early 1980s. [Mysterious Venus: 10 Weird Facts] Time to bone up on Venus; probes are under developent. With many questions remaining unanswered, the joint mission of Roscosmos and NASA, if approved, would see an orbiter launch toward Venus in 2025 with the aim to make remote-sensing observations of the planet and its atmosphere; deploy a lander on the surface; and search for future landing sites. Now, the “life” hope is dark streaks in Venus’s clouds. Finding life at high altitude in the atmosphere Read More ›

New Republic intern Eric Armstrong thinks that no U.S. party deserves the crown, at any rate: The time has come for Democrats to remove the beam from their own eyes, so to speak. Taking up the mantle of scientific liberalism—that is, adopting an evidence-based view of reality in pursuit of progressive policy—would serve both the strategic purposes of the Democratic Party in the menacing face of Trumpism, as well as the existential interests of humanity.* More. Oh, wait. No political party is likely to survive just taking an evidence-based view of matters. That’s supposed to be the role of science as such. You know what they say about party policy and strategy: It’s like sausage; if you are going to Read More ›

From Hanneke Weitering at LiveScience: Earth’s moon may be the product of many small moonlets that merged after multiple objects as big as Mars collided with Earth, leaving disks of planetary debris orbiting the planet, a new study suggests. This idea that multiple impacts led to the moon’s birth challenges the most prevalent theory of lunar formation, which suggests that one giant impact led to the formation of the moon. More. See also: Space.com: Scientists finally know how old Moon is What’s surprising, really, is how little we know about the moon in general. And various current theories: Another moon origin theory: Epic crash How the Moon Formed: 5 Wild Lunar Theories (Mike Wall at Space.com, 2014) Our moon formed in Read More ›

From Joshua Howgego at New Scientist: On 11 November last year, a small birthday party was held in an apparently unremarkable hangar onthe outskirts of Geneva, Switzerland. Nothing too fancy, just a few people gathered around a cake. The honourees were there. Well, sort of – they were still locked in the cage where they had spent their first year. But then again, there is no other way to treat a brood of antimatter particles. The antimatter realm is so bizarre as to be almost unbelievable: a mirror world of particles that destroy themselves and normal matter whenever the two come into contact. But it’s real enough. Cosmic rays containing antiparticles constantly bombard Earth. A banana blurts out an anti-electron Read More ›

 In a review of Max Tegmark’s 2015 book, Our Mathematical Universe: My Quest for the Ultimate Nature of Reality, mathematician Daniel Kleitman observes at Inference: Tegmark’s chief argument now follows. Our local universe arose through the process of inflation; since this inflation happened, it had a finite non-zero probability of happening. In an infinite universe, inflation must have taken place infinitely often. There must therefore be an infinite number of local universes. Tegmark then claims that, since you also have a finite non-zero probability of existing in the infinite universe, there must be infinitely many copies of you in the other local universes. He then weakens his claim, though he does not acknowledge this, by pointing out that the physical Read More ›

From Anna Azvolinsky at The Scientist: In a study published last week (January 3) in eLife, Burchard and colleagues showed that about 75 percent of methylation signatures could be explained by the children’s genetic ancestry. The other 25 percent, however, is likely due to social or environmental factors that co-vary with self-identified race/ethnicity. The study is among the first to probe how the epigenome is influenced by genetic ancestry. Additional investigations are needed to better understand to what extent race and ethnicity are interchangeable with genetic ancestry, experts say. … It is challenging to draw conclusions from methylation analyses like this one because “a lot of the variation can be explained by background genetic variation of individuals,” noted Conley. In Read More ›

Taking issue wth paleontologist Simon Conway Morris, astrobiologist Dirk Schulze-Makuch writes at Air and Space Smithsonian: Since we doubtlessly did originate from animal ancestors, the gap between us and them must have been bridged at some point in time. Perhaps it was not a jump, but a continuous evolution. Were the mental abilities of the cavewoman or caveman really as advanced as today’s humans? How much ability for abstraction and appreciation of complex numbers did they have? Since modern humans are the evidence that bridging the gap is possible, we might ask why it wasn’t bridged earlier, perhaps by an intelligent octopus, a smart dinosaur, a dolphin, or another ape? They’ve had millions more years to evolve than we have, Read More ›

