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Category: Biology

Links between pathogens and Alzheimer’s spur new projects searching for causal evidence

Links between pathogens and Alzheimer’s spur new projects searching for causal evidence

Science reports: This week, thousands of researchers are flocking to downtown Philadelphia for what’s billed as the largest international conference dedicated to Alzheimer’s disease. But several kilometers away a much smaller group congregated for an alternative meetup: a daylong dive into whether and how pathogens might cause the fatal dementia. Saturday’s gathering of about 80 scientists on the city’s periphery is something of a metaphor for where the idea sits in the larger Alzheimer’s community, long dominated by the view…

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How fetuses learn to talk while they’re still in the womb

How fetuses learn to talk while they’re still in the womb

Darshana Narayanan writes: Loud, shrill and penetrating – a baby’s cry is its first act of communication. A simple adaptation that makes it less likely that the baby’s needs will be overlooked. And babies aren’t just crying for attention. While crying, they are practising the melodies of speech. In fact, newborns cry in the accent of their mother tongue. They make vowel-like sounds, growl and squeal – these are protophones, sounds that eventually turn into speech. Babies communicate as soon…

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The physics of cold water may have jump-started complex life

The physics of cold water may have jump-started complex life

Veronique Greenwood writes: Once upon a time, long ago, the world was encased in ice. That’s the tale told by sedimentary rock in the tropics, many geologists believe. Hundreds of millions of years ago, glaciers and sea ice covered the globe. The most extreme scenarios suggest a layer of ice several meters thick even at the equator. This event has been called “Snowball Earth,” and you’d think it would be a terrible time to be alive — and maybe, for…

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To save life on Earth, bring back taxonomy

To save life on Earth, bring back taxonomy

Robert Langellier writes: In 2009, the botanist Naomi Fraga was hunting a flower without a name near Carson City, Nev. Ms. Fraga saw that the plant was going extinct in real time as its desert valley habitat was bulldozed to make way for Walmarts and housing developments. But in order to seek legal protections for it, she had to give it a name. The diminutive yellow flower became the Carson Valley monkeyflower or, officially, Erythranthe carsonensis, allowing conservationists to petition…

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The new science of animal minds

The new science of animal minds

Brandon Keim writes: Back when I first started writing about scientific research on animal minds, I had internalized a straightforward historical narrative: The western intellectual tradition held animals to be unintelligent, but thanks to recent advances in the science, we were learning otherwise. The actual history is so much more complicated. The denial of animal intelligence does have deep roots, of course. You can trace a direct line from Aristotle, who considered animals capable of feeling only pain and hunger,…

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Study finds life on Earth emerged 4.2 billion years ago, soon after the planet came into existence

Study finds life on Earth emerged 4.2 billion years ago, soon after the planet came into existence

Science Alert reports: Once upon a time, Earth was barren. Everything changed when, somehow, out of the chemistry available early in our planet’s history, something started squirming – processing available matter to survive, to breed, to thrive. What that something was, and when it first squirmed, have been burning questions that have puzzled humanity probably for as long as we’ve been able to ask “what am I?” Now, a new study has found some answers – and life emerged surprisingly…

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We need new metaphors that put life at the center of biology

We need new metaphors that put life at the center of biology

Philip Ball writes: You could be forgiven for thinking that the turn of the millennium was a golden age for the life sciences. After the halcyon days of the 1950s and ’60s when the structure of DNA, the true nature of genes and the genetic code itself were discovered, the Human Genome Project, launched in 1990 and culminating with a preliminary announcement of the entire genome sequence in 2000, looked like – and was presented as – a comparably dramatic…

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Is conscious AI possible?

Is conscious AI possible?

