From Vox: For some reason, the scientists decided the ̊world wasn’t ready for them. So the tardigrades, and the moss they were found in, were wrapped in paper, placed in plastic baggies, and locked away in a -20 degrees Celsius freezer. There they remained — frozen and forgotten — for more than 30 years. This sounds like the start of a horror movie. But be assured: When the tardigrades unfroze in May 2014, they did not seek vengeance upon humanity for their imprisonment. Instead, they moseyed around on a plate of agar gel like nothing had happened. And then they reproduced. More. See also: Water bear’s hybrid genome now disputed Follow UD News at Twitter!

From The Conversation: Mysterious chimpanzee behaviour may be evidence of ‘sacred’ rituals … What we saw on this camera was exhilarating – a large male chimp approaches our mystery tree and pauses for a second. He then quickly glances around, grabs a huge rock and flings it full force at the tree trunk. … But what we discovered during our now-published study wasn’t a random, one-off event, it was a repeated activity with no clear link to gaining food or status – it could be a ritual. We searched the area and found many more sites where trees had similar markings and in many places piles of rocks had accumulated inside hollow tree trunks – reminiscent of the piles of Read More ›

Multi Scale Modeling of Chromatin and Nucleosomes

Well, that’s one way of looking at it. From New Scientist: Some thought it was impossible. But a population of stickleback fish that breed in the same streams is splitting into two separate species before our eyes, and at rapid speeds. Three-spine sticklebacks were introduced to Lake Constance in Switzerland around 150 years ago – a blink of an eye in evolutionary terms. But since then, the fish have begun splitting into two separate types: one that lives in the main lake (pictured above left, female top, male in breeding colours below), and another that lives in the streams that flow into it (above right). The main lake dwellers are bigger, with longer spines and tougher armour. In theory, these Read More ›

The list and scope of presenters at the Alternatives to Methodological Naturalism conference continues to grow. The conference committee is very pleased with the response to the conference so far. Register today to be a part of it!
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So says conservation biologist Ross Pomeroy at RealClearScience: Think about it. As you travel back in time though your family history, the number of ancestors you have roughly doubles with every generation. Using the most conservative estimate of generation time — 32 years — in the year 1152, you had as many as 134,217,728 potential ancestors. And since genes are scrambled with every generation, it’s very likely you share little to no genetic relation to most of them. They might as well be strangers!… DNA testing companies often take this ambiguity and fill in the blanks with impressive stories that you can show your friends and relatives. Though fascinating, these tales share more in common with astrological horoscopes than historical Read More ›

Extending our arts and culture moment, from Retraction Watch: Death camp dog satire retracted when German journal wasn’t in on joke Totalitarianism and Democracy has removed a paper claiming that German Shepherds belonging to guards at the Berlin Wall descended from dogs used at concentration camps, after learning that the paper was a work of satire, The Guardian reports. The paper, and its author, are the creation of the anonymous group “Christiane Schulte and friends.” This isn’t the first hoax we’ve seen in publishing: Don’t forget journalist John Bohannon, who submitted hundreds of fake papers to open access journals, and more recently conjured up a studythat showed chocolate helps you lose weight. (And, of course, a paper in a Romanian Read More ›

From Mashable: The geometric wonders are by Kerby Rosanes, an illustrator from the Philippines, who wields an ink pen and plastic compass like a straight-edge wizard. More of Rosanes’ work can be found on his Society6 page and Instagram. See also: At PBS: Puzzle of mathematics is more complex than we sometimes think Follow UD News at Twitter! More of Rosanes’ work can be found on his Society6 page and Instagram.

Latest improbable scenario for the origin of life, from New Scientist: Did life begin in the freezer? Early Earth may not have been as hot and hellish as we thought. In fact, it may have become a snowball around the time life first emerged. This is according to a fresh analysis of rocks from South Africa that formed about 3.5 billion years ago, during the Archaean period. Previous research suggested that the ocean in which these rocks formed was warm – perhaps around 85̊C. But Maarten de Wit at the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, now says the ocean temperature was similar to today’s – and that there is even evidence that ice was present. The Read More ›

Recently, I was astonished when I came across an article titled, Are We in a ‘Sixth Great Extinction’? Maybe Not, by Ross Pomeroy, an editor of RealClearScience and a zoologist and conservation biologist by training. The author’s candor and intellectual honesty are refreshing: The notion that humans are erasing species off the face of the Earth at near unprecedented levels is a perennial story that has been blared in the media for more than two decades. In the year 2000, the United Nations’ Millennium Ecosystem Assessment estimated that species are going extinct 1,000 times faster than they naturally do, and that this rate could increase to 10,000 times. These rates translate to between 17,000 and 140,000 species going extinct each Read More ›

From BBC: Mystery ancient hobbit ‘was not human’ Researchers Balzeau and Charlier: “The shape of its skull is definitely not the shape of a modern human skull… Even a human with pathologies [disease].” Taken together, the results of his study, soon to be published in the Journal of Human Evolution, suggest that there is nothing about the skull that fits with any known population of modern human. In other words, the hobbit is not a small and diseased member of our species, Homo sapiens. It’s something much more exotic. Well, that tidies things up, right? Its eyes are very small and its shape is slightly different from H. erectus Crucially, the hobbit also lacked a chin. And as we have Read More ›

Depending on how we define species, extinction, as well as hybridization and evolution. From ScienceDaily: New research from UBC shows that when humans speed up the usually slow process of evolution by introducing new species, it can result in a lasting impact on the ecosystem. The phenomenon is known as reverse speciation and researchers witnessed it in Enos Lake on Vancouver Island where two similar species of threespine stickleback fish disappeared within three years.”When two similar species are in one environment, they often perform different ecological roles,” said Seth Rudman, a PhD student in zoology at UBC. “When they go extinct, it has strong consequences for the ecosystem.” Two species of endangered threespine stickleback fish lived in the lake. One Read More ›

What else to make of this, from New Scientist?: A lot of problems in today’s world are too big for our brains. An algorithm that identifies how cause and effect are linked could lead us to better solutions … Finding solutions means doing what Newton did with gravity: asking the right questions, teasing out causes and effects, and so building an intellectual framework to explain the puzzle. But how do we do that with the sheer quantity of data sloshing around in today’s world? It’s this problem that has led some to think we need to think seriously about the way we think. Only by rebooting our powers of logic and going beyond what nature has hardwired into our brain Read More ›

Swarmbots: Apparently, it takes ingenuity to get a life form to fail, but the trick may come in handy. From Duke University: Duke University bioengineers design cells that die if they leave the confines of their capsule Duke University researchers have engineered microbes that can’t run away from home; those that do will quickly die without protective proteins produced by their peers. Dubbed “swarmbots” for their ability to survive in a crowd, the system could be used as a safeguard to stop genetically modified organisms from escaping into the surrounding environment. The approach could also be used to reliably program colonies of bacteria to respond to changes in their surrounding environment, such as releasing specific molecules on cue. The system Read More ›

From science writer Neel S. Patel at Inverse: “Survival of the fittest” is bigger than just evolutionary biology. You bet. The selfish gene even gives us medical advice. The word Darwinism has become a synecdoche for all the mechanisms implied by the Malthusian concept of “survival of the fittest” — the notion that the strongest members of a system survive to reproduce and pass their genetics on to progeny. But natural selection needn’t be limited to Darwin’s finches. When applying this idea to physics we get quantum Darwinism, the theory that the governing laws of biology apply to particles. It used to be the other way around (physics and chemistry govern biology), but on the eve of its extinction, there Read More ›