Science & Technology

Algae species with 3 distinct sexes discovered

Jacinta Bowler
Science Alert
Tue, 13 Jul 2021 12:00 UTC

Although we might think of ourselves as far removed from blobby green algae, we're not really that different.

Comment: Maybe some people aren't that different from algae, but most humans generally are.

An algae explosion a few hundred million years ago is thought to have been what allowed all human and animal life to evolve, and all told there's only about one and a half billion years between us in terms of evolution.

Plus, according to a Japanese team of researchers, algae could actually help us to understand how different sex systems - like male and female - evolved in the first place.

Researchers from the University of Tokyo and a number of other Japanese universities have discovered that a type of green algae called Pleodorina starrii has three distinct sexes - 'male', 'female', and a third sex that the team have called 'bisexual'. This is the first time any species of algae has been discovered with three sexes.

Comment: Meanwhile there's a talented slime mold with no brain and that is considered to have '720 sexes'.

See also:

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Top gain-of-function scientist Ralph Baric admitted viruses can be lab engineered 'without a trace'

Jack Posobiec
Human Events
Mon, 12 Jul 2021 07:04 UTC

A top gain-of-function scientist admitted in an interview last September that viruses can be lab engineered without leaving a trace.

Professor Ralph Baric, an epidemiologist at the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health and professor of immunology and microbiology at the UNC School of Medicine, has been studying coronaviruses for 30 years. In a video interview last year with Italian outlet Presa Diretta, Baric was extremely direct about his controversial work, and the implications for COVID19.

Comment: See also:

New type of stellar grain discovered in ancient mineral aggregates isolated from the Allende meteorite

Robert Perkins
CalTech
Fri, 09 Jul 2021 23:13 UTC

stellar grains ancient minerals allende meteorite

The unusual chemistry of grain could tell scientists more about the origin of Earth's water

Scientists have discovered a new type of star dust whose composition indicates that it formed during a rare form of nucleosynthesis (the process through which new atomic nuclei are created) and could shed new light on the history of water on Earth.

A team led by cosmochemists from Caltech and Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand studied ancient minerals aggregates within the Allende meteorite (which fell to Earth in 1969) and found that many of them had unusually high amounts of strontium-84, a relatively rare light isotope of the element strontium that is so-named for the 84 neutrons in its nucleus.

"Strontium-84 is part of a family of isotopes produced by a nucleosynthetic process, named the p-process, which remains mysterious," says Caltech's François L. H. Tissot, assistant professor of geochemistry. "Our results points to the survival of grains possibly containing pure strontium-84. This is exciting, as the physical identification of such grains would provide a unique chance to learn more about the p-process."

Human environmental genome recovered in the absence of skeletal remains

Universität Wien
Mon, 12 Jul 2021 17:45 UTC

Ancient sediments from caves have already proven to preserve DNA for thousands of years. The amount of recovered sequences from environmental sediments, however, is generally low, which difficults the analyses to be performed with these sequences. A study led by Ron Pinhasi and Pere Gelabert of the University of Vienna and published in Current Biology successfully retrieved three mammalian environmental genomes from a single soil sample of 25,000 years bp obtained from the cave of Satsurblia in the Caucasus (Georgia).

The cave of Satsurblia was inhabited by humans in different periods of the Paleolithic: Up to date a single human individual dated from 15,000 years ago has been sequenced from that site. No other human remains have been discovered in the older layers of the cave.

The innovative approach used by the international team led by Prof. Ron Pinhasi and Pere Gelabert with Susanna Sawyer of the University of Vienna in collaboration with Pontus Skoglund and Anders Bergström of the Francis Crick Institute in London permits the identification of DNA in samples of environmental material, by applying extensive sequencing and huge data analysis resources. This technique has allowed the recovery of an environmental human genome from the BIII layer of the cave, which is dated before the Ice Age, about 25,000 years ago.

Trust 'the science', but how much scientific research is actually fraudulent?

Ronald Bailey
Reason
Tue, 13 Jul 2021 16:47 UTC

Fraud may be rampant in biomedical research. My 2016 article "Broken Science" pointed to a variety of factors as explanations for why the results of a huge proportion of scientific studies were apparently generating false-positive results that could not be replicated by other researchers. A false positive in scientific research occurs when there is statistically significant evidence for something that isn't real (e.g., a drug cures an illness when it actually does not). The factors considered included issues like publication bias, and statistical chicanery associated with p-hacking, HARKing, and underpowered studies. My article did not address the possibility that the lack of reproducibility could be because a significant proportion of preclinical and clinical biomedical studies were actually fraudulent.

My subsequent article, "Most Scientific Findings Are False or Useless," which reported the conclusions of Arizona State University's School for the Future of Innovation in Society researcher Daniel Sarewitz's distressing essay, "Saving Science," also did not consider the possibility of extensive scientific dishonesty as an explanation for the massive proliferation of false positives. In his famous 2005 article, "Why Most Published Research Findings Are False," Stanford University biostatistician John Ioannidis cited conflicts of interest as one factor driving the generation of false positives but also did not suggest that actual research fraud was a big problem.

Comment: "Researchers" who engage in fraud should be drummed out of their fields post haste. If that means entire fields such as sociology and other "studies" diminish or vanish entirely, so be it. By promoting false data which leads to false conclusions, they corrupt the essential goal of science: the impartial observation, identification, description, experimental investigation, and theoretical explanation of phenomena.

Meteorite that fell in February 'most important ever to be recovered in Britain'

Jonathan Amos
BBC
Mon, 12 Jul 2021 09:40 UTC

The Winchcombe meteorite is now official.

The rocky material that fell to Earth in a blazing fireball over the Cotswold town of Winchcombe in February has had its classification formally accepted.

