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Category: Biology

100,000 simulations of comets striking Earth suggest the ingredients of life were not extraterrestrial

100,000 simulations of comets striking Earth suggest the ingredients of life were not extraterrestrial

Science Alert reports: Where did we come from? The answer, many scientists have proposed, is space. One longstanding theory, hypothesized for over a century, is that life on Earth emerged from fragments of prebiotic chemistry that arrived from the cosmic unknowns, possibly delivered by far-flung comets. The idea is supported by a growing body of evidence, with scientists detecting signs of organic molecules in comets soaring through space, which hypothetically could seed the ingredients of life on worlds they come…

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Why did humans’ brains surpass chimps’? An ancient virus might help explain it

Why did humans’ brains surpass chimps’? An ancient virus might help explain it

Science News reports: Viruses may be minuscule, but one could have influenced major differences between human and chimpanzee brains. Millions of years ago, a virus left DNA behind in an African ape’s genome, and the genetic material stuck around in modern day chimps. Those ghosts of infections past appear to influence genes involved in neuron development, which may help explain how human and chimp brains ended up so different, researchers report October 23 in Science Advances. Compared with the brains…

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Start-up claims to use AI-created phage viruses to treat a patient

Start-up claims to use AI-created phage viruses to treat a patient

The New York Times reports: For the first time, scientists say they have used viruses designed by artificial intelligence to treat a human patient. Researchers announced on Tuesday that they had administered the virus, known as a phage, to a patient suffering from a deadly bacterial infection. Phages attack bacteria, and the hope is that this one will kill the microbes causing the infection. Radical Numerics, the start-up that created the viruses, posted a technical report about them on its…

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Plants can speak using electricity. This startup built an AI model to decipher their language

Plants can speak using electricity. This startup built an AI model to decipher their language

TechCrunch reports: Justin Mast’s life was changed by a cyborg plant. A few years ago, Mast was reading through some scientific literature when he stumbled upon research about a houseplant wired to a motorized stand. When the plant wanted more light, electrical signals flowed through the living tissues. A control board sensed the current and wheeled the plant closer to the light source. “I’m like, what the heck?” Mast told TechCrunch. “That was the entry to the rabbit hole for…

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‘I didn’t want to write about this’: The primatologist who first saw chimps waging civil war

‘I didn’t want to write about this’: The primatologist who first saw chimps waging civil war

The Guardian reports: [John] Mitani [a primatologist from northern California] estimates he has spent 85 months of his life hiking the forests of Ngogo [in Uganda’s Kibale national park], or approximately seven years. What began as a few basic structures and tents has grown into a large – albeit rustic – research camp that has housed the nearly 90 researchers who have worked with the Ngogo project over three decades. The findings that have emerged from Ngogo over the years…

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David Krakauer: ‘What we have to cultivate is amazing question-askers’

David Krakauer: ‘What we have to cultivate is amazing question-askers’

  Why did intelligence evolve in the universe? Neil deGrasse Tyson, Chuck Nice, and Gary O’Reilly explore the nature of intelligence, information theory, consciousness, and whether AI is actually intelligent at all with David Krakauer, evolutionary biologist and president of the Santa Fe Institute. Can you conceive of life without intelligence, or intelligence without life? We parse the difference between intelligence and being alive and whether you can be one without the other. What does it mean for something to…

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Was the human microbiome healthier in ancient times?

Was the human microbiome healthier in ancient times?

The New York Times reports: The human microbiome — the trillions of microbes that live in our guts — was a stable ecosystem for tens of thousands of years before rapidly changing in industrialized countries, raising possible health concerns for modern people, scientists reported on Wednesday. In a study of Africans and South Americans, researchers identified more than 600 species of bacteria that may once have been common in the gut but are now rare or missing entirely from people…

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A human gene lurks in a virus that causes skin infections

A human gene lurks in a virus that causes skin infections

The New York Times reports: Scientists have discovered a virus that is a tiny bit human, carrying a gene it stole from our ancestors about 100,000 years ago. And this virus may be using our own gene to infect us. Previous studies have demonstrated that viruses can pick up genes from their hosts. But the new discovery, reported Thursday in the journal Science, may be the first known instance of a virus with a human gene acquired in recent evolutionary…

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In an $80 motel room, a discovery sheds light on the origins of life

