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From ScienceDaily: The increased risk of hyperglycemia associated with prenatal exposure to famine is also passed down to the next generation, according to a new study of hundreds of families affected by widespread starvation in mid-20th Century China. … Among 983 people gestated during the famine years, 31.2 percent had hyperglycemia and 11.2 percent had type 2 diabetes. By comparison, among 1,085 people gestated just after the famine ended, the prevalence of hyperglycemia was 16.9 percent, and the prevalence of type 2 diabetes as 5.6 percent. Controlling for factors such as gender, smoking, physical activity, calorie consumption and body-mass index, the researchers calculated that in utero famine exposure was associated with 1.93-times higher odds of hyperglycemia and a 1.75 times Read More ›

Are they or are they not life forms? Note that the article on giant viruses, abstracted below, is public access. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science: Special section on Understanding viruses: Philosophical investigations For example, Understanding viruses: Philosophical investigations: Viruses have been virtually absent from philosophy of biology. In this editorial introduction, we explain why we think viruses are philosophically important. We focus on six issues (the definition of viruses, the individuality and diachronic identity of a virus, the possibility to classify viruses into species, the question of whether viruses are living, the question of whether viruses are organisms, and finally the biological roles of viruses in ecology and evolution), and we show how they relate to classic questions Read More ›

Here:  (breakthroughs not listed in any particular order after gravitational waves): Rocky planet found in habitable zone around Sun’s nearest neighbour Brave new world: artist’s impression of Proxima b To the Pale Red Dot collaboration for finding clear evidence that a rocky exoplanet orbits within the habitable zone of Proxima Centauri, which is the nearest star to the solar system. Dubbed Proxima b, the exoplanet has a mass about 1.3 times that of the Earth and is therefore most likely a terrestrial planet with a rocky surface. Our newly found neighbour also lies within its star’s habitable zone, meaning that it could, in theory, sustain liquid water on its surface, and may even have an atmosphere. Proxima Centauri is a Read More ›

Recently, Barry Arrington noted, in Climate Alarmism and Crony Capitalism, a Marriage Made in Hell, As reported in the WSJ. As many of us suspected (knew for a certainty, actually) all along, it has never been about science or the environment. It has always been about money That realization is beginning to seep into the mud up  here in Canada, of course. Just for example, in Ontario province: Ontario electricity has never been cheaper, but bills have never been higher Why? A hidden tax on Ontario’s electricity has pushed the actual purchase price in the opposite direction, to the highest it’s ever been. The tax, called the Global Adjustment (GA), is levied on electricity purchases to cover a massive provincial slush Read More ›

From anthropologist Barbara J. King at NPR: Did Neanderthals engage in some way with the supernatural or the sacred? Caution is required here. The bones and artifacts, after all, don’t clue us in to the meaning-making that went on in Neanderthal groups, and we can’t just overlay present customs onto the past. Perhaps the Neanderthals simply wanted to bury their companions’ bodies in order to protect themselves from predators, or disease, or both. … Given their intelligence, it seems to me likely that the Neanderthals contemplated, in some way, the mysteries of life. More. What does “religious” mean? If a skyscraper’s basement shopping mall today got fossilized, would anyone know thousands of years hence if any of the interred were Read More ›

From Harvard astrophysicist Howard A. Smith at Nautilus: Almost in spite of themselves, scientists are driven to a teleological view of the cosmos. … As a research astrophysicist, I can say without exaggeration that a day never goes by when I am not impressed by the amazing explanatory power of modern science. But I am also trained to be open to the world as it presents itself, not just as I would like it to be. So it is worth calling attention to two recent discoveries that suggest our place in the cosmos needs reconsideration. We might not be ordinary at all. Voice from crowd: Guy might have a point. If we are so ordinary, where are all the others? Read More ›

From Joshua S. Weitz and Steven W. Wilhelm at The Scientist (2013, but worth revisiting): There are an estimated 1031 viruses on Earth. That is to say: there may be a hundred million times more viruses on Earth than there are stars in the universe. The majority of these viruses infect microbes, including bacteria, archaea, and microeukaryotes, all of which are vital players in the global fixation and cycling of key elements such as carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus. These two facts combined—the sheer number of viruses and their intimate relationship with microbial life—suggest that viruses, too, play a critical role in the planet’s biosphere. Of all the Earth’s biomes, the ocean has emerged as the source for major discoveries on Read More ›

