They thought it was a joke. A century ago, biologists could not believe that a one-celled creature had an eye. But since the warnowiid dinoflagellate was difficult to find and grow in the lab, detailed research was rare, until now. A team from the University of British Columbia gathered specimens off the coast of BC and Japan for a closer look. They found that the structure, called an ocelloid, has structures that mimic the complex eye of higher animals. Phys.Org says:

In fact, the 'ocelloid' within the planktonic predator looks so much like a complex eye that it was originally mistaken for the eye of an animal that the plankton had eaten.

"It's an amazingly complex structure for a single-celled organism to have evolved," said lead author Greg Gavelis, a zoology PhD student at UBC. "It contains a collection of sub-cellular organelles that look very much like the lens, cornea, iris and retina of multicellular eyes found in humans and other larger animals." [Emphasis added.]

Astonishment to Share

New Scientist shares the astonishment:

It is perhaps the most extraordinary eye in the living world — so extraordinary that no one believed the biologist who first described it more than a century ago.

Now it appears that the tiny owner of this eye uses it to catch invisible prey by detecting polarised light. This suggestion is also likely to be greeted with disbelief, for the eye belongs to a single-celled organism called Erythropsidinium. It has no nerves, let alone a brain. So how could it "see" its prey?

Proof-of-concept mouse experiment will have a long road before use in humans is possible.

Researchers have made eggs from the cells of male mice — and showed that, once fertilized and implanted into female mice, the eggs can develop into seemingly healthy, fertile offspring.

The approach, announced on 8 March at the Third International Summit on Human Genome Editing in London, has not yet been published and is a long way from being used in humans. But it is an early proof-of-concept for a technique that raises the possibility of a way to treat some causes of infertility — or even allow for single-parent embryos. "This is a significant advance with significant potential applications," says Keith Latham, a developmental biologist at Michigan State University in East Lansing.

The newly discovered asteroid 2023 DW could collide with Earth in February 2046, although the odds of an impact are low.
A newly discovered asteroid may make a perilously close approach to Earth about 20 years from now, with a roughly 1-in-600 chance that the space rock will collide directly with our planet, officials with NASA's Planetary Defense Coordination Office tweeted.

While that's a higher-than-average risk level for near-Earth asteroids, it's still a "very small chance" of impact, NASA wrote — and that risk level is expected to decline as clearer observations of the asteroid become available.

First detected on Feb. 27, the asteroid dubbed 2023 DW is estimated to measure about 165 feet (50 meters) in diameter, or roughly the length of an Olympic-size swimming pool. The asteroid is expected to make a very close approach to Earth on Feb. 14, 2046; as of March 8, the European Space Agency's Near-Earth Object Coordination Centre predicts a 1-in-625 chance of a direct impact, although those odds are being recalculated daily.

Soil animal communities in the tropics are driven by plant roots and the resources derived from them. This is the main finding of a new study of a research team led by the University of Göttingen, the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) and Leipzig University. Millions of small creatures toiling in a single hectare of soil including earthworms, springtails, mites, insects, and other arthropods are crucial for decomposition and soil health. For a long time, it has been believed that leaf litter is the primary resource for these animals. However, this recent study published in the journal Ecology Letters shows that litter doesn't play any crucial role at all for the tropical soil fauna.

The researchers isolated plots within natural ecosystems and separated the plots from accessing plant roots with a plastic barrier (a technique known as 'root trenching'). Their study included rainforest, as well as both rubber and oil palm plantations in Sumatra, Indonesia. As a comparison, they removed all dead leaves, the main resource of decomposer animals, from other experimental plots. They found that without living roots, animal abundance in the rainforest plots decreases by 42 percent and in plantations by 30 percent.

The Pentagon's secret operations branch is seeking capabilities to deploy "next generation" deep fakes in information warfare and hack the Internet of Things (IoT) to track their impact, a procurement document has revealed. The Intercept reported on the initiative on Monday.

The document in question outlines a technology wish list for US Special Operations Command (USSOCOM), which is responsible for Washington's clandestine military actions around the world. It was first published in 2020 and last updated in October 2022, adding tools that can falsify images of public figures to its desired inventory, according to the outlet.

The command's Military Information Support Operations (MISO) is seeking a "next generation of 'deep fake' or other similar technology to generate messages and influence operations via non-traditional channels in relevant peer/near peer environments," it states.

Deep-fake technology uses publicly available imagery to create a digital version of a person, which can then be used to fabricate footage. It is currently used mostly for entertainment, including the production of fake pornography featuring celebrities.

