Sara Walker and Lee Cronin write: A timeless universe is hard to imagine, but not because time is a technically complex or philosophically elusive concept. There is a more structural reason: imagining timelessness requires time to pass. Even when you try to imagine its absence, you sense it moving as your thoughts shift, your heart pumps blood to your brain, and images, sounds and smells move around you. The thing that is time never seems to stop. You may even…
Science Alert reports: Like treasured recipes passed down from generation to generation, there are just some regions of DNA that evolution doesn’t dare tweak. Mammals far and wide share a variety of such encoded sequences, for example, which have remained untouched for millions of years. Humans are a strange exception to this club. For some reason, recipes long preserved by our ancient ancestors were suddenly ‘spiced up’ within a short evolutionary period of time. Because we’re the only species in…
Andreas Wagner writes: What are the most successful organisms on the planet? Some people might think of apex predators like lions and great white sharks. For others, insects or bacteria might come to mind. But few would mention a family of plants that we see around us every day: grasses. Grasses meet at least two criteria for spectacular success. The first is abundance. Grasses cover the North American prairies, the African savannahs and the Eurasian steppes, which span 5,000 miles…
Your brain can imagine things that haven’t happened or that don’t even exist. agsandrew/iStock via Getty Images Plus By Andrey Vyshedskiy, Boston University You can easily picture yourself riding a bicycle across the sky even though that’s not something that can actually happen. You can envision yourself doing something you’ve never done before – like water skiing – and maybe even imagine a better way to do it than anyone else. Imagination involves creating a mental image of something that…
Joshua Sokol writes: An oak tree. The symbiotic fungus intertwined with its roots. A cardinal chirping from one of its branches. Our best clue yet to their shared ancestor might have arrived in electron microscope images that were unveiled in December. “Look!” said the microbiologist Christa Schleper, beaming as she held a printed, high-resolution image in front of her webcam at the University of Vienna. “Isn’t it beautiful?” The cells in the micrograph were 500 nanometer-wide orbs surrounded by a…
Any hominid fossil find with molar teeth can be plugged into a new equation that reveals its species’ prenatal growth rate. Gil Cohen-Magen/AFP via Getty Images By Tesla Monson, Western Washington University Fossilized bones help tell the story of what human beings and our predecessors were doing hundreds of thousands of years ago. But how can you learn about important parts of our ancestors’ life cycle – like pregnancy or gestation – that leave no obvious trace in the fossil…
Cody Cottier writes: Some mass extinctions unfold like a sloppy murder, leaving clear fingerprints for the keen investigator to uncover. (Asteroids are no masters of subtlety.) The Late Ordovician mass extinction, the oldest of all and the second most lethal, isn’t one of them. Though there is a standard explanation for this granddaddy of death — involving an ancient ice age — the evidence is cryptic enough that experts are still submitting new theories for how 85 percent of all…
Susanne Wedlich writes: The weather in Morro Bay, California is too good, the coastline too picturesque, and the wildlife seem to have waltzed straight out of a Disney film. Sea otters play in the waves with their young, herons bask on the beach, and seals stretch their plump bellies in the sun. And yet amid the tranquility of Morro Bay lurks a monster straight from H.P. Lovecraft’s playbook, as slimy as a creature from Sartre’s nightmares. It doesn’t get much…
Science Daily: By simulating early Earth conditions in the lab, researchers have found that without specific amino acids, ancient proteins would not have known how to evolve into everything alive on the planet today — including plants, animals, and humans. The findings, which detail how amino acids shaped the genetic code of ancient microorganisms, shed light on the mystery of how life began on Earth. “You see the same amino acids in every organism, from humans to bacteria to archaea,…
Tim Requarth writes: Mike Russell found his moment of inspiration on a warm spring evening in Glasgow in 1983, when his 11-year-old son broke a new toy. The toy in question was a chemical garden, a small plastic tank in which stalagmite-like tendrils grew out of seed crystals placed in a mineral solution. Although the tendrils appeared solid from the outside, when shattered they revealed their true nature: each one was actually a network of hollow tubes, like bundles of…
Your brain can imagine things that haven’t happened or that don’t even exist. agsandrew/iStock via Getty Images Plus By Andrey Vyshedskiy, Boston University You can easily picture yourself riding a bicycle across the sky even though that’s not something that can actually happen. You can envision yourself doing something you’ve never done before – like water skiing – and maybe even imagine a better way to do it than anyone else. Imagination involves creating a mental image of something that…
Allison Whitten writes: The neocortex stands out as a stunning achievement of biological evolution. All mammals have this swath of tissue covering their brain, and the six layers of densely packed neurons within it handle the sophisticated computations and associations that produce cognitive prowess. Since no animals other than mammals have a neocortex, scientists have wondered how such a complex brain region evolved. The brains of reptiles seemed to offer a clue. Not only are reptiles the closest living relatives…
Elia Pellegrini/Unsplash By Alice Clement, Flinders University Many of us are returning to work or school after spending time with relatives over the summer period. Sometimes we can be left wondering how on earth we are related to some of these people with whom we seemingly have nothing in common (especially with a particularly annoying relative). However, in evolutionary terms, we all share ancestors if we go far enough back in time. This means many features in our bodies stretch…
The Scientist reports: Humans are still evolving new genes, according to a study published in Cell Reports on December 20. As our lineage evolved, at least 155 human genes sprung up from DNA regions previously thought of as “junk,” including two human-specific genes that emerged since humans branched off from chimpanzees around 4 to 6 million years ago, the researchers report. “I thought it was a great study,” says Alan Saghatelian, a biologist at the Salk Institute who was not…
John Rennie and Allison Parshall write: In 2021, the Hayabusa2 space mission successfully delivered a morsel of the asteroid 162173 Ryugu to Earth — five grams of the oldest, most pristine matter left over from the solar system’s formation 4.5 billion years ago. Last spring, scientists revealed that the chemical composition of the asteroid includes 10 amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. The discovery added to the evidence that the primordial soup from which life on Earth arose may…
Science reports: As a motley medley of mycologists climbed the basalt slopes of the Lanín volcano earlier this year, the green foliage at lower elevations gave way to autumnal golds and reds. Chile’s famed Araucaria—commonly called monkey puzzle trees—soon appeared, their spiny branches curving jauntily upward like so many cats’ tails. Beneath the majestic trees, the scientists were focused on something far less glamorous—indeed, mostly invisible: mycorrhizal fungi, tiny organisms that intertwine with roots of the Araucaria and nearly all…