In an $80 motel room, a discovery sheds light on the origins of life

The New York Times reports: On a spring day last year, Andrew Willoughby drove three and a half hours to a cheap motel in Nags Head, N.C. From the parking lot, he texted a stranger he had met online. Julia Van Etten appeared, ushering him past a “Do Not Disturb” sign into one of the motel’s $80 rooms, which she had secretly turned into a makeshift lab. Jugs of brackish water lined the walls. Buckets overflowed with hunks of marsh…

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How virus-like ‘jumping genes’ became our partners in evolution

How virus-like ‘jumping genes’ became our partners in evolution

Jake Buehler writes: You might imagine that the DNA in your cells has a simple history. Even though it’s been recombined in every generation through sex and gained the occasional mutation, on the whole the genome has been stable and has been passed down reliably from your ancestors. But that’s not the entire story. Nearly half of your genome is a wild drama: mobile, repetitive, disruptive, even viral. This half is the result of genetic material that can clip itself…

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A fossilized feather from the age of dinosaurs may explain why only some birds survived

A fossilized feather from the age of dinosaurs may explain why only some birds survived

NPR reports: Paleontology can be quite physical. In 2016, David DeMar was doing field work in the rocky badlands of Montana in what’s known as the Hell Creek Formation. “We all get down on our hands and knees,” he recalls. “And I start crawling up the hill and I noticed this little dark, round object on the ground. It was kind of odd.” DeMar, a lab manager at the Burke Museum in Seattle, picked up the cherry-sized fossil. “I start…

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The fungi in the ocean may be way more important than we realized

The fungi in the ocean may be way more important than we realized

Science Alert reports: Hidden inside tree trunks, between grains of soil, deep within our bodies, and below our feet, fungi seem to wind their way into everything. But did you know fungi actually live in the ocean, too? New research published in PLOS Biology reveals the overlooked role of marine fungi in the carbon cycle by zooming in on the seawater and sediments that line an Arctic fjord in Norway. We’re only just starting to understand how widespread fungi are…

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More than half of Earth’s migratory bird species are declining – here’s how we can still save them

More than half of Earth’s migratory bird species are declining – here’s how we can still save them

The spoon-billed sandpiper, a small wading bird, flies nearly 5,000 miles (8,000 km) on its annual migration. Tareq’s Photography/Wikimedia, CC BY-SA By Peter P. Marra, Georgetown University and Nathan W. Cooper, Smithsonian Institution Every year, billions of migratory birds connect the world’s continents, oceans and ecosystems as they undertake epic journeys between their foraging habitats and their breeding grounds. A bobolink (Dolichonyx oryzivorus) leaves its breeding grasslands of North America for the Pampas of South America. A Newell’s shearwater (Puffinus…

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On the origin of feces: How animal poo drove Earth’s greatest evolutionary event

On the origin of feces: How animal poo drove Earth’s greatest evolutionary event

Kimmig & Bicknell / Trends in Ecology & Evolution, CC BY By Russell Dean Christopher Bicknell, Flinders University and Julien Kimmig As all children learn, everyone poos. But when did this begin? And what evolutionary and environmental changes accompanied the dawn of dung? Going further, is the evolution of excrement the reason we exist? Our new research suggests the evolution of fecal matter helped fuel one of the most important events in the history of life on Earth: the Cambrian…

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Birdsong follows a fundamental law of human language

Birdsong follows a fundamental law of human language

Scientific American reports: The twittering of songbirds may bear little resemblance to human speech, but new research on Bengalese finches shows that their vocalizations do follow a fundamental structural principle found in all languages. Zipf’s law states that a handful of words—or, in this case, chirps, whistles and trills—occur frequently, while most are rare. Specifically, the most common word (“the,” in English) appears roughly twice as often as the second-most common (“of”), three times as often as the third most…

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AI just created viable viruses that don’t exist in nature

AI just created viable viruses that don’t exist in nature

Carl Zimmer reports: For the first time, scientists have used artificial intelligence to create new kinds of viruses, raising hopes for medical advances while also raising the disturbing possibility that the technology could someday be used to invent dangerous pathogens. Synthesizing viruses from scratch is hardly new. Researchers long ago learned how to manufacture viral genomes; they are used to investigate antiviral drugs and vaccines, as well as to learn how viruses work. But the new study, published Thursday in…

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