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Category: Life

When Attenborough was welcomed by the mountain gorillas

When Attenborough was welcomed by the mountain gorillas

  David Sillito writes: It is the most memorable moment of Sir David Attenborough’s broadcasting career. A short sequence of his encounter with a group of playful mountain gorillas in a forest clearing in Rwanda. “There is more meaning and mutual understanding in exchanging a glance with a gorilla than any other animal I know,” he tells the camera, as a female gorilla observes him from just a few feet away. The footage for his 1979 Life on Earth series…

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We’re finally learning what it’s like to die. And it’s not as bad as you think…

We’re finally learning what it’s like to die. And it’s not as bad as you think…

Nate Scharping writes: The last words Steve Jobs, the legendary Apple founder, spoke were simple: “Oh wow, oh wow, oh wow.” Their mystery is enticing – what did Jobs, the digital prophet who brought us the smartphone, see as he neared death? We’ll never know. But stories of near-death experiences (NDEs) tantalise the living, and something unique seems to be happening inside our brains as we sense death approaching. Despite NDE testimonies, the moments surrounding death largely remain a mystery…

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All living things emit a visible light that vanishes at death, surprising study says

All living things emit a visible light that vanishes at death, surprising study says

Science Alert reports: Life truly is radiant, according to an experiment conducted by researchers from the University of Calgary and the National Research Council of Canada. An extraordinary experiment on mice and leaves from two different plant species has uncovered direct physical evidence of an eerie ‘biophoton’ phenomenon ceasing on death, suggesting all living things – including humans – could literally glow with health, until we don’t. The findings might seem a little fringe at first glance. It’s hard not…

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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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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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Life on Earth emerged fast — far quicker than we thought

Life on Earth emerged fast — far quicker than we thought

Michael Marshall writes: Here’s a story you might have read before in a popular science book or seen in a documentary. It’s the one about early Earth as a lifeless, volcanic hellscape. When our planet was newly formed, the story goes, the surface was a barren wasteland of sharp rocks, strewn with lava flows from erupting volcanoes. The air was an unbreathable fume of gases. There was little or no liquid water. Just as things were starting to settle down,…

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When we see the Earth as ‘a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam’ what do we learn about human significance?

When we see the Earth as ‘a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam’ what do we learn about human significance?

Tim Bayne writes: On St Valentine’s Day 1990, NASA’s engineers directed the space-probe Voyager 1 – at the time, 6 billion kilometres (3.7 billion miles) from home – to take a photograph of Earth. Pale Blue Dot (as the image is known) represents our planet as a barely perceptible dot serendipitously highlighted by a ray of sunlight transecting the inky-black of space – a ‘mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam’, as Carl Sagan famously put it. But to find that mote of dust, you need to know…

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Distant planet might be brimming with life, astronomers suggest

Distant planet might be brimming with life, astronomers suggest

The New York Times reports: The search for life beyond Earth has led scientists to explore many suggestive mysteries, from plumes of methane on Mars to clouds of phosphine gas on Venus. But as far as we can tell, Earth’s inhabitants remain alone in the cosmos. Now a team of researchers is offering what it contends is the strongest indication yet of extraterrestrial life, not in our solar system but on a massive planet, known as K2-18b, that orbits a…

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Trump and Musk’s vengeful nihilism

Trump and Musk’s vengeful nihilism

George Monbiot writes: Vengeful nihilism, the destruction of what they do not love, know or understand, is a major theme in Maga politics. It is applied as viciously to culture and science as it is to the natural world. It is hard to avoid the thought that environmental destruction is not just a means by which Trump serves his corporate backers, but an end in itself. At the same time, Trump enthusiastically (albeit vaguely) boosts Musk’s plans to send people…

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Mega El Niños kicked off the world’s worst mass extinction

Mega El Niños kicked off the world’s worst mass extinction

Science News reports: A barrage of intense, wild swings in climate conditions may have fueled the largest mass extinction in Earth’s history. A re-creation of how ancient sea surface temperatures, ocean and atmosphere circulation, and landmasses interacted revealed an Earth plagued by nearly decade-long stints of droughts, wildfires and flooding. Researchers knew that a spike in global temperatures — triggered by gas emissions from millions of years of enormous volcanic eruptions in what is now Siberia — was the likely…

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What ‘plant philosophy’ says about plant agency and intelligence

What ‘plant philosophy’ says about plant agency and intelligence

Stella Sandford writes: It was once common, in Western societies at least, to think of plants as the passive, inert background to animal life, or as mere animal fodder. Plants could be fascinating in their own right, of course, but they lacked much of what made animals and humans interesting, such as agency, intelligence, cognition, intention, consciousness, decision-making, self-identification, sociality and altruism. However, groundbreaking developments in the plant sciences since the end of the previous century have blown that view…

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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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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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Watching Biden, many see the heartbreaking indignities of aging

Watching Biden, many see the heartbreaking indignities of aging

The Washington Post reports: President Biden shuffled onto the debate stage. He whispered, mumbled and repeatedly trailed off. When he wasn’t speaking, he stood slightly stooped, his mouth at times agape and his eyes flickering between apparent confusion and recognition. When his halting 90-minute 2024 debate debut was over, his wife took him by the hand, escorting him gingerly offstage. Biden’s debate performance a week and a half ago set off a swirl of political angst and upheaval in the…

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