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Category: evolution – Page 70

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If we re-ran Earth’s clock, would life arise again? Would another civilization eventually evolve? Astrobiology is faced with trying to contextualize our place in the Universe using just a single data point. But even a single data point contains information. The key to unlocking it is a careful understanding of the selection biases at play and intricacies of Bayesian statistics. Today, we’re thrilled to present to you our explainer video of a new research paper led by Prof David Kipping that provides a direct quantification of the odds of life and intelligence on Earth-like worlds, based on our own chronology. Presented & Written by Prof. David Kipping.

This video is based on research conducted at the Cool Worlds Lab at Columbia University, New York. You can now support our research program directly here: https://www.coolworldslab.com/support.

Previous episodes to catch up on:
► “Watching the End of the World”: https://youtu.be/p9e8qNNe3L0
► “Why We Could Be Alone”: https://youtu.be/PqEmYU8Y_rI

References:
► Kipping, D. 2020, “An Objective Bayesian Analysis of Life’s Early Start and Our Late Arrival”, PNAS: https://www.pnas.org/content/early/2020/05/12/1921655117
► Spiegel, D. & Turner, E., 2011, “Bayesian analysis of the astrobiological implications of life’s early emergence on Earth”, PNAS 109,395 https://arxiv.org/abs/1107.3835
► Carter, B. 2007, “Five or six step scenario for evolution?”, Int. J. Astrobiology 7,177 : https://arxiv.org/abs/0711.1985
► O’Malley-James, J. et al. 2013, “Swansong biospheres: refuges for life and novel microbial biospheres on terrestrial planets near the end of their habitable lifetimes” Int. J. Astrobiology 12, 99: https://arxiv.org/abs/1210.5721
► Bell, E. et al., 2015, “Potentially biogenic carbon preserved in a 4.1 billion-year-old zircon”, PNAS 112, 14518: https://www.pnas.org/content/112/47/14518
► Smith, H. & Szathmáry, E. 1995, “The Major Transitions in Evolution”, Oxford, England: Oxford University Press.
► Schopf, W. et al., 2018, “SIMS analyses of the oldest known assemblage of microfossils document their taxon-correlated carbon isotope compositions”, PNAS 115, 53: https://www.pnas.org/content/115/1/53

Video materials & graphics used:

Continue reading “The Odds of Life and Intelligence” | >

Our default intuition when it comes to consciousness is that humans and some other animals have it, whereas plants and trees don’t. But how sure can we be that plants aren’t conscious? And what if what we take to be behavior indicating consciousness can be replicated with no conscious agent involved? Annaka Harris invites us to consider the real possibility that our intuitions about consciousness might be mere illusions.

Our intuitions have been shaped by natural selection to quickly provide life-saving information, and these evolved intuitions can still serve us in modern life. For example, we have the ability to unconsciously perceive elements in our environment in threatening situations that in turn deliver an almost instantaneous assessment of danger — such as the intuition that we shouldn’t get into an elevator with someone, even though we can’t put our finger on why.

But our guts can deceive us as well, and “false intuitions” can arise in any number of ways, especially in domains of understanding — like science and philosophy — that evolution could never have foreseen. An intuition is simply the powerful sense that something is true without having an awareness or understanding of the reasons behind this feeling — it may or may not represent something true about the world.

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‘I almost died on the way out,’ said the six-foot-two tall archeologist who lost 25 kgs to enter a 17.5-centimeter cave.

Researchers claim to have discovered new evidence of extinct human species who lived in the underground caves of modern-day South Africa.

“We have massive evidence. It’s everywhere,” said Berger, who reported the findings in a press release and a Carnegie Science lecture at the Martin Luther King Jr.

Gulshan Khan/Getty Images.

Continue reading “‘Massive evidence’ on evolution: Extinct human species with tiny brains ‘used fire’ to live underground” | >

Mammals run the gamut of social organization systems, ranging from loose, ephemeral interactions like aggregations of jaguars in the South American wetlands to the antlike subterranean societies of naked mole-rats (SN: 10/13/21; SN: 10/20/20).

But marsupials — a subgroup of mammals that give birth to relatively underdeveloped young reared in pouches — have traditionally been considered largely solitary. Some kangaroo species were known to form transient or permanent groups of dozens of individuals. But among marsupials, long-term bonds between males and females were thought rare and there were no known examples of group members cooperating to raise young. Previous work on patterns of mammalian social evolution regarded about 90 percent of examined marsupial species to be solitary.

“If you look at other [studies] about some specific species, you will see [the researchers] tend to assume that the marsupials are solitary,” says Jingyu Qiu, a behavioral ecologist at CNRS in Strasbourg, France.

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Accelerating particles to relativistic speeds typically requires particle accelerators that are many kilometers in length. Miniature particle accelerators a few tens of centimeters long or smaller also exist. These so-called laser-plasma accelerators are being tested in research facilities for future use in hospitals, where scientists hope the accelerators could generate x rays for cancer diagnostics and treatment. In these devices, particles are accelerated by short laser pulses, so scientists have only a few femtoseconds to track the particles’ evolving properties. Now Simon Bohlen of the German Electron Synchrotron (DESY) and colleagues experimentally demonstrate a technique to measure the energy evolution of an electron bunch inside a laser-plasma accelerator [1]. The team hopes that the technique could be used to improve laser-plasma accelerators and ready them to generate x rays for medical applications.

