Here’s a new paper form Nature Communications describing a discovery of a new geometric shape that is apparently found only in curved epithelial cells. I find it intriguing that this shape is entirely new, not found elsewhere in nature, but now coined “scutoids” by the authors, and is proposed as making “possible the minimization of the tissue energy and stabilize three-dimensional packing.” From the abstract: “The detailed analysis of diverse tissues confirms that generation of apico-basal intercalations between cells is a common feature during morphogenesis. Using biophysical arguments, we propose that scutoids make possible the minimization of the tissue energy and stabilize three-dimensional packing. Hence, we conclude that scutoids are one of nature’s solutions to achieve epithelial bending. Our findings Read More ›

Some articles in science journals leave one wondering, that’s for sure. At Nature: Lethal aggression in Pan is better explained by adaptive strategies than human impacts Abstract: Observations of chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and bonobos (Pan paniscus) provide valuable comparative data for understanding the significance of conspecific killing. Two kinds of hypothesis have been proposed. Lethal violence is sometimes concluded to be the result of adaptive strategies, such that killers ultimately gain fitness benefits by increasing their access to resources such as food or mates1,2,3,4,5. Alternatively, it could be a non-adaptive result of human impacts, such as habitat change or food provisioning6,7,8,9. To discriminate between these hypotheses we compiled information from 18 chimpanzee communities and 4 bonobo communities studied over five Read More ›

… maybe by changing the landscape in ways we might not like. Referring to a mathematical concept discussed by Bertrand Russell, he calls it “theft” vs. “honest toil.” From Bill Dembski at Mind Matters Today: AI (artificial intelligence) poses a challenge to human work, threatening to usurp many human jobs in coming years. But a related question that’s too often ignored and needs to be addressed is whether this challenge will come from AI in fact being able to match and exceed human capabilities in the environments in which humans currently exercise those capabilities, or whether it will come from AI also manipulating our environments so that machines thrive where otherwise they could not. AI never operates in a vacuum. Read More ›

Does that mean anything? The reason we ask is, From Lisa Grossman at Science News: A Mars orbiter has detected a wide lake of liquid water hidden below the planet’s southern ice sheets. There have been much-debated hints of tiny, ephemeral amounts of water on Mars before. But if confirmed, this lake marks the first discovery of a long-lasting cache of the liquid. “This is potentially a really big deal,” says planetary scientist Briony Horgan of Purdue University in West Lafayette, Ind. “It’s another type of habitat in which life could be living on Mars today.”More. and From JPL/NASA: New comprehensive mapping of the radiation pummeling Jupiter’s icy moon Europa reveals where scientists should look — and how deep they’ll Read More ›

The genes were transferred to the beetles, researchers say, from sea squirts (tunicates) , with whom they have, may we say, not much in common, by microorganisms (symbiont bacterial strains). From ScienceDaily: An international team of researchers led by scientists of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) and the Leibniz Institute for Natural Product Research and Infection Biology in Jena has discovered that bacteria associated to Lagria villosa beetles can produce an antifungal substance very similar to one found in tunicates living in the marine environment. The researchers revealed that this commonality is likely explained by the transfer of genes between unrelated microorganisms. … The discovery of a new bioactive substance produced by the dominant strain B. gladioli Lv-StB was particularly Read More ›

Which now seem to serve an as-yet-unknown function in the bat. From ScienceDaily: Some 18 million years ago, an ancestor of mouse-eared bats “stole” genetic material from an ancient virus related to Bola. The swiped genetic sequence — a gene called VP35 — has remained largely intact in the bats despite the passage of time, with few changes since it was co-opted, a new study finds. The research also sheds light on the gene’s possible function in bats, suggesting that it may play a role in regulating the immune system’s response to threats. “We’re using a multidisciplinary approach to understand the evolution, structure and function of a viral gene co-opted by a mammal,” says Derek J. Taylor, PhD, an evolutionary biologist at Read More ›

From ScienceDaily: Researchers have captured video showing how pieces of DNA once thought to be useless can act as on-off switches for genes. These pieces of DNA are part of over 90 percent of the genetic material that are not genes. Researchers now know that this “junk DNA” contains most of the information that can turn on or off genes. But how these segments of DNA, called enhancers, find and activate a target gene in the crowded environment of a cell’s nucleus is not well understood. Now a team led by researchers at Princeton University has captured how this happens in living cells. The video allows researchers to see the enhancers as they find and connect to a gene to Read More ›