Andrew Maynard writes: It seems that barely a week goes by these days where there isn’t some degree of speculation that the current crop of large language models, novel AI systems, or even the internet, are showing signs of consciousness. These are usually met with a good dose of skepticism. But under the surface there’s often a surprisingly strong conflation between advanced artificial intelligence and conscious machines — to the extent that much of the current wave of AI acceleration…

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How AI revolutionized protein science, but didn’t end it

How AI revolutionized protein science, but didn’t end it

Yasemin Saplakoglu writes: In December 2020, when pandemic lockdowns made in-person meetings impossible, hundreds of computational scientists gathered in front of their screens to watch a new era of science unfold. They were assembled for a conference, a friendly competition some of them had attended in person for almost three decades where they could all get together and obsess over the same question. Known as the protein folding problem, it was simple to state: Could they accurately predict the three-dimensional…

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Why intelligence exists only in the eye of the beholder

Why intelligence exists only in the eye of the beholder

Abigail Desmond and Michael Haslam write: What has intelligence? Slime moulds, ants, fifth-graders, shrimp, neurons, ChatGPT, fish shoals, border collies, crowds, birds, you and me? All of the above? Some? Or, at the risk of sounding transgressive: maybe none? The question is a perennial one, often dusted off in the face of a previously unknown animal behaviour, or new computing devices that are trained to do human things and then do those things well. We might intuitively feel our way…

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What causes long COVID? Case builds for rogue antibodies

What causes long COVID? Case builds for rogue antibodies

Nature reports: Antibodies isolated from people with long COVID increase pain sensitivity and reduce movement in mice when transferred to the animals, research shows. The findings suggest that antibodies might drive some symptoms of long COVID — although how that process works is unclear, and the results will need to be replicated in larger studies. “I think this will be a beacon of a paper that we can take forwards to further understand long COVID,” says Resia Pretorius, an immunologist…

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More playful young male dolphins father more offspring

More playful young male dolphins father more offspring

Science reports: Leaping over waves or body surfing side by side, dolphins are a fun-loving bunch. But their frolicking—and that of species from hyenas to humans—has long baffled evolutionary biologists. Why expend so much energy on play? A new study offers an intriguing explanation: Juvenile male dolphins use play to acquire the skills required for fathering calves, researchers report today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Most significantly, the scientists found the most playful males go on…

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Do plants have minds?

Do plants have minds?

Rachael Petersen writes: Gustav Theodor Fechner championed the idea that plants have souls – something we might call ‘consciousness’ today. I first learned of him in an interdisciplinary reading group on plant consciousness that I co-lead at Harvard University. We convene biologists, theologians, artists and ethologists to explore the burgeoning literature on plant life. We found Fechner covered in the New York Times bestselling book by Christopher Bird and Peter Tompkins titled The Secret Life of Plants (1973). Michael Pollan…

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Elephants call each other by name across the savanna

Elephants call each other by name across the savanna

Marta Zaraska writes: Humans have a long history of inventing names for elephants. There is Disney’s Dumbo, of course, and Jumbo, a 19th-century circus attraction, and Ruby, a famed painting elephant from the Phoenix Zoo in Arizona. But new research suggests wild African elephants may pick their own names, too—and use them to call and greet one another on the savanna. Most animals are born with a fixed set of sounds for communication. A few, such as songbirds, can imitate…

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RNA, the long-overlooked molecule that will define a generation of science

RNA, the long-overlooked molecule that will define a generation of science

Thomas Cech writes: From E=mc² to splitting the atom to the invention of the transistor, the first half of the 20th century was dominated by breakthroughs in physics. Then, in the early 1950s, biology began to nudge physics out of the scientific spotlight — and when I say “biology,” what I really mean is DNA. The momentous discovery of the DNA double helix in 1953 more or less ushered in a new era in science that culminated in the Human…

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Most life on Earth is dormant, after pulling an ‘emergency brake’

Most life on Earth is dormant, after pulling an ‘emergency brake’

Dan Samorodnitsky writes: Researchers recently reported the discovery of a natural protein, named Balon, that can bring a cell’s production of new proteins to a screeching halt. Balon was found in bacteria that hibernate in Arctic permafrost, but it also seems to be made by many other organisms and may be an overlooked mechanism for dormancy throughout the tree of life. For most life forms, the ability to shut oneself off is a vital part of staying alive. Harsh conditions…

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