Science & TechnologyS


Question

In some science contexts, 'emergence' really means 'we don't know how'

Denyse O'Leary
Evolution News
Sun, 30 Jul 2023 03:43 UTC
flower
© RTBGSpathiphyllum cochlearispathum
For some purposes, "emergence" is just another word in the dictionary. For example, "caterpillar emergence" (emphasis added) means just that: Caterpillars exiting their eggs.

But there is a sneakier way the word is sometimes used in science contexts: It's a way of pretending we know something we don't or that something can happen in a certain way — but we have no evidence for that.

Consider Three Illustrations

First:
Abiotic emergence of ordered information stored in the form of RNA is an important unresolved problem concerning the origin of life.

TOTANI, T. EMERGENCE OF LIFE IN AN INFLATIONARY UNIVERSE. SCI REP 10, 1671 (2020).
When used with respect to the origin of life, emergence is intended to convey the idea that life simply started to form without any intelligence in the universe directing it. The author is willing to admit that this is "an important unresolved problem" but the word "emergence" encourages us to think of it as like the caterpillar bursting out of the egg — forgetting that, in this case, the origin of the egg and other life forms is precisely what we wish to account for.
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Satellite

NASA temporarily loses contact with Voyager 2 after accidentally pointing its antenna away from Earth

Carolyn Collins Petersen
Universe Today
Mon, 31 Jul 2023 12:00 UTC
Voyager 2 NASA
© NASA/JPL-CaltechAn artist concept depicting one of NASA's twin Voyager spacecraft, humanity's farthest and longest-lived spacecraft. Voyager 2 just lost contact with Earth while Voyager 1 is still reporting back.
It's every space mission's nightmare: losing contact with the spacecraft. In the best case, you recover it right away. Worst case, you never hear from your hardware again. On July 21, controllers lost contact with Voyager 2, out in the depths of space. Now they're waiting for a reset to catch Voyager 2's next message when it "phones home".

So, what happened? The spacecraft, which is nearly 20 billion kilometers away, seems to be doing fine. It's probably sending all kinds of communications back to Earth. But, the stream of data is bounding off into space instead of linking up with the Deep Space network. That's because a series of planned commands to Voyager 2 inadvertently caused the spacecraft to point its antenna 2 degrees away from Earth. Essentially, Voyager 2 and Earth are not in communication. They're "talking past" each other.

Comment: This comes just a week after: NASA briefly loses contact with ISS after power outage, relies on backup systems for first time - Russia's agency notified them of problem

Is something going on at NASA? Or is this just the nature of Space exploration? Bearing in mind that this follows a number of other notable accidents and errors, the majority of which NASA were responsible for overseeing: See also: China, Russia 'deploying space weapons to attack US satellites', Space Force chief claims following $3.7 billion budget increase

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Dig

Russian scientists grow watermelons in Antarctica


RT
Mon, 31 Jul 2023 19:41 UTC
russia melons antarctic research station vostok
© Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute (AARI)Watermelon growing at Russia's Vostok research station in Antarctica
The researchers hope to eventually be able to grow other fruits and wild berries at all polar bases

Russian polar explorers have successfully grown a batch of watermelons at the Vostok station in Antarctica, the coldest place on Earth, according to a statement published by the Arctic and Antarctic Research Institute (AARI).

"The results of the experiment are impressive - we managed to grow the southernmost watermelons in the most severe conditions of Antarctica," said leading AARI geophysicist Andrey Teplyakov, who led the project at the Vostok station. "The taste and aroma are no worse than the ones we have at home! The size of the fruits is up to 13 cm in diameter, and their weight is up to 1 kg," he said.

The experiment was a joint project between the AARI and the Agrophysical Research institute and the Institute of Biomedical Problems of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
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Magic Wand

Dormant 46,000-year-old nematode roundworm from Siberian permafrost brought back to life


Sputnik
Sun, 30 Jul 2023 09:50 UTC
Fossil rodent
© Sputnik International, 1920, 28.07.2023Fossil rodent burrow with herbaceous litter and seeds buried in permafrost deposits.
This microscopic female worm, now known as Panagrolaimus kolymaensis, was found in a state of suspended animation and later started reproducing in a laboratory dish.