Details have just been published by the international Meteoritical Society in its bulletin database.

Comment: It's perhaps a sign of the documented uptick in fireball activity that meteorite recoveries are in the news more often in recent years:

Jupiter's X-ray aurora explained

Lauren Fuge
Cosmos Magazine
Sat, 10 Jul 2021 19:40 UTC

© NASA Chandra/Juno Wolk/Dunn
Overlaid images of Jupiter's pole from NASA's satellite Juno and NASA's Chandra X-ray telescope. Left shows a projection of Jupiter's Northern X-ray aurora (purple) overlaid on a visible Junocam image of the North Pole. Right shows the Southern counterpart.

Chinese and UK researchers have solved a 40-year-old puzzle: how does Jupiter produce regular and spectacular bursts of X-rays? Turns out, it's all to do with the gas giant's magnetic field.

Like Earth, Jupiter displays spectacular light shows at its poles, where charged particles from the Sun (as well as from giant volcanoes on the moon Io) are channelled by the planet's magnetic field into the atmosphere. Here, these ions collide with gas atoms and produce bursts of light.

Jupiter's aurorae are much more powerful than our own, generating X-rays as well as visible light. These are produced like clockwork - but how does the planet accelerate these charged particles to high enough speeds to produce X-rays?

"We have seen Jupiter producing X-ray aurora for four decades, but we didn't know how this happened," says William Dunn from the University College London. "We only knew they were produced when ions crashed into the planet's atmosphere."

Now, Dunn and colleagues from the Chinese Academy of Sciences have discovered that these X-ray flares are triggered by periodic vibrations in Jupiter's magnetic field lines, which create waves of plasma that allow ions to "surf" down into the atmosphere, where they collide at high speed and generate X-rays.

Microbes that feast on crushed rocks thrive in Antarctica's ice-covered lakes

Harry Baker
Live Science
Fri, 09 Jul 2021 10:27 UTC

It could provide clues to how extraterrestrial life might develop on other planets.

Microbes living in an ice-covered lake in Antarctica are feasting on crushed rocks, researchers have discovered. And the little critters are thriving.

Subglacial lakes are bodies of freshwater, a majority of which are found in Antarctica, trapped between Earth's crust, or bedrock, and thick sheets of ice — sometimes several miles thick. These lakes are teeming with diverse microbes that feed off nutrients in the water. However, until now researchers were unsure exactly where these nutrients came from.

Subglacial lakes naturally erode over time as their water levels rise and fall. In a new study, researchers replicated this erosion in the lab by crushing up sediment samples taken from Lake Whillans — a 23-square-mile (60 square kilometers) subglacial lake buried beneath 2,600 feet (800 meters) of ice in Antarctica — and revealed how vital chemicals needed to sustain microbial communities are created.

Comment: It appears that there are few areas on our planet (and likely elsewhere) that aren't teaming with life of some kind:

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Revisiting Dr Judy Wood - Because she's right about 9/11

Rosemary Frei
rosemaryfrei.ca
Thu, 08 Jul 2021 00:00 UTC

Dr. Wood's book Where Did The Towers Go: Evidence of Directed Free-Energy Technology on 9/11 deserves attention. Because its 500 pages provide proof that the towers were made to go 'poof' by very advanced technology. And we can also conclude that that technology could instead be harnessed for the good of humankind.

Did you hear the one about 14 firefighters walking away after a 110-storey building supposedly toppled down on them?

It sounds like a gag. But it really happened.

Twenty years ago this September, on 9/11, a group of firefighters were trapped in the ground level of a stairway in the centre of the half-mile-high World Trade Center North Tower (WTC1). When the dust cleared, beams of sun shone down on them.

Comment: For more on Dr. Judy Wood's work, see:

Did climate change the size of our bodies & brains?

University of Cambridge
Phys.org
Thu, 08 Jul 2021 09:06 UTC

© Manuel Will
Skulls: Left: Amud 1, Neanderthal, 55.000 years ago, ~1750 cm³, Middle: Cro Magnon, Homo sapiens, 32.000 years ago, ~1570 cm³, Right: Atapuerca 5, Middle Pleistocene Homo, 430.000 years ago, ~1100 cm³. Femora: Top: Middle Pleistocene Homo, Trinil, 540.000 years ago, ~50 kg- Bottom: Neanderthal, La Ferrassie 1, 44.000 years ago, ~90 kg.

An interdisciplinary team of researchers, led by the Universities of Cambridge and Tübingen, has gathered measurements of body and brain size for over 300 fossils from the genus Homo found across the globe. By combining this data with a reconstruction of the world's regional climates over the last million years, they have pinpointed the specific climate experienced by each fossil when it was a living human.

The study reveals that the average body size of humans has fluctuated significantly over the last million years, with larger bodies evolving in colder regions. Larger size is thought to act as a buffer against colder temperatures: less heat is lost from a body when its mass is large relative to its surface area. The results are published today in the journal Nature Communications.

Comment: See also:

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Science & Technology

Algae species with 3 distinct sexes discovered

Top gain-of-function scientist Ralph Baric admitted viruses can be lab engineered 'without a trace'

New type of stellar grain discovered in ancient mineral aggregates isolated from the Allende meteorite

Human environmental genome recovered in the absence of skeletal remains

Trust 'the science', but how much scientific research is actually fraudulent?

Meteorite that fell in February 'most important ever to be recovered in Britain'

Jupiter's X-ray aurora explained

Microbes that feast on crushed rocks thrive in Antarctica's ice-covered lakes

Revisiting Dr Judy Wood - Because she's right about 9/11

Did climate change the size of our bodies & brains?

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