Prevention is better than cure, so we should start using genetic techniques to stop dangerous animal diseases jumping to humans, say Scott Nuismer and James Bull

A famous quote often attributed to Benjamin Franklin is "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure". The world is now discovering the cost of its pound of cure for covid-19. But what would an ounce of prevention look like?

For infectious diseases that originate in wild animals, like covid-19, SARS, MERS and Ebola, one solution is to prevent the transmission to humans in the first place. To achieve this, an important first step is to change our behaviour to reduce contact with the wildlife species that harbour such diseases.

While Perseverance rover is rolling over the Red Planet studying its geology and taking fancy selfies with the help of the Ingenuity helicopter, researchers back on Earth are looking forward to welcome and investigating the first Martian soil samples in the upcoming years.

Bringing rocks from the Marian surface to Earth does not seem very exciting to a small group of enthusiasts from The International Committee Against Mars Sample Return (ICAMSR), who warn about incredible risks these life-bearing samples may pose to our home planet, including an immense "Martian plague".

The chief scientist for the newly created US Space Force has said he thinks 'human augmentation' will be here sooner rather than later. Dr. Joel Mozer, speaking at an event at the Airforce Research Laboratory, said that it is 'imperative' that the US outdo its adversaries by leading in 'human augmentation' in military technology.

"In the last century, Western civilization transformed from an industrial-based society to an information-based society, but today we're on the brink of a new age: the age of human augmentation. In our business of national defense, it's imperative that we embrace this new age, lest we fall behind our strategic competitors."

Mozer, whose career has been spent largely with the US Air Force developing space flight technologies, warned that there would be 'unimaginable' advances made over the next decade, citing the leaps in artificial intelligence (AI) that have already been made in programs like Google's AlphaGo. The Space Force scientist added that AI could eventually develop military tactics and strategies that 'no human could', and that eventually 'autonomous' programs or machines could advise commanders in real time. The AI could eventually create programs that design lines of attack too complex for humans to understand, Mozer warned.

Across decades, topics, and studies, women are more censorious than men. Compared to men, women support more censorship of various kinds of sexual and violent content and content perceived as hateful or otherwise offensive to minorities.

Women are more supportive of illegalizing insults of immigrants, homosexual individuals, transgender individuals, the police, African Americans, Hispanics, Muslims, Jewish people, and Christians, and are more supportive of banning sexually explicit public statements and flag burning. In contrast, men evaluate free speech as more important than do women.

One likely reason for this pattern is that women are more averse to interpersonal harm and have a relatively stronger concern for protecting others. Indeed, women believe sexual media content has more harmful effects on the self and others, and women view hate speech as more harmful and violent than do men.

Scientists at the UNIGE have shown that the response of the retina to light depends not only on the intensity of the light perceived by the eye, but also on its temporal shape and the order in which the colours are organized.
Vision is a complex process that has been successfully deciphered by many disciplines -physics, biochemistry, physiology, neurology, etc.-: The retina captures light, the optic nerve transmits electrical impulses to the brain, which ultimately generates the perception of an image. Although this process takes some time, recent studies have shown that the first stage of vision, the perception of light itself, is extremely fast. But the analysis of this decisive step was carried out on molecules in solution in the laboratory.

Scientists from the University of Geneva (UNIGE), in collaboration with EPFL and the University Hospitals of Geneva (HUG), Switzerland, reproduced the experiment on mice, in order to observe the processing of light by a living organism in all its complexity. This non-invasive study shows that light energy alone does not define the response of the retina. Its shape -short or long- also has an impact on the signal sent to the brain to form an image. This discovery, published in the journal Science Advances, opens up a new field of research into vision, diagnostics and possibly new curative possibilities.

The cellular mechanism of vision has been successfully studied thanks to the collaboration of several disciplines. "In the eye, the first stage of vision is based on a small molecule - the retinal - which, on contact with light, changes shape," explains Geoffrey Gaulier, researcher at the Applied Physics Department of the UNIGE Faculty of Science and first author of the study. "When the retinal alters its geometric form, it triggers a complex mechanism that will result in a nerve impulse generated in the optic nerve."

Marine scientists say they have found what they believe to be more than 25,000 barrels that possibly contain DDT dumped off the Southern California coast near Catalina Island, where a massive underwater toxic waste site dating back to World War II has long been suspected.

The 27,345 "barrel-like" objects were captured in high-resolution images as part of a study by researchers at the University of California San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography. They mapped more than 56 square miles (145 square kilometers) of seafloor between Santa Catalina Island and the Los Angeles coast in a region previously found to contain high levels of the toxic chemical in sediments and in the ecosystem.