From Mind Matters Today: Succinctly, researchers using Bell’s theoretical insight into quantum entanglement have shown that there are no deterministic local hidden variables. This means that the final state of entangled quantum particles is not determined by any variables in the initial state. Nature at its most fundamental level is indeterminate. The states of bound particles are not determined by any local variable at the moment of separation. Bell’s inequality and the experimental work that has followed on it conclusively demonstrate that quantum entanglement, and thus nature, is not determinate, at least locally. There remains the remote possibility of non-local determinism, but that view is considered fringe and is rejected by nearly all physicists working in the field. It is Read More ›

Instead of meaningless? How exactly did we get from “Alone” to “Meaningless” via eloquence from tenured pundits? Where do we buy return tickets? A blogging neurologist asks this obvious question. From Steven Novella at The Ness: Until, however, we detect actual aliens or their signals, the rest of the factors in the equation are likely to remain a mystery. Put simply – we have a sample size of one. We don’t know how likely life is to develop intelligence, and intelligence technology, and how long such civilizations tend to last. We won’t know until we encounter evidence of aliens. And, if there are few or no other aliens out there, we will never know the full answer. We would only Read More ›

From Ryan Whitwam at Extreme Tech: Scientists have known for years that our Neanderthal cousins made use of fire to cook and make tar from birch bark, but we didn’t know much about where they got the fire. Were they simply at the mercy of mother nature, collecting fire from lightning strikes, or could they start their own fires whenever they needed it? Archaeologist Andrew Sorensen and his colleagues now say Neanderthals knew how to make fire, and they came to that decision after making fire themselves. Sorensen and his team at Leiden University suspected that flint tools often found at Neanderthal dig sites held the answer to early humanoid mastery of fire. Any place Neanderthals lived, archaeologists are likely Read More ›

From science writer Suzan Mazur, at Oscillations, interviewing Bogdan Dragnea, who studies the physical structure of viruses via spectrosopy: Suzan Mazur: Do you consider viruses live organisms since viruses can recognize their targets, attach, and infect their hosts—most viruses using a tail spike and needle [see following Parent lab image]—and as you’ve noted, they can “drive large-scale phenomena across the entire biosphere”? Bogdan Dragnea: No, I don’t. I will stick with the definition that requires for a living organism to reproduce and produce mechanical work in a thermodynamic cycle. If it could do that, then I would say it’s alive. But the virus cannot do mechanical work as part of a cyclic transformation. That is because they do not have Read More ›

From Josh Bloom at American Council for Science and Health: I recently wrote about three of the deadly neurotoxins being produced by cyanobacteria (aka blue-green algae) during an ongoing algae bloom in South Florida (See Florida’s Deadly Algae Bloom – Why Is It So Dangerous?). The toxins range from structurally simple and easy for organic chemists to synthesize in the lab to moderately complex and not simple at all. But there are numerous examples of plants, marine organisms, and bacteria that easily biosynthesize molecules that are so complex and difficult to make synthetically that chemistry grad students and post-docs who were given the unenviable task of doing so are probably still waking up in cold sweats thinking about what they Read More ›

From Ethan Siegel at Forbes: So why do so many theoretical physicists write papers about the multiverse? About parallel Universes and their connection to our own through this multiverse? Why do they claim that the multiverse is connected to the string landscape, the cosmological constant, and even to the fact that our Universe is finely-tuned for life? Because even though it’s obviously a bad idea, they don’t have any better ones. … As I’ve explained before, the Multiverse is not a scientific theory on its own. Rather, it’s a theoretical consequence of the laws of physics as they’re best understood today. It’s perhaps even an inevitable consequence of those laws: if you have an inflationary Universe governed by quantum physics, Read More ›

From Denyse O’Leary at Salvo, a look at Matti Leisola’s book, Heretic: One Scientist’s Journey from Darwin to Design Matti Leisola, a gifted Finnish bioengineer, started out as a good Darwinist. But he could not avoid the massive pushback from the evidence of design he found in nature. A specialist in enzymes and rare sugars, he noticed that high-school students in his own country were being taught hoary Darwinian legends rather than a more nuanced view of biology that sees each individual cell as a complex city of life. Over a long career, which included serving as dean (now emeritus) of Chemistry and Material Sciences at Helsinki University of Technology and as research director for Cultor, a global biotech company, Read More ›

They were microbial mats. From Anna Azvolinsky at The Scientist: According to the study authors, the previously oldest visible fossilized remains of microbes on land were about 2.7 billion years old, found in a different location from the Barberton Greenstone Belt in South Africa and also in Australia … For the current study, Homann and his colleagues focused on ancient sedimentary rocks, known as the Moodies Group, in the Barberton Greenstone Belt that were shown by geologists earlier to be approximately 3.22 billion years old. There, the team uncovered what are known as fossilized microbial mats—composed mainly of the imprints of bacteria and archaea and are among the earliest preserved forms of life. While living on the early Earth, these Read More ›