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Category: Biology

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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Is life just different?

Is life just different?

Philip Ball writes: In 1993, a team led by the planetary scientist Carl Sagan tentatively concluded that there is life on Earth. Not much of a deduction, you might think — except that the researchers confined their evidence to observations made by the Galileo spacecraft, which had flown past our planet three years earlier on a looping journey to Jupiter. So great is the transformative power of life that its presence can be detected just from the light and radio…

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Scientists have discovered only a tiny fraction of living insect species

Scientists have discovered only a tiny fraction of living insect species

Science reports: From half-meter-long moths to fairy wasps smaller than sand grains, insects come in a stunning variety of shapes and sizes and constitute the most diverse animal group on Earth. But the insect species discovered so far may represent just a fraction of the total crawling, flying, and burrowing around the planet, according to a new study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Using statistical methods borrowed from another field, a team of entomologists…

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Cells have a secret power line: Scientists discover how the nucleus gets its own direct energy supply

Cells have a secret power line: Scientists discover how the nucleus gets its own direct energy supply

Centro Nacional de Investigaciones Cardiovasculares: For decades, biologists assumed a cell’s energy simply diffused to wherever it was needed. It turns out the most important destination of all has a private delivery line An international team of scientists led by Dr. Ivan Menendez-Montes, Assistant Professor at the University of Arizona, and Dr. Hesham A. Sadek, Director of the Sarver Heart Center at the University of Arizona and Group Leader at the Centro Nacional de Investigaciones Cardiovasculares Carlos III (CNIC), has…

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Are memories transferable — or edible?

Are memories transferable — or edible?

Claire L. Evans writes: It was the dead of winter in Boston. The surface of the Charles River was frozen solid. But Zachary Kelso braved the biting cold to finally put to rest a mystery that has haunted neuroscience labs for over half a century. To do that, Kelso, a research assistant in the Harvard lab of the neuroscientist Sam Gershman, needed some worms. Specifically, planarians: arrow-headed flatworms, which are among the simplest creatures to possess a brain and a…

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The chemistry of life is not exclusive to life

The chemistry of life is not exclusive to life

Siddhant Pusdekar writes: For 15 years, Sébastien Fontaine has been trying to kill dirt. The biochemist, who runs a lab at the French National Institute for Agriculture, Food, and Environment, wanted to know how much carbon is released by soil — just dirt alone, completely devoid of life. His team sealed dirt into jars and blasted them with sterilizing gamma radiation. Then they waited for the carbon dioxide released by the soil — a sign of ongoing microbial respiration —…

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