Researchers at the University Zurich have mapped the first complete atlas of single cells that make up the human teeth. Their research shows that the composition of human dental pulp and periodontium vary greatly. Their findings open up new avenues for cell-based dental therapeutic approaches.
During the last 30 years, medical and dental research has attracted a large number of scientists and practitioners working on aspects of high medical relevance that involve a combination of genetic and tissue regeneration approaches. These developments in stem cell and tissue engineering have provided medical and dental researchers with new insights and given rise to new ideas as to how everyday clinical practice can be improved. Many research groups are dealing with questions like: How can we help injured tissues and organs heal? Can lost tissue be regenerated? How can we create solid protocols that apply across all stem cell therapies?

What happens if you put 15 people together in a dark cave and take away their ability to track the passage of time? An extraordinary experiment in France has attempted to answer this question, and the results are fascinating.

At 10:30 a.m. local time on Saturday April 24, 15 people emerged from Lombrives cave in Ussat les Bains, France, following 40 days of complete isolation from the outside world. Many of them had smiles on their faces, which... well, full credit to them. Had it been me, I can guarantee you that I would not be smiling, as the conditions down there were far from ideal.

The environment was most certainly rough, with the temperature fixed at 50 degrees F (10 degrees C) and the relative humidity pinned at an oppressive 100%. Not a single ray of sunlight leaks into this cave, requiring the team to depend exclusively on artificial lighting. And with no way to communicate with the outside world, team members lost touch with their friends, families, and the daily news cycle.

Importantly, they also lost track of time, as no clocks of any sort were allowed in the cave. For this was the point of the "Deep Time" project, organized by the Human Adaptation Institute, which is seeking to understand how humans adapt and work together to recreate "synchronization outside the usual indicators," as the group explains at its website.

When asked how long they had stayed in the cave, the team collectively figured it was around 30 days (though, as The Guardian reports, one person estimated the total duration at 23 days!). That the team had somehow lost track of 10 whole days (or more) is somewhat astounding and testament to our dependence on clocks or the day-night cycle to keep track of time. Our internal clocks, it would appear, really, really suck, and are subject to considerable drift — even across the relatively short time span of 40 days.

Scientists have long believed that male sperm whales are among nature's loneliest creatures. Unlike female sperm whales, which spend their entire lives living in matrilineal societies among their female kin, males get kicked out of their mothers' pods once they reach sexual maturity and then spend the majority of their lives alone. Or so we thought.

A new study has found evidence that male sperm whales can develop strong, long-lasting bonds, forming friendships with other males that can last for at least five years.

The findings of this landmark study are based on 12 years of observations conducted by researchers working in the Nemuro Strait, a narrow stretch of water sandwiched between Hokkaido, in northern Japan, and the southernmost Kuril Island. The strait is visited by hundreds of migrating sperm whales each year. Although male sperm whales have previously been observed feeding together, and even stranding themselves in all-male groups of unrelated individuals, no one knew what was driving them to do so.

To find out, researchers led by Hayao Kobayashi, a sociobiologist at Nagasaki University in Japan, spent thousands of hours aboard whale watching boats photographing 226 male sperm whales and listening in on their conversations using hydrophones.

"It takes a steady effort, extensive data sets, and patience to reveal the ecology of long-life animals," says Kobayashi. Although the data collection was arduous, it let the researchers determine which whales hung out together, and for how long.

A group of University of Wyoming professors and students has identified an unusual belt of igneous rocks that stretches for over 2,000 miles from British Columbia, Canada, to Sonora, Mexico.

The rock belt runs through Idaho, Montana, Nevada, southeast California and Arizona.

"Geoscientists usually associate long belts of igneous rocks with chains of volcanoes at subduction zones, like Mount Shasta, Mount Hood, Mount St. Helens and Mount Rainer," says Jay Chapman, an assistant professor in UW's Department of Geology and Geophysics. "What makes this finding so interesting and mysterious is that this belt of igneous rocks is located much farther inland, away from the edge of the continent, and doesn't contain any evidence for producing volcanoes. In fact, all of the melting to generate the igneous rocks originally took place deep underground, five to 10 miles beneath the surface."

Chapman is lead author of a paper, titled "The North American Cordilleran Anatectic Belt," which was published online in February in the journal Earth-Science Reviews. The print version will be published this month.

The paper is a result of a special course taught by Simone Runyon, an assistant professor in UW's Department of Geology and Geophysics, and Chapman. Runyon, six UW graduate students and one undergraduate student, who took part in the course, are co-authors of the paper.

"It was really fascinating to start with a scientific question in a classroom, then collect and analyze data, and eventually publish our results," says Cody Pridmore, a UW graduate student from Orange, Calif., and co-author of the paper. "It's a process most college students don't get to experience."