For their demonstration Bohlen and colleagues used a phenomenon called Thomson scattering, which is the scattering of photons by electrons. They split in two the laser beam used to accelerate the electrons, using one part for normal electron acceleration and the other part to create a Thomson laser—a beam of photons the accelerated electrons could scatter. They then overlapped the Thomson laser and the accelerated electrons such that the two interacted at 20 locations over a 400- m distance. The team measured the energy of the photons scattered during these interactions using an x-ray detector. From these measurements, the team reconstructed the energy evolution of the electrons over most of the accelerator length without destroying the electron beam.

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Recently, I learned about the World Nobel Peace Summit — fascinating. Young people can go there, mingle with Nobel Peace Laureates, network and share ideas.

Amma introduces the concept of two types of education: one that allows you to earn a living and another to attain a happy, fulfilled life. Modern education should focus on not just academic skills but a culture of human rights and peaceful coexistence of peoples, the ethics of non-violence. Too often, education is propelled by vanity and the desire for individual success. Over and over, it is just competition, pressure, and a vast amount of information pumped into one’s head without instilling the habit of exploring the future consequences of one’s actions. Imagine a good physics student who becomes a scientist just to invent a bomb that could destroy the whole world. We want a child to fulfill their potential — but stay aware of the outcomes of their choices at individual and societal levels. Ethics allows one to maintain this balance. As a society, we may want to establish ethical think tanks that simulate the future and guide us as we develop new technologies and community practices.

JB: Should the ways of peaceful coexistence be taught starting from pre-school age and reinforced over the years?

EG: Education is a good starting point, but everyday practice is of utmost importance. It is essential to talk to a child or teenager about ethics, culture, the evolution of ideas, about the fact that we are all one — but also give that person a lot of real-life experience in conflict resolution and the opportunity to reflect on it. We cannot shield our youth from risks, conflicts, and frustrations and hope they will be able to deal with such challenges in adulthood. Instead, we need to let young people dive into these issues early on — but provide them with support, guidance, and wisdom along the way.

Continue reading “How Nobel Peace Laureates Inspire Youth To Believe In Themselves” | >

Imaging deep tissues with light is challenging. Visible light is often quickly absorbed and scattered by structures and molecules in the body, preventing researchers from seeing deeper than a millimeter within a tissue. If they do manage to probe further, substances like collagen or melanin often muddy the image, creating the equivalent of background noise through their natural fluorescence. As the authors explained, “Biological tissues have strong optical attenuation in the visible wavelength range (350–700 nm), due to the absorption of hemoglobin and melanin, as well as the tissue scattering, which fundamentally limits the imaging depth of high-resolution optical technologies.”

To wade out from these muddied waters, Yao and collaborator Vladislav Verkhusha, PhD, professor of genetics at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, developed a protein that absorbs and emits longer wavelengths of light in the near-infrared (NIR) spectrum. “Tissue is the most transparent in the 700‑1300 nm window of NIR light,” said Yao. “At those wavelengths, light can penetrate deeper into a tissue, and because there is less natural background fluorescence to filter out, we can take longer exposures and capture clearer images.”

Verkhusha and his lab used a process called directed molecular evolution to engineer their proteins, using photoreceptors normally found in bacteria as the basis for the structure. “The state-of-the-art NIR FPs were engineered from bacterial phytochrome photoreceptors (BphPs),” the team noted. “Applying rational design, we developed 17 kDa cyanobacteriochrome-based near-infrared (NIR-I) fluorescent protein, miRFP718nano.”

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Tapping Biological Innovation In Nature For Humanity — Dr. Seemay Chou Ph.D., CEO, Arcadia Science

Dr. Seemay Chou, Ph.D. is the Co-Founder, CEO, and Board Member of Arcadia Science (https://www.arcadia.science/), a research and development company focusing on under researched areas in biology, with a specific focus on novel model organisms that haven’t been traditionally studied in the lab.

The goals of Arcadia Science are to unlock the knowledge and ingenuity contained within a wide range of diverse species, uncover how evolution has solved limitless problems, and through revealing this untapped biological innovation, generate new technologies and products.

Continue reading “Dr. Seemay Chou, Ph.D. — CEO, Arcadia Science — Tapping Biological Innovation In Nature For Humanity” | >

“What this new result does is provide a clearer picture of how our local universe has come together — it is telling us that at least in one of the large galaxies, there has been this sporadic feeding of small galaxies,” Lewis said in a press release.

Globular clusters are at the center of this research. They’re older associations of stars that have lower metallicity. There are at least 150 in the Milky Way, likely more. They play a role in the galactic evolution, but the role isn’t clearly understood. Globulars, as they’re known, are more prevalent in a galaxy’s halo, while their counterparts, open clusters, are found in the galactic disks.

The researchers behind this work identified a population of globulars in Andromeda’s inner halo that all have the same metallicity. Metallicity refers to the elemental makeup of stars, with elements heavier than hydrogen and helium referred to as metals in astronomy. The globulars have lower metallicity than most stars in the same region, meaning they came from elsewhere, not from Andromeda itself. It also means they’re older since there were fewer heavy elements in the early Universe than there are now. Lewis named the collection of globulars the Dulai Structure, which means black stream in Welsh.

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In a breakthrough study, Japanese researchers at Osaka Metropolitan University have engineered the smallest motile life form ever. They introduced seven bacterial proteins into a synthetic bacterium, allowing it to move independently.

The rise of synthetic biology.

The new study is based on the synthetic bacterium called syn-3. The tiny spherical bacteria contain minimal genetic information, allowing them to grow and divide without motility.

The team experimented with syn-3 by introducing seven genes that code for proteins that are likely involved in the swimming motion of Spiroplasma bacteria.

Continue reading “The world’s smallest life form can now move, thanks to genetic engineering” | >