News

Yet it isn’t happening, and we have no idea how it happened even once… From science writer Michael Gross at Cell: Rapid progress in several research fields relating to the origin of life bring us closer to the point where it may become feasible to recreate coherent and plausible models of early life in the laboratory. (paywall) It’s a survey article, and it concludes: on our own planet and on many others. “One of the main new aspects of origins research is the growing effort to connect chemistry to geology,” Jack Szostak notes. “Finding reasonable geological settings for the origin of life is a critical aspect of understanding the whole pathway. We’ve moved beyond thinking that life emerged from the Read More ›

From Neuroskeptic at Discover: When you’re doing two things at once – like listening to the radio while driving – your brain organizes itself into two, functionally independent networks, almost as if you temporarily have two brains. That’s according to a fascinating new study from University of Wisconsin-Madison neuroscientists Shuntaro Sasai and colleagues. It’s called Functional split brain in a driving/listening paradigm. To study authors link their work to the experiences of split-brain epilepsy patients. In other words, when the GPS voice was helping the participants to drive (“integrated task”), the brain ‘driving network’ and ‘listening network’ were acting in concert, with a high degree of functional connectivity. But when the drivers were listening to the radio show (“split task”), Read More ›

From Haroon Siddique at Guardian: The UK’s rocketing demand for high-protein products is being fuelled by consumers buying foods unlikely to deliver the benefits they are seeking, experts have said. Weetabix, Shreddies, Mars, Snickers and Batchelors Cup a Soup were among the brands that launched enhanced protein versions this year as the trend hit the mainstream. Most Brits, even athletic ones, get enough protein but supplements sales have rocketed upwards. Tom Sanders, professor emeritus of nutrition and dietetics at King’s College London, said people were being taken in by “nutri-babble”. “There’s been a lot of hype in gyms pushing high-protein shakes, there’s also a need to get rid of a waste product from the dairy industry, which is whey protein,” Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Rapid evolution of other species happens all around us all the time — and many of the most extreme examples are associated with human influences. Consider three examples: Commercial fishing. When fishing pressure is high, the fish evolve to reproduce when they are younger and smaller, and thus tend to have fewer, smaller offspring. This evolutionary change can, in turn, reduce fisheries yields and the sustainability. But is this really a form of evolution? That is, are the changes irreversible? Will speciation occur in the affected population, so that the two new groups cannot interbreed with each other? Or, if the bottom fell out of the fish market, would everything be pretty much the same a couple of Read More ›

From Mike Wall at Space.com: The streaks, known as recurring slope lineae (RSL), occur seasonally on steep, relatively warm slopes at many locations on the Red Planet. They were discovered in 2011 by scientists studying images captured by NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). … But it may be prudent to rein in that excitement a bit, according to a new study. Hydrated salts are crystalline solids, and it’s possible that the water the RSL salts contain comes from the Martian atmosphere rather than liquid water at or near the surface, said Raina Gough, a research scientist at the University of Colorado, Boulder.More. On the bright side, we are now, as noted earlier, looking at specific locations and the hypotheses generated Read More ›

From Tia Ghose at LiveScience: Evidence suggests that the Martian atmosphere was declining as early as 4.1 billion years ago, and any surface water likely dried up long ago. With a thin atmosphere, bombardment by deadly cosmic radiation and likely no modern flowing water, any life that emerged on Mars likely did so very early on in the planet’s history, during a time known as the Noachian period (from 4.1 billion to 3.7 billion years ago), Cabrol said. If that life is still hanging on, it likely went deep underground, where it is protected from Mars’ current harsh environment, she said. … Another way to determine what to look for is to find the most Martian-like places on Earth. The Read More ›

From Institute for Basic Science: When spring is approaching, how do plants decide that it is time to flower? A team of plant scientists led by KWAK June M. at the Center for Plant Aging Research, within the Institute for Basic Science (IBS) unravelled a new mechanism to explain this seemingly easy, but actually complicated question. Their research was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) on November 11, 2016. … Epigenetic regulation is one of the major mechanisms to control flowering time. It regulates gene expression through chemical modifications of DNA and its interacting proteins, but without changing the DNA sequence. If you think of the DNA contained in each cell as a big book Read More ›

Phosphorus accumulation changed that, according to a new study. From Ben Brumfield at Georgia Tech News Center: For three billion years or more, the evolution of the first animal life on Earth was ready to happen, practically waiting in the wings. But the breathable oxygen it likely required wasn’t there, and a lack of simple nutrients may have been to blame. Then came a fierce planetary metamorphosis. Roughly 800 million years ago, in the late Proterozoic Eon, phosphorus, a chemical element essential to all life, began to accumulate in shallow ocean zones near coastlines widely considered to be the birthplace of animals and other complex organisms, according to a new study by geoscientists from the Georgia Institute of Technology and Read More ›