Ancient 46,000-year-old roundworms from the Siberian permafrost called nematodes have been successfully revived by scientists. The discovery also revealed that the worm belongs to a new (or, in fact, old) species of nematode.

This remarkable revival serves a practical purpose beyond its "wow" factor. Scientists are interested in studying how these creatures enter a state of dormancy to survive extreme conditions.

Comment: See also: Of Flash Frozen Mammoths and Cosmic Catastrophes

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Info

New insights into the origin of the Indo-European languages


Max-Planck-Gesellschaft
Thu, 27 Jul 2023 00:59 UTC
Linguistics and genetics combine to suggest a new hybrid hypothesis for the origin of the Indo-European languages.
Indo-European languages
© P. Heggarty et al., Science (2023)A hybrid hypothesis for the origin and spread of the Indo-European languages. The language family began to diverge from around 8100 years ago, out of a homeland immediately south of the Caucasus. One migration reached the Pontic-Caspian and Forest Steppe around 7000 years ago, and from there subsequent migrations spread into parts of Europe around 5000 years ago.
An international team of linguists and geneticists led by researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig has achieved a significant breakthrough in our understanding of the origins of Indo-European, a family of languages spoken by nearly half of the world's population.

For over two hundred years, the origin of the Indo-European languages has been disputed. Two main theories have recently dominated this debate: the 'Steppe' hypothesis, which proposes an origin in the Pontic-Caspian Steppe around 6000 years ago, and the 'Anatolian' or 'farming' hypothesis, suggesting an older origin tied to early agriculture around 9000 years ago. Previous phylogenetic analyses of Indo-European languages have come to conflicting conclusions about the age of the family, due to the combined effects of inaccuracies and inconsistencies in the datasets they used and limitations in the way that phylogenetic methods analyzed ancient languages.

To solve these problems, researchers from the Department of Linguistic and Cultural Evolution at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology assembled an international team of over 80 language specialists to construct a new dataset of core vocabulary from 161 Indo-European languages, including 52 ancient or historical languages. This more comprehensive and balanced sampling, combined with rigorous protocols for coding lexical data, rectified the problems in the datasets used by previous studies.
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Archaeology

Fossil Friday: Another prediction vindicated

Günter Bechly
Evolution News
Fri, 28 Jul 2023 19:15 UTC
hominin tibia cut marks butchering cannibalism
© Pobiner et al. 2023Hominin tibia KNM-ER 741, after Fig. 1
In a recent article for Fossil Friday (Bechly 2023a) I discussed the controversial hominin taxon Homo habilis and said that "this ape-like creature was rather the animal prey of contemporary human hunters than a human ancestor and producer of stone tools." The virtual ink for this article had hardly dried when a story about a new discovery hit the news around the globe, reporting the earliest evidence of cannibalism by human ancestors about 1.45 million years ago (Bower 2023, Metcalfe 2023, Tozer 2023, Zhao 2023).

In 1970 the famous paleoanthropologist Mary Leakey discovered a fragment of a hominin tibia at the Koobi Fora locality in the Turkana region of Kenya. It was first considered as belonging to Australopithecus (Leakey 1971, Leakey & Leakey 1977), but later attributed to Homo erectus (Walker & Leakey 1993). However, Wood (2011) remarked about this fossil in the prestigious Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Human Evolution that its "current conventional taxonomic allocation is H. erectus or Hominin gen et sp. indet." and "because so little is known about the tibial morphology of early hominins other than Australopithecus afarensis it may be premature to rule out the possibility that it belongs to Homo habilis or Paranthropus boisei." Consequently, Pobiner et al. (2023) cautioned that "due to the taxonomic uncertainty of this fossil, we simply refer to it in this study as a hominin (hominin gen. et sp. indet)."
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Microscope 1

How an ultra-sensitive on-off switch helps axolotl salamander regrow limbs

Sarah C. P. Williams
The Scope
Wed, 26 Jul 2023 15:13 UTC
graphic cell regeneration
© Samantha
It's one of the mysteries of nature: How does the axolotl, a small salamander, boast a superhero-like ability to regrow nearly any part of its body? For years, scientists have studied the amazing regenerative properties of the axolotl to inform wound healing in humans.

