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From ScienceDaily: New findings published in eLife draw connections between some of these pieces, revealing an extensive web of molecular interactions that may ultimately inform the development of new epigenetic drugs for cancer and other diseases. Specifically, the study reveals a mechanism that helps explain how dividing cells pass patterns of epigenetic information called methyl tags to their daughter cells, a crucial part of regulating gene expression across cell generations. Epigenetic tags help tell genes — stretches of DNA that act as biological instruction manuals — when to switch “on” and “off,” ultimately determining cell type and function. DNA methylation, or the addition of methyl tags to DNA, is one of the most well-studied epigenetic signals; errors in this process Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Scientists have long known that infants born to women who are obese show higher risks of obesity, but they don’t fully understand what boosts those risks. Researchers at Joslin Diabetes Center now have demonstrated that umbilical cells from children of obese or overweight mothers show impaired expression of key genes regulating cell energy and metabolism, compared to similar cells from babies of non-obese mothers. … Isganaitis adds that mothers and healthcare providers also could carefully monitor the growth patterns and nutrition of children at risk of obesity, both in the first two years of life and afterwards. “Your risk of chronic diseases isn’t set in stone at birth; there are many different periods in which your lifelong disease Read More ›

From Michael Greshko at National Geographic: That fossil, recently described in Palaeobiodiversity and Palaeoenvironments, is only the second of its kind ever found, revealing three levels of an ancient food chain nested one inside the other in paleontology’s version of Russian nesting dolls—or its culinary equivalent, a turducken. More. This is interesting but what is even more interesting is when life forms choose to live inside other life forms, abandoning machinery that creates independence—devolution: Sometimes, devolution offers an apparent advantage. Many plankton microbes eliminated the genes for producing key vitamins, and now outsource the function. One account suggests, “… most of the time, the fitness advantages of smaller genomes and lower cell replicating costs offset the potential fitness gains that Read More ›

From Belinda Smith at Cosmos: A Mercury-sized planetary embryo that slammed into Earth around 4.4 billion years ago delivered virtually all of the planet’s carbon, new research suggests. … Unravelling the early Earth’s composition is no easy feat. Billions of years ago, the solar system was a whirling mess of comets, asteroids and proto planets. … One scenario that could yield today’s volatile concentrations was if a carbon-rich Mercury-sized planet with a core full of silicon or sulfur smashed into and was absorbed by Earth. The dynamics of the collision meant the silicon sank straight to Earth’s core while the carbon was mixed with the mantle, ready to be cycled up to the crust and eventually, develop life. More. Two Read More ›

From Douglas Axe’s Undeniable, Consider popular wisdom about genes and DNA. Just as most peole think scientists havefigured out how the brain works, so too they think scientists have figured out how DNA works. By my casual observation, most nonscientists—and some scientists as well—think the blueprint from which every living organism was formed is written on that individual’s genome in the language of genes. Accordingly, geese honk because they have the honk gene, and hyperactive dogs yap because they have the hyperactive-dog gene. Likewise, by this popular view people who can sing or whistle received these abilities by receiving the corresponding genes. The master template for specifying all our attributes became public with the publishing of the human genome, supposedly, Read More ›

From Tom Wolfe’s The Kingdom of Speech, Speech ended not only the evolution of man, by making it no longer necessary for survival, but also the evolution of animals. Today the so-called animal kingdom is an animal colony and we own it. It exists only at our sufferance. If we were foolish enough and could get the cooperation of people all over the earth, in six months we could exterminate every animal that sticks up more than a half inch above the ground. Already all cattle, chickens, and sheep in the world and the vast majority of pigs, horses, and turkeys—we hold the whole huge gaggle of them captive, all of them… to do with as we wish. (pp 262-263, Read More ›

“Lucy” is the iconic imputed human ancestor from 3.2 mya, Austropithecus afarensis. From Deborah Netburn at Los Angeles Times: After examining high-resolution CT scans of broken bones in Lucy’s right shoulder, as well as the damage to other parts of her skeleton, researchers at the University of Texas at Austin propose that the small hominid’s life ended shortly after a catastrophic fall from a great height — probably from a tree. “What we see is a pattern of fractures that are well documented in cases of people who have suffered a severe fall,” said John Kappelman, a UT professor of anthropology and geological sciences. “This wouldn’t happen if you just fell over.” More. But there are doubts: From Washington Post: Read More ›