A friend writes to tell us of an insightful article in Nature: It emerges that a dogfish shark’s spine becomes stiffer as the fish swims faster, enabling the animal to swim efficiently at different speeds. The finding could also provide inspiration for the design of robotic biomaterials. (paywall) – Biomaterials: Sharks shift their spine into high gear Matthew A. Kolmann & Adam P. Summers, Nature, 14 December 2016 | doi:10.1038/nature21102, More. The friend believes that the shark’s cartilaginous skeleton should not be thought of, as it often is, as primitive, but as an intelligent use of materials that enable high-speed bursts of movement. As the author put it, the skeleton is “an aquatic equivalent of continuously variable transmission, a type Read More ›

From Andy Coghlan at New Scientist: “No one can say now that there’s a vocal anatomy problem with monkey speech,” says Asif Ghazanfar at Princeton University, and co-leader of the study team. “They have a speech-ready vocal anatomy, but not a speech-ready brain. Now we need to find out why the human but not the monkey brain can produce language.” … “They have gathered the type of data that confirms that monkey vocal tracts are speech-ready,” says Adriano Lameira at Durham University in the UK, who recently showed that an orangutan called Rocky could mimic human speech. And Philip Lieberman at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, says: “I’ve pointed out for decades that monkeys could talk, with reduced intelligibility, Read More ›

Thanu Padmanabhan asks: Our knowledge about the universe has increased tremendously in the last three decades or so — thanks to the progress in observations — but our understanding has improved very little. There are several fundamental questions about our universe for which we have no answers within the current, operationally very successful, approach to cosmology. Worse still, we do not even know how to address some of these issues within the conventional approach to cosmology. This fact suggests that we are missing some important theoretical ingredients in the overall description of the cosmos. I will argue that these issues — some of which are not fully appreciated or emphasized in the literature — demand a paradigm shift: We should Read More ›

From Julia Shaw at Scientific American: I’m a factual relativist. I abandoned the idea of facts and “the truth” some time last year. I wrote a whole science book, The Memory Illusion, almost never mentioning the terms fact and truth. Why? Because much like Santa Claus and unicorns, facts don’t actually exist. At least not in the way we commonly think of them. We think of a fact as an irrefutable truth. According to the Oxford dictionary, a fact is “a thing that is known or proved to be true.” And where does proof come from? Science? Well, let me tell you a secret about science; scientists don’t prove anything. What we do is collect evidence that supports or does Read More ›

From astrophysicist Geraint F. Lewis at Cosmos: For more than 400 years, physicists treated the universe like a machine, taking it apart to see how it ticks. The surprise is it turns out to have remarkably few parts: just leptons and quarks and four fundamental forces to glue them together. But those few parts are exquisitely machined. If we tinker with their settings, even slightly, the universe as we know it would cease to exist. Science now faces the question of why the universe appears to have been “fine-tuned” to allow the appearance of complex life, a question that has some potentially uncomfortable answers. Oh, not to worry. “Evolution” bred a sense of reality out of us and – assuming Read More ›

What? Where’s the BBC? Where’s New Scientist? Aren’t apes entering the Stone Age now? From Melissa Healy at LA Times: We humans might find nothing more heartwarming than seeing other animals befriend and take care of each other. But new research suggests that, although they appear to perform random acts of kindness, chimpanzees, our primate relatives with the most complex social lives, do not actually act with the simple intention of pleasing one another. That conclusion will probably stir controversy, because chimps appear to engage in many kinds of social activities that would appear to require kindness. They groom one another — but is that kindness or just the opportunity for a delicious treat? They risk personal injury by keeping watch Read More ›

Chosen by “Longread”‘s writer and editor friends, it’s a broad range. Readers will doubtless find one piece of candy and another piece of coal in the ol’ Christmas stocking. Here’s a snatch to get you started: The Case for Leaving City Rats Alone (Becca Cudmore, Nautilus) … (“The rat gut acts as a mixing bowl,” says the scientist overseeing the project.) When you exterminate rats, you scatter their families, pushing them into new turf where they fight with the neighbors, swapping blood and bacteria that might combine to create something new. So maybe, the argument goes, it’s better to leave rats where they are, keeping local germs … well, local. More. Every ecological decision has strength and weaknesses. It’s the balance that Read More ›