After the asteroid hit. The extinction of the dinosaurs is, in certain ways, the pop science equivalent of the falls of great houses in ancient literature. It’s  fascinating and it accommodates dozens of plausible explanations and hundreds of possible ones. Good for business. From ScienceDaily: “It became cold, I mean, really cold,” says Brugger. Global annual mean surface air temperature dropped by at least 26 degrees Celsius. The dinosaurs were used to living in a lush climate. After the asteroid’s impact, the annual average temperature was below freezing point for about 3 years. Evidently, the ice caps expanded. Even in the tropics, annual mean temperatures went from 27 degrees to mere 5 degrees. “The long-term cooling caused by the sulfate Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: As they were able to see, the catalysis of the reaction took place when the fatty acids formed compartments. As they are in an aqueous medium, and due to the hydrophobic nature of lipids, they tend to join with each other and form closed compartments; in other words, they take on the function of a membrane; “at that time the membranes obviously weren’t biological but chemical ones,” explained Ruiz-Mirazo. In their experiments they were able to see that the conditions offered by these membranes are favourable for amino acids. “The Montpellier group had the prebiotic reactions of the formation of dipeptides very well characterised, so they were able to see that this reaction took place more efficiently in Read More ›

From Mike Wall at Space.com: A new analysis of lunar rocks brought to Earth by Apollo astronauts suggests that the moon formed 4.51 billion years ago — just 60 million years after the solar system itself took shape. Astronomers think the Moon took shape from a collision between Earth and a Mars-size body but just when is unclear, from the jumbled rock samples available to be gathered by astronauts: “You don’t have pristine, old rock preserved on the moon,” Barboni said. “That’s one of the biggest problems — the whole-rock record on the moon is not there.” But zircon samples collected by Apollo 14 appear to provide reasonably clear information. The moon’s advanced age also makes sense from a dynamics Read More ›

From the Daily Galaxy: On Earth, simple life appears to have formed quickly, but it likely took many millions of years for very simple life to evolve the ability to photosynthesize. “The early Earth certainly wasn’t a hellish, dry, boiling planet; we see absolutely no evidence for that,” said Harrison [UCLA]. “The planet was probably much more like it is today than previously thought.” UCLA geochemists have found evidence that life likely existed on Earth at least 4.1 billion years ago — 300 million years earlier than previous research suggested. The discovery indicates that life may have begun shortly after the planet formed 4.54 billion years ago. The new research suggests that life existed prior to the massive bombardment of Read More ›

From Tracy Vence at The Scientist: Foamy-like endogenous retroviruses (FLERVs), which are found in fish and amphibian genomes, may have originated with their vertebrate hosts more than 450 million years ago, according to a study published in Nature Communications this week (January 10). … “They date back to the origins of vertebrates, and this gives us the context in which we should consider their present-day activity and interactions with their hosts.” More. Maybe they were all part of a package with the fish and amphibians who hosted them? See also: Endogenous retroviruses made us human? Note the role of supposed junk DNA. and Stasis: When life goes on but evolution does not happen very much Follow UD News at Twitter!

From Anna Azvolinsky at The Scientist: The human genome is peppered with the DNA of extinct hominins—Neanderthals and Denisovans—as a result of interbreeding with early Homo sapiens. According to some reports, the Neanderthal and Denisovan DNA retained at specific loci, such as immune system-related genes, likely conferred adaptive advantages against infectious microorganisms. In a study published last month (November 29) in Genome Biology, researchers provide strong evidence that the Neanderthal DNA present at one such locus within the modern human genome is likely the result of positive selection. The study authors also suggest that this Neanderthal haplotype is not unique to Neanderthals. Rather, interbreeding reintroduced the beneficial genetic variant present in early African humans that had been lost during the Read More ›

From Colin Barras at New Scientist: The team discovered that male and female baboons each produce four vowel-like sounds. Females produce one that males don’t, and vice versa, so in total there are five distinct vowels. They correspond to the second syllable in “roses”, and the vowel sounds in “you”, “thought”, “trap” and “ah”. … “We believe that one of the major advantages of our study is that we worked on real vocalisations, which were spontaneously produced by baboons in a social context,” says Fagot. But Philip Lieberman at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, is not convinced. He thinks the researchers have unwittingly processed the baboon calls in a way that accentuates the fundamental frequency of the call and Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: This research challenges the classically accepted view that reduction of tooth size in hominins is linked with having a larger brain. The reasoning is that larger brains allowed hominins to start making stone tools and that the use of these tools reduced the need to have such large chewing teeth. But recent studies by other authors found that hominins had larger brains before chewing teeth became smaller, and they made and used stone tools when brains were still quite small, which challenges this relationship. The new study evaluates this issue by measuring and comparing the rates at which teeth and brains have evolved along the different branches of the human evolutionary tree. “The findings of the study indicate Read More ›