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Category: Biology

The microbiologist who fundamentally changed the way we think about evolution and the origins of life

The microbiologist who fundamentally changed the way we think about evolution and the origins of life

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David Quammen writes: On Nov. 3, 1977, a new scientific revolution was heralded to the world — but it came cryptically, in slightly confused form. The front page of that day’s New York Times carried a headline: “Scientists Discover a Form of Life That Predates Higher Organisms.” A photograph showed a man named Carl R. Woese, a microbiologist at the University of Illinois in Urbana, with his feet up on his office desk. He was 50ish, with unruly hair, wearing…

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The nastiest feud in science

The nastiest feud in science

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Bianca Bosker writes: While the majority of her peers embraced the Chicxulub asteroid as the cause of the [dinosaurs’] extinction, [Gerta] Keller [a 73-year-old paleontology and geology professor at Princeton] remained a maligned and, until recently, lonely voice contesting it. She argues that the mass extinction was caused not by a wrong-place-wrong-time asteroid collision but by a series of colossal volcanic eruptions in a part of western India known as the Deccan Traps—a theory that was first proposed in 1978…

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We are more than our brains

We are more than our brains

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Alan Jasanoff writes: Brains are undoubtedly somewhat computer-like – computers, after all, were invented to perform brain-like functions – but brains are also much more than bundles of wiry neurons and the electrical impulses they are famous for propagating. The function of each neuroelectrical signal is to release a little flood of chemicals that helps to stimulate or suppress brain cells, in much the way that chemicals activate or suppress functions such as glucose production by liver cells or immune…

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A watery lake is detected on Mars, raising the potential for alien life

A watery lake is detected on Mars, raising the potential for alien life

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The New York Times reports: For the first time, scientists have found a large, watery lake beneath an ice cap on Mars. Because water is essential to life, the discovery offers an exciting new place to search for life forms beyond Earth. Italian scientists working on the European Space Agency’s Mars Express mission announced on Wednesday that a 12-mile wide underground liquid pool — not just the momentary damp spots seen in the past — had been detected by radar…

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Owls see the world much like we do

Owls see the world much like we do

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The New York Times reports: Owl eyes are round, but not spherical. These immobile, tubular structures sit on the front of an owl’s face like a pair of built-in binoculars. They allow the birds to focus in on prey and see in three dimensions, kind of like humans — except we don’t have to turn our whole heads to spot a slice of pizza beside us. Although owls and humans both have binocular vision, it has been unclear whether these…

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Space is full of dirty, toxic grease, scientists reveal

Space is full of dirty, toxic grease, scientists reveal

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The Guardian reports: It looks cold, dark and empty, but astronomers have revealed that interstellar space is permeated with a fine mist of grease-like molecules. The study provides the most precise estimate yet of the amount of “space grease” in the Milky Way, by recreating the carbon-based compounds in the laboratory. The Australian-Turkish team discovered more than expected: 10 billion trillion trillion tonnes of gloop, or enough for 40 trillion trillion trillion packs of butter. Prof Tim Schmidt, a chemist…

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How spiders fly

How spiders fly

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James Gorman writes: Sometimes spiders ride the wind. They spin out lines of silk that are caught by the breeze and carry them aloft. They have been reported to rise a mile or two above the earth, and perhaps even to cross oceans. It’s called ballooning. Moonsung Cho, an aeronautical engineer, was in Denmark the first time he saw the flight of a spider. It was autumn, when baby spiders often balloon en masse and spread to new areas. He…

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There is no biological difference between male and female brains

There is no biological difference between male and female brains

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Taylor Lorenz writes: Pop neuroscience has long been fascinated with uncovering secret biological differences between male and female brains. Just last year, the Google engineer James Damore caused an uproar after publishing a manifesto detailing the various ways women were biologically different from men. But according to Lise Eliot, a professor of neuroscience at the Chicago Medical School and the author of Pink Brain, Blue Brain, anyone who goes searching for innate differences between the sexes won’t find them. “People…

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‘Shocking’ die-off of Africa’s oldest baobabs

‘Shocking’ die-off of Africa’s oldest baobabs

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AFP reports: Some of Africa’s oldest and biggest baobab trees — a few dating all the way back to the ancient Greeks — have abruptly died, wholly or in part, in the past decade, researchers said Monday. The trees, aged between 1,100 and 2,500 years and some as wide as a bus is long, may have fallen victim to climate change, the team speculated. “We report that nine of the 13 oldest… individuals have died, or at least their oldest…

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Bees may understand zero, a concept that took humans millennia to grasp

Bees may understand zero, a concept that took humans millennia to grasp

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Kate Keller writes: As a mathematical concept, the idea of zero is relatively new in human society—and indisputably revolutionary. It’s allowed humans to develop algebra, calculus and Cartesian coordinates; questions about its properties continue to incite mathematical debate today. So it may sound unlikely that bees—complex and community-based insects to be sure, but insects nonetheless—seem to have mastered their own numerical concept of nothingness. Despite their sesame-seed-sized brains, honey bees have proven themselves the prodigies of the insect world. Researcher…

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What enabled animal life to get more complex and diverse during the Cambrian explosion?

What enabled animal life to get more complex and diverse during the Cambrian explosion?

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Jordana Cepelewicz writes: When Emma Hammarlund of Lund University in Sweden first reached out to her colleague Sven Påhlman for help with her research, he was skeptical he’d have much insight to offer. He was a tumor biologist, after all, and she was a geobiologist, someone who studied the interplay between living organisms and their environment. Påhlman didn’t see how his work could possibly inform her search for answers about the rapid proliferation and diversification of animal life that, half…

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Theory of predictive brain as important as evolution — an interview with Lars Muckli

Theory of predictive brain as important as evolution — an interview with Lars Muckli

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Our brains make sense of the world by predicting what we will see and then updating these predictions as the situation demands, according to Lars Muckli, professor of neuroscience at the Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging in Glasgow, Scotland. He says that this predictive processing framework theory is as important to brain science as evolution is to biology. Horizon magazine: You have used advanced brain imaging techniques to come up with a model of how the brain processes vision – and…

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China-backed Sumatran dam threatens the rarest ape in the world

China-backed Sumatran dam threatens the rarest ape in the world

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By Bill Laurance, James Cook University The plan to build a massive hydropower dam in Sumatra as part of China’s immense Belt and Road Initiative threatens the habitat of the rarest ape in the world, which has only 800 remaining members. This is merely the beginning of an avalanche of environmental crises and broader social and economic risks that will be provoked by the BRI scheme. Read more: How we discovered a new species of orangutan in northern Sumatra The…

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We reconstructed the genome of the ‘first animal’

We reconstructed the genome of the ‘first animal’

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Shutterstock By Jordi Paps, University of Essex The first animals emerged on Earth at least 541m years ago, according to the fossil record. What they looked like is the subject of an ongoing debate, but they’re traditionally thought to have been similar to sponges. Like today’s animals, they were made up of many, many different cells doing different jobs, programmed by thousands of different genes. But where did all these genes come from? Was the emergence of animals a small…

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Why the human brain is so efficient

Why the human brain is so efficient

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Liqun Luo writes: An important difference between the computer and the brain is the mode by which information is processed within each system. Computer tasks are performed largely in serial steps. This can be seen by the way engineers program computers by creating a sequential flow of instructions. For this sequential cascade of operations, high precision is necessary at each step, as errors accumulate and amplify in successive steps. The brain also uses serial steps for information processing. In the…

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