Retro beefalo. From ScienceDaily: Ancient DNA research has revealed that Ice Age cave artists recorded a previously unknown hybrid species of bison and cattle in great detail on cave walls more than 15,000 years ago. The mystery species, known affectionately by the researchers as the Higgs Bison* because of its elusive nature, originated over 120,000 years ago through the hybridisation of the extinct Aurochs (the ancestor of modern cattle) and the Ice Age Steppe Bison, which ranged across the cold grasslands from Europe to Mexico. Research led by the Australian Centre for Ancient DNA (ACAD) at the University of Adelaide, published today in Nature Communications, has revealed that the mystery hybrid species eventually became the ancestor of the modern European bison, Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: A tiny grape pip (scale 1mm), left on the ground some 780,000 years ago, is one of more than 9,000 remains of edible plants discovered in an old Stone Age site in Israel on the shoreline of Lake Hula in the northern Jordan valley, dating back to the Acheulian culture from 1.75-0.25 million years ago. The floral collection provides rich testimony of the plant-based diet of our prehistoric ancestors. … “In recent years we were met with a golden opportunity to reveal numerous remains of fruits, nuts and seeds from trees, shrubs and the lake, alongside the remains of animals and human-made stone tools in one locality,” Prof. Goren-Inbar said. Of the remains found on site, Prof. Goren-Inbar Read More ›

From University of Bergen: A new Norwegian diet intervention study (FATFUNC), performed by researchers at the KG Jebsen center for diabetes research at the University of Bergen, raises questions regarding the validity of a diet hypothesis that has dominated for more than half a century: that dietary fat and particularly saturated fat is unhealthy for most people. The researchers found strikingly similar health effects of diets based on either lowly processed carbohydrates or fats. In the randomized controlled trial, 38 men with abdominal obesity followed a dietary pattern high in either carbohydrates or fat, of which about half was saturated. Fat mass in the abdominal region, liver and heart was measured with accurate analyses, along with a number of key Read More ›

From Stephanie Pappas at LiveScience: The fish, part of the family Aphyonidae, was caught on camera during an ongoing National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) exploration by the ship Okeanos Explorer. … The secretive fish was swimming along a ridge 8,202 feet (2,500 meters) down, according to NOAA. The animal is about 4 inches (10 centimeters) long, with translucent, scale-less skin and eerie, colorless eyes. No fish in the family Aphyonidae has ever been seen alive before. They usually turned up dead in dreding or trawling operations. “There has been a big debate about whether these are pelagic, living up in the water column, or whether they’re associated with the bottom, like this one is,” he said. The observation of Read More ›

 From Richard Webb at New Scientist, a review of four new physics books, noting: In one sense fundamental physics is flowering like never before. In another, it is in one of its deepest funks. The past five years have seen three great experimental advances: the discoveries of the Higgs boson and gravitational waves, as well as the Planck satellite’s meticulous measurements of the cosmic microwave background. But all have served to confirm existing pictures of reality: the standard model of particle physics based on quantum field theory, and the standard cosmological model of a big bang universe rooted in Einstein’s theory of gravity, the general theory of relativity. Yet the deficiencies of those two theories are obvious. Not only do Read More ›

From Carrie Arnold at Nature: “This bird acts like it has four sexes,” says Christopher Balakrishnan, an evolutionary biologist at East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina, who worked with Tuttle and Gonser. “One individual can only mate with one-quarter of the population. There are very few sexual systems with more than two sexes.” The work helps to explain a long-standing puzzle for biologists. It shows how two identical chromosomes can evolve into distinct subtypes that can define the sexes of a species and their different behaviours. “These birds are an amazing system,” says Catherine Peichel, an evolutionary ecologist at the University of Berne. “The process of sex-chromosome evolution tends to erase much of the evidence of how it happened, Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: A gene that regulates bone growth and muscle metabolism in mammals may take on an additional role as a promoter of brain maturation, cognition and learning in human and nonhuman primates, according to a new study led by neurobiologists at Harvard Medical School. Describing their findings in the Nov. 10 issue of Nature, researchers say their work provides a dramatic illustration of evolutionary economizing and creative gene retooling — mechanisms that contribute to the vast variability across species that share nearly identical set of genes yet differ profoundly in their physiology. … For their experiments, the team analyzed RNA levels — the molecular footprints of gene activity — in the brain cells of mice, rats and humans. Although Read More ›

From The Conversation: If all jawed vertebrates, including humans, are nothing more than highly evolved placoderms, then key features of ourselves should be traceable to structures that first appeared in our fishy placoderm ancestors. This would include particular jaw and skull bones and the proportions of our face and brain. But our new evolutionary tree challenges the idea that placoderms gave rise to all other jawed vertebrates. Instead, we suggest they are a side branch in vertebrate evolution – diverse and successful in their day but ultimately all destined for extinction. If correct, this alternative tree would require a radical rethink of many aspects of vertebrate evolution.More. If evolution takes place by a number of means other than Darwinian descent, Read More ›