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Category: Biology

Humans have an internal lunar clock. We are accidentally destroying it

Humans have an internal lunar clock. We are accidentally destroying it

PsyPost reports: Most animals, including humans, carry an internal lunar clock, tuned to the 29.5-day rhythm of the Moon. It guides sleep, reproduction and migration of many species. But in the age of artificial light, that ancient signal is fading – washed out by the glow of cities, screens and satellites. Just as the circadian rhythm keeps time with the 24-hour rotation of the Earth, many organisms also track the slower rhythm of the Moon. Both systems rely on light…

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Long-term calorie restriction in diet may slow biological aging in the brain

Long-term calorie restriction in diet may slow biological aging in the brain

PsyPost reports: A new study suggests that restricting calorie intake over a lifetime may slow the biological aging of support cells in the primate brain. The research provides evidence that a thirty percent reduction in calories preserves the metabolic function of cells responsible for insulating nerve fibers. These findings were published in the journal Aging Cell. The brain relies on complex networks of communication to function correctly. This communication depends heavily on white matter, which consists of nerve fibers coated…

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A cell that lacks any metabolic genes is a new addition to the spectrum of life

A cell that lacks any metabolic genes is a new addition to the spectrum of life

Jake Buehler writes: Life’s fundamental structure is the cell, and so the main things that a cell does — processing biomolecules, growing, replicating its genetic material and producing a new body — are considered hallmarks of life. But earlier this year, scientists discovered a cell so severely stripped of essential functions that it challenges biologists’ definitions of what counts as a living thing. The species is a single-celled organism known only by the mysterious sequence of its genetic code. Its…

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Are plants intelligent? It depends on how you define it

Are plants intelligent? It depends on how you define it

Avery Elizabeth Hurt writes: It’s a pleasant summer morning. Across a field, a line of poplar trees sways in the breeze. Insects buzz and flit among the branches. Everything seems calm and peaceful. But don’t be fooled. These trees are actually under attack as hungry insects chomp on their leaves. The trees can’t hide, and they can’t run away. But they aren’t helpless: They have ways to fight back — and even aid each other. As soon as an insect…

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James Watson: Titan of science with tragic flaws

James Watson: Titan of science with tragic flaws

Jon Cohen writes: “It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.” That famous understatement concludes the 1953 Nature article in which James Watson, then just 25, and Francis Crick announced their discovery of the double helical structure of DNA. In his later life, Watson, who died on 6 November at 97, was anything but understated. The son of a Chicago bill collector, Watson shared a…

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Humans have an internal lunar clock – but light pollution is disrupting it

Humans have an internal lunar clock – but light pollution is disrupting it

Flash Vector/Shutterstock By Stefano Arlaud, Queen Mary University of London Most animals, including humans, carry an internal lunar clock, tuned to the 29.5-day rhythm of the Moon. It guides sleep, reproduction and migration of many species. But in the age of artificial light, that ancient signal is fading – washed out by the glow of cities, screens and satellites. Just as the circadian rhythm keeps time with the 24-hour rotation of the Earth, many organisms also track the slower rhythm…

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Between sleep and awareness are many types of liminal states

Between sleep and awareness are many types of liminal states

Yasemin Saplakoglu writes: The pillow is cold against your cheek. Your upstairs neighbor creaks across the ceiling. You close your eyes; shadows and light dance across your vision. A cat sniffs at a piece of cheese. Dots fall into a lake. All this feels very normal and fine, even though you don’t own a cat and you’re nowhere near a lake. You’ve started your journey into sleep, the cryptic state that you and most other animals need in some form…

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What is sleep?

What is sleep?

