Browsed by
Category: Biology

The genetic power of ancient trees

The genetic power of ancient trees

Jim Robbins writes: In 2005, several of the centuries-old ponderosa pine trees on my 15 acres (0.06 sq km) of forest in the northern Rocky Mountains in Montana suddenly died. I soon discovered they were being brought down by mountain pine beetles, pernicious killers the size of the eraser on a pencil that burrow into the tree. The next year the number of dying trees grew exponentially. I felt powerless and grief-stricken as I saw these giant, sky-scraping trees fading…

Read More Read More

Life helps make almost half of all minerals on Earth

Life helps make almost half of all minerals on Earth

Joanna Thompson writes: The impact of Earth’s geology on life is easy to see, with organisms adapting to environments as different as deserts, mountains, forests and oceans. The full impact of life on geology, however, can be easy to miss. A comprehensive new survey of our planet’s minerals now corrects that omission. Among its findings is evidence that about half of all mineral diversity is the direct or indirect result of living things and their byproducts. It’s a discovery that…

Read More Read More

Do we need a new theory of evolution?

Do we need a new theory of evolution?

Stephen Buranyi writes: Strange as it sounds, scientists still do not know the answers to some of the most basic questions about how life on Earth evolved. Take eyes, for instance. Where do they come from, exactly? The usual explanation of how we got these stupendously complex organs rests upon the theory of natural selection. You may recall the gist from school biology lessons. If a creature with poor eyesight happens to produce offspring with slightly better eyesight, thanks to…

Read More Read More

Five misunderstandings of pregnancy biology that cloud the abortion debate

Five misunderstandings of pregnancy biology that cloud the abortion debate

Science News reports: Like most aspects of biology, early human development involves many complex processes. Despite the rhetoric around these issues, clear lines — between having a heart and not having a heart or being able to survive outside of the uterus — are scarce, or nonexistent. “There aren’t these set black-and-white points for much of this,” says obstetrician-gynecologist Nisha Verma, a fellow with the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists in Washington, D.C. Here’s what’s known about five key…

Read More Read More

How the brains of social animals synchronise and expand one another

How the brains of social animals synchronise and expand one another

Sofia Quaglia writes: Humans are not the only creatures that show a refined grasp of social norms. If a group of adult male rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) find themselves sitting around a turning table set with food, they will display an ‘I scratch your back, you scratch mine’ ethos of reciprocity. One monkey will offer another one a piece of fruit and, what’s more, will expect the gesture to be reciprocated. If the offer isn’t forthcoming, the first monkey is…

Read More Read More

Modern city dwellers have lost about half their gut microbes

Modern city dwellers have lost about half their gut microbes

Science reports: Deep in the human gut, myriad “good” bacteria and other microbes help us digest our food, as well as keep us healthy by affecting our immune, metabolic, and nervous systems. Some of these humble microbial assistants have been in our guts since before humans became human—certain gut microbes are found in almost all primates, suggesting they first colonized a common ancestor. But humans have also lost many of these helpers found in other primates and may be losing…

Read More Read More

How the sugars in mucus tame the body’s unruly fungi

How the sugars in mucus tame the body’s unruly fungi

Wired reports: Katharina Ribbeck’s lab collects mucus—the often gooey substance present in places like the mouth, gut, reproductive tract, and intestines. While the slimy goop may not be pretty from the get-go, a purification process can brighten it up. “Once you remove particulates and microbes, it’s a beautiful, beautiful clear gel—like egg white,” says Ribbeck, a professor of bioengineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “It’s really gorgeous.” Ribbeck cares about spit because she’s trying to deconstruct how glycans, tiny…

Read More Read More

How humans impact the perceptual world of other animals

How humans impact the perceptual world of other animals

Ed Yong writes: In the Tetons, as I watch [a sensory ecologist, Jesse] Barber tagging bats, mosquitoes bite me through my shirt, attracted by the smell of the carbon dioxide on my breath. While I itch, an owl flies overhead, tracking its prey using a radar dish of stiff facial feathers that funnel sound toward its ears. These creatures have all evolved senses that allow them to thrive in the dark. But the dark is disappearing. Barber is one of…