From Columbia mathematician Peter Woit at Not Even Wrong: To me, Facebook is perhaps the most worrisome of all the Big Data concerns of the book [Cathy O’Neil’s Weapons of Math Destruction ]. It now exercises an incredible amount of influence over what information people see, with this influence sometimes being sold to the highest bidder. Together with Amazon, Google and Apple, our economy and society have become controlled by monopolies to an unparalleled degree, monopolies that monitor our every move. In the context of government surveillance, Edward Snowden remarked that we are now “tagged animals, the primary difference being that we paid for the tags and they’re in our pockets.” A very small number of huge extremely wealthy corporations Read More ›

From Emily Conover at ScienceNews: A beautiful but unproved theory of particle physics is withering in the harsh light of data. For decades, many particle physicists have devoted themselves to the beloved theory, known as supersymmetry. But it’s beginning to seem that the zoo of new particles that the theory predicts —the heavier cousins of known particles — may live only in physicists’ imaginations. Or if such particles, known as superpartners, do exist, they’re not what physicists expected. New data from the world’s most powerful particle accelerator — the Large Hadron Collider, now operating at higher energies than ever before — show no traces of superpartners. More. Will we accept that or move toward throwing out falsifiability? See also: Supersymmetry Read More ›

From Science Daily: ESA’s Planck satellite has revealed that the first stars in the Universe started forming later than previous observations of the Cosmic Microwave Background indicated. This new analysis also shows that these stars were the only sources needed to account for reionising atoms in the cosmos, having completed half of this process when the Universe had reached an age of 700 million years. More. Paper. (public access) – Matthieu Tristram and Collaboration. Planck intermediate results. XLVII. Planck constraints on reionization history. Astronomy & Astrophysics, 2016; DOI: 10.1051/0004-6361/201628897 Doesn’t that reduce the time for origin of life? See also: Galaxy started forming stars only 200 million years after the Big Bang? Follow UD News at Twitter!

From Anil Ananthaswamy at New Scientist: How does something as physical as the brain create something as immaterial as your sense of self? It could all just be one big trick of the mind … Broadly speaking, those trying to solve the hard problem fall into two camps, according to psychologist and philosopher Nicholas Humphrey. There are those who think that consciousness is something real and those who say it’s a mirage, and so dismiss the problem entirely. More. (paywall) Generally speaking, a trick is more complex than straightforward information, so it only adds to the difficulty if consciousness is regarded as a trick. By whom on whom? These people are not going to get anywhere any time soon. See Read More ›

From O’Leary for News at MercatorNet: … if anyone tells you that there is no broad consensus that social science is in deep trouble because of progressive bias, you can assume that they haven’t been keeping up with the stats. Unfortunately, when asked to reform by adding diverse voices, social scientists opt for any strategy other than inclusiveness, almost as if they were old-fashioned segregationists. That is, they want to “subtract out bias” all on their own, without adding new voices. Of course, if that had worked, they could have done it decades ago. Part of the problem, as the Regnerus controversy demonstrated, is that so many of their beliefs conflict not so much with tradition as with reality. Commentator Read More ›

From Ross Pomeroy at RealClearScience: Recently, Nir Lahav, a physicist at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, went searching for this nucleus of conscious activity. He and his interdisciplinary team, which also included neuroscientists and mathematicians, used detailed scans of six brains to assemble an information map of the human cortex, the brain’s outer layer of neural tissue. With the map, they observed and recorded how certain parts of the cortex were connected to other parts. They charted regions of high connectivity and regions of low connectivity. The map approximated how information “flows” within the cortex, and showed where that flow is concentrated. The region with the highest traffic may very well be the seat of consciousness.More. But what about those people Read More ›

From archaeologist Joe Roe: Archaeology, like geology or astronomy, is an observational science, not an experimental one. … The stuff of archaeology―landscapes, sites, assemblages―are unique and finite records of the past. That doesn’t mean we can’t be scientific, just not in the neat, hypothetico-deductive mold so fervently extolled by bright-eyed physics students. It’s hard to come up with testable predictions for the field when you have no idea what you’re going to find there. Controlled experiments are a non-starter because, as excellently put by Roger Peng, the stuff we study is “generally reluctant to be controlled by human beings”. Archaeology, like geology or astronomy, is an observational science, not an experimental one. More. See also: Nature on the reproducibility crisis and Read More ›