Vladyslav Vyazovskiy writes: After decades of research, there is still no clearly articulated scientific consensus on what sleep is or why it exists. Yet whenever sleep comes up as a topic of discussion, it is quickly reduced to its necessity and importance. Popular media remind us of what can, and will, go wrong if we do not sleep enough, and serve up some handy tips on how to overcome insomnia. Discussed exclusively in utilitarian terms, we are force-fed the idea…

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Genes harness physics to help grow living things

Genes harness physics to help grow living things

Anna Demming writes: Sip a glass of wine, and you will notice liquid continuously weeping down the wetted side of the glass. In 1855, James Thomson, brother of Lord Kelvin, explained in the Philosophical Magazine that these wine “tears” or “legs” result from the difference in surface tension between alcohol and water. “This fact affords an explanation of several very curious motions,” Thomson wrote. Little did he realize that the same effect, later named the Marangoni effect, might also shape…

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The surprising recovery of once-rare birds

The surprising recovery of once-rare birds

Sandhill cranes can be spotted in many states, but in the 1930s their populations had crashed to a few dozen breeding pairs in the eastern U.S. Rsocol/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY By Tom Langen, Clarkson University When I started bird-watching as a teenager, a few years after the first Earth Day in 1970, several species that once thrived in my region were nowhere to be found. Some, like the passenger pigeon, were extinct. Others had retreated to more remote, wild areas…

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Just like humans, parrots can learn new tricks by imitating their peers

Just like humans, parrots can learn new tricks by imitating their peers

GrrlScientist writes: A recently published study reports that parrots can learn new tricks simply by observing their peers performing the desired behavior in response to a physical cue from a human. The study, by an international group of scientists, discovered that this method of learning – known as third-party imitation – is not exclusive to humans as was widely thought, and could help explain the subtleties of parrot culture and social interactions. Third-party imitation is a social learning trait associated…

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Tiny tubes in primitive Asgard archea may have been the precursor of our own cellular skeletons

Tiny tubes in primitive Asgard archea may have been the precursor of our own cellular skeletons

Veronique Greenwood writes: In 2010, biologists made a shocking discovery. Living in the mud of the North Sea were microorganisms whose genes looked a lot like ours. Genetic analysis revealed that humans, oak trees, blue whales — any living things whose cells have nuclei and mitochondria — are related to these microbes, which were named the Asgard archaea after the home of the Norse gods. Two billion years ago, it was an ancestor of an Asgard that diverged from its…

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Why we should tune into the orchestra of the animal world

Why we should tune into the orchestra of the animal world

Jay Griffiths writes: Sound is life. The sound of God’s voice created life, in Christian understanding. In the womb, sound is the first of the senses to apprehend the world beyond the body: a fetus is able to hear their mother’s voice, while a chick in the egg hears the song of its parent birds. Hearing is thought to be the last sense to leave us in our dying, and we speak of the silence of the grave. Healing has…

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Life on Earth probably needed supplies from space

Life on Earth probably needed supplies from space

University of Bern: Earth is so far the only known planet on which life exists—with liquid water and a stable atmosphere. However, the conditions were not conducive to life when it formed. The gas-dust cloud from which all the planets in the solar system formed was rich in volatile elements essential for life, such as hydrogen, carbon and sulfur. However, in the inner solar system—the part closest to the sun, where the four rocky planets Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars…

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The sudden surges that forge evolutionary trees

The sudden surges that forge evolutionary trees

Jake Buehler writes: Over the last half-billion years, squid, octopuses and their kin have evolved much like a fireworks display, with long, anticipatory pauses interspersed with intense, explosive changes. The many-armed diversity of cephalopods is the result of the evolutionary rubber hitting the road right after lineages split into new species, and precious little of their evolution has been the slow accumulation of gradual change. They aren’t alone. Sudden accelerations spring from the crooks of branches in evolutionary trees, across…

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Here’s how the first proteins might have assembled, sparking life

Here’s how the first proteins might have assembled, sparking life

Science reports: Life today depends on proteins, cellular workhorses that do everything from flex muscles to ferry oxygen. And proteins, in turn, depend on RNA, which carries the recipes for making them and also helps with their assembly. In modern cells, large protein-based enzymes help connect RNA snippets to amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. Then, the RNA- and protein-based cellular machine called the ribosome stitches the amino acids together into a protein chain, reading the correct sequence from…

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