Read More Read More

Brain-signal proteins evolved before animals did

Brain-signal proteins evolved before animals did

Viviane Callier writes: Our human brains can seem like a crowning achievement of evolution, but the roots of that achievement run deep: The modern brain arose from hundreds of millions of years of incremental advances in complexity. Evolutionary biologists have traced that progress back through the branch of the animal family tree that includes all creatures with central nervous systems, the bilaterians, but it is clear that fundamental elements of the nervous system existed much earlier. How much earlier has…

Read More Read More

Cultivating a sense of wonder

Cultivating a sense of wonder

Anelise Chen writes: When the marine biologist Rachel Carson was a young girl, she discovered a fossilized shell while hiking around her family’s hillside property in Springdale, Pennsylvania. Those who knew her then would later contend that this relic sparked such intense reverie in her that she instantly felt a tug toward the sea. What was this ancient creature, and what was the world it had known? Though Carson had never seen the sea herself, she threw herself into its…

Read More Read More

How I started to see trees as smart

How I started to see trees as smart

Matthew Hutson writes: A couple of decades ago, on a backpacking trip in the Sierra Nevada, I was marching up a mountain solo under the influence of LSD. Halfway to the top, I took a break near a scrubby tree pushing up through the rocky soil. Gulping water and catching my breath, I admired both its beauty and its resilience. Its twisty, weathered branches had endured by wresting moisture and nutrients from seemingly unwelcoming terrain, solving a puzzle beyond my…

Read More Read More

Origin of life theory involving RNA–protein hybrid gets new support

Origin of life theory involving RNA–protein hybrid gets new support

Nature reports: Chemists say they have solved a crucial problem in a theory of life’s beginnings, by demonstrating that RNA molecules can link short chains of amino acids together. The findings, published on 11 May in Nature, support a variation on the ‘RNA world’ hypothesis, which proposes that before the evolution of DNA and the proteins it encodes, the first organisms were based on strands of RNA, a molecule that can both store genetic information — as sequences of the…

Read More Read More

Tiny channels discovered inside the human skull could be vital for the brain

Tiny channels discovered inside the human skull could be vital for the brain

Science Alert reports: A shortcut between the skull and the brain could be a possible way for the human immune system to bypass the blood-brain barrier. Researchers recently discovered a series of tiny channels in mice and human skulls, and in mice at least, these little pathways represent an unexpected source of brain immunity. Previously, scientists assumed that the immune system connects with the brain by slipping through a kind of neurological customs gate – a barrier separating blood channels…

Read More Read More

Lowly mushrooms may be key to ecosystem survival in a warming world

Lowly mushrooms may be key to ecosystem survival in a warming world

Elizabeth Pennisi writes: The red, orange, and spotted mushrooms that sprout up after it rains are doing more than adding color to the landscape. The fungi that produce them could be keeping the natural world productive and stable, according to a new study. Indeed, they may be critical to the health of Earth’s ecosystems, says Matthias Rillig, a soil ecologist at the Free University Berlin who was not involved with the work. There are 70,000 known kinds of fungi. These…

Read More Read More

The awake ape: Why people sleep less than their primate relatives

The awake ape: Why people sleep less than their primate relatives

Elizabeth Preston writes: On dry nights, the San hunter-gatherers of Namibia often sleep under the stars. They have no electric lights or new Netflix releases keeping them awake. Yet when they rise in the morning, they haven’t gotten any more hours of sleep than a typical Western city-dweller who stayed up doom-scrolling on their smartphone. Research has shown that people in non-industrial societies — the closest thing to the kind of setting our species evolved in — average less than…

Read More Read More

Ancient genes for symbiosis hint at mitochondria’s origins

Ancient genes for symbiosis hint at mitochondria’s origins

Veronique Greenwood writes: Once, long ago, the only players in the grand drama of life, predation and death were invisibly small and simple cells. Archaea and bacteria jigged and whirled through seas and ponds, assembled themselves into fortresses a few microns wide, and devoured films of organic matter. Then some of them began to change, and eventually the first eukaryote — the first organism to keep its genes locked away in a nucleus, to line its interior with ramifying compartments,…

Read More Read More