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Category: Biology

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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New study points to two origins of life on Earth

New study points to two origins of life on Earth

Smithsonian magazine reports: Among biologists, few questions have been debated as fiercely as the origin of life. How did self-sustaining organisms, capable of transforming molecules to capture energy, arise on the primitive Earth? Before any cells existed, scientists suspect chemical reactions occurred around deep-sea hydrothermal vents, where heat and high pressures led to spontaneous chemistry that was sped up, or catalyzed, by metals in Earth’s crust. One possibility for the origin of life is that, over time, these relatively simple…

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Origin of human eyes traced to 560-million-year-old one-eyed marine ‘cyclops’

Origin of human eyes traced to 560-million-year-old one-eyed marine ‘cyclops’

ZME Science reports: Deep inside the human brain, a small gland in the middle of the forehead helps keep time. As darkness arrives, the pineal gland helps set the body’s nightly rhythm. But some creatures use the pineal gland as a sort of “third eye”, helping them detect light and shadow, though the organ doesn’t form pictures. Our human lineage lost this ancestral ability millions of years ago. But a new evolutionary hypothesis suggests that this unassuming organ is the…

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Biophilia: Monkeys sometimes have ‘pets’ like humans

Biophilia: Monkeys sometimes have ‘pets’ like humans

Popular Science reports: We humans love our pets, but we aren’t the only great apes who buddy up with other species. Researchers have documented multiple instances of primates forming bonds with different animals, but a recent study indicates these relationships may be even more common than expected. In a first-of-its-kind comprehensive review published in the journal Primates, anthropologists at the University of Oxford explored various instances of monkeys and apes carrying, grooming, playing, and sometimes actually adopting other creatures. The…

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The extinction of dinosaurs, along with most other species, may have happened in less than two hours

The extinction of dinosaurs, along with most other species, may have happened in less than two hours

Popular Science reports: The reign of the dinosaurs undisputedly came to a dramatic conclusion 66 million years ago, after the six-mile-wide Chicxulub asteroid slammed into what is now Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula. However, the exact timeline of their extinction remains a matter of debate. Did most of the Earth’s species die a slow death of starvation after a dust-choked atmosphere blocked sunlight and ushered in a prolonged winter? Or did they quickly incinerate from globe-spanning wildfires sparked by falling, superheated space…

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A mitochondrial theory of mind

A mitochondrial theory of mind

Rachel Nuwer writes: It was 9 a.m. on a Thursday, and Martin Picard was watching his blood flow from an IV in his arm through a hole in the wall. He was sitting on a twin bed in a claustrophobic chamber less than a shoulder’s width from a stainless steel sink and porcelain toilet. Every hour over 24 hours, including while he slept, a nurse channeled blood from his arm to a research team next door; at each time point,…

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Mapping the largely uncharted terrain of the human microbiome

Mapping the largely uncharted terrain of the human microbiome

Jeneen Interlandi writes: In the mid-2010s, when they were still postdoctoral fellows at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Mathilde Poyet and Mathieu Groussin kept bumping into different sides of the same obstacle. Poyet, an ecologist and a microbiologist, was trying to study rare bacterial species, the kind that had never been grown in a lab before. Groussin, a computational biologist in the same lab, wanted to understand how humans and microbes evolved together over millenniums. Each was focused on microbes…

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