Now, Stanford Medicine researchers have made a leap forward in understanding what sets the axolotl apart from other animals. Axolotls, they discovered, have an ultra-sensitive version of mTOR, a molecule that acts as an on-off switch for protein production. And, like survivalists who fill their basements with non-perishable food for hard times, axolotl cells stockpile messenger RNA molecules, which contain genetic instructions for producing proteins. The combination of an easily activated mTOR molecule and a repository of ready-to-use mRNAs means that after an injury, axolotl cells can quickly produce the proteins needed for tissue regeneration.

The new findings were published July 26 in Nature.
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Magnet

Room-temperature superconductor 'breakthrough' met with scepticism

Karmela Padavic-Callaghan
New Scientist
Wed, 26 Jul 2023 07:28 UTC
LK-99 superconductor
© Hyun-Tak Kim et al. (2023)LK-99 partially levitating
A team of researchers claims to have created the first materials that conduct electricity perfectly at room temperature and ambient pressure, but many physicists are highly sceptical. Speaking to New Scientist, Hyun-Tak Kim at the College of William & Mary in Virginia says he will support anyone trying to replicate his team's work.

Superconductors are materials through which electricity can move without encountering any resistance, and so would significantly cut down the energy costs of electronics. But for over a century, researchers have been unable to make them work except under extreme conditions like very low temperatures and remarkably high pressures.

Now, Kim and his colleagues claim to have made a material that is superconductive at room temperature and pressure.

If their claims hold up to scientific scrutiny, this new work would be truly extraordinary, so the burden of proof for the research team is equally exceptional. The fact that some previous reports of breakthroughs in superconductivity were later retracted and that other teams failed to replicate the results also raises the stakes.

To make the new material, called LK-99, Kim and his colleagues mixed several powdered compounds containing lead, oxygen, sulphur and phosphorus, then heated them at a high temperature for several hours. This made the powders chemically react and transform into a dark grey solid.
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Shamrock

Exquisitely preserved, 5 million year old fossil forest uncovered in Japan

Fiona MacDonald
Science Alert
Tue, 25 Jul 2023 09:26 UTC
fossil forest
© David Johnson/iStock/Getty Images PlusRepresentative image of a fossilized tree stump.
A beautifully preserved fossil forest uncovered on a river bank in Japan has been described in detail for the first time.

The rare site takes scientists one step closer to reconstructing an entire Eurasian plant from the late Miocene epoch, and filling in one of the many gaps in the botanical tree of life.

The late Miocene epoch stretched from around 10.4 to 5 million years ago, and the forest was located beneath what is now the Kiso River, north-east of Nagoya.

Comment: See also: When Antarctica was a rainforest

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Blue Planet

Experts have possible theory of why Indian Ocean has a 'gravity hole' where sea levels are 300ft lower

Jonathan Chadwick
The Daily Mail
Wed, 26 Jul 2023 19:13 UTC
indian ocean geoid low gravity iogl
© International Centre of Global Earth Models (ICGEM)Also known as a geoid, the gravity hole isn't a physical hole, but a region of the ocean where gravity is lower than average. The Indian Ocean geoid low (IOGL) is the deepest geoid on Earth
Indian Ocean has a 'gravity hole' where sea levels are 300ft lower - experts think they know why 7-8 minutes

Scientists have known about the existence of a 'gravity hole' in Indian Ocean for decades but have long been left puzzled as to why it exists.

Known officially as the 'Indian Ocean Geoid Low', it isn't a conventional physical hole, but rather a region of the ocean where gravity is lower than average. This dip in gravity means the water level is around 340 feet lower than the surrounding area - like a groove in a 'bumpy potato'.

Now, a team of researchers in India claim the gravity hole was formed by plumes of low-density magma that rose up from Earth's mantle.

These plumes were generated by the remains of a sunken tectonic plate called Tethys, lost when India became part of Asia 50 million years ago.

Comment: Missing mass - what is causing a geoid low in the Indian Ocean?

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