"We are seeing emissions from the shockwaves in the largest structures in the universe."
Scientists have discovered the first evidence of shockwaves rippling through the "cosmic web," a massive network of interweaving filaments that represents the largest structure in the universe.

The discovery represents tantalizing evidence of magnetic fields weaving through the gas, dust, and dark matter tendrils which link galaxies together.

Scientists first began to think that on the largest scales, the universe is ordered in a web-like pattern with filaments that cross vast voids in space and pull galaxies into clusters in the 1960s. Two decades later using computer modeling, researchers were able to determine what this vast universal network might look like for the first time.

Astronomers have since mapped the cosmic web with actual observations in the process answering questions about its structure. One element has remained frustratingly shrouded in mystery, however: The magnetic fields that may run throughout the cosmic web.

How long is the present? The answer, Cornell researchers suggest in a new study, depends on your heart.

They found that our momentary perception of time is not continuous but may stretch or shrink with each heartbeat.

The research builds evidence that the heart is one of the brain's important timekeepers and plays a fundamental role in our sense of time passing - an idea contemplated since ancient times, said Adam K. Anderson, professor in the Department of Psychology and in the College of Human Ecology (CHE).

"Time is a dimension of the universe and a core basis for our experience of self," Anderson said. "Our research shows that the moment-to-moment experience of time is synchronized with, and changes with, the length of a heartbeat."

Saeedeh Sadeghi, M.S. '19, a doctoral student in the field of psychology, is the lead author of "Wrinkles in Subsecond Time Perception are Synchronized to the Heart," published March 2 in the journal Psychophysiology. Anderson is a co-author with Eve De Rosa, the Mibs Martin Follett Professor in Human Ecology (CHE) and dean of faculty at Cornell, and Marc Wittmann, senior researcher at the Institute for Frontier Areas of Psychology and Mental Health in Germany.

Time perception typically has been tested over longer intervals, when research has shown that thoughts and emotions may distort our sense time, perhaps making it fly or crawl. Sadeghi and Anderson recently reported, for example, that crowding made a simulated train ride seem to pass more slowly.

Ford Global Technologies, a subsidiary of Ford Motor Company, has filed a patent for new "systems and methods to repossess a vehicle," including potentially locking certain features after missed payments.

A patent application published on February 23, describes a system in which a vehicle computer could be used to "disable functionality of a component of the vehicle or may place the vehicle in a lockout condition."

The application describes multiple possible implementations of this system, such as disabling "the air conditioning system, a remote key fob, and an automated door lock/unlock system," using the stereo to "emit an incessant and unpleasant sound every time the owner is present in the vehicle," and even using self-driving to technology to cause the vehicle to move to a place where it could be retrieved by the creditor:

In some cases, the vehicle can be a semi-autonomous vehicle and the repossession system computer may cooperate with the vehicle computer in the semi-autonomous vehicle to autonomously move the vehicle from a first spot to a second spot that is more convenient for a tow truck to tow the vehicle. The first spot may, for example, be located inside the property line of the owner (a garage or a driveway, for example) and the second spot may be outside the property line (a public road, for example).

In some other cases, the vehicle can be an autonomous vehicle and the repossession system computer may cooperate with the vehicle computer to autonomously move the vehicle from the premises of the owner to a location such as, for example, the premises of the repossession agency, the premises of the lending institution, an impound pound, or any other pre-designated location.

Supercomputer simulations on Frontera reveal the origins of ultra-massive black holes, the most massive objects thought to exist in the entire universe.

Ultra-massive black holes are the most massive objects in the universe. Their mass can reach millions and billions of solar masses. Supercomputer simulations on Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC)'s Frontera supercomputer have helped astrophysicists reveal the origin of ultra-massive black holes formed about 11 billion years ago.

"We found that one possible formation channel for ultra-massive black holes is from the extreme merger of massive galaxies that are most likely to happen in the epoch of the 'cosmic noon,'" said Yueying Ni, a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

A terrestrial planet hovering between Mars and Jupiter would be able to push Earth out of the solar system and wipe out life on this planet, according to a UC Riverside experiment.
UCR astrophysicist Stephen Kane explained that his experiment was meant to address two notable gaps in planetary science.

The first is the gap in our solar system between the size of terrestrial and giant gas planets. The largest terrestrial planet is Earth, and the smallest gas giant is Neptune, which is four times wider and 17 times more massive than Earth. There is nothing in between.

"In other star systems there are many planets with masses in that gap. We call them super-Earths," Kane said.

The other gap is in location, relative to the sun, between Mars and Jupiter. "Planetary scientists often wish there was something in between those two planets. It seems like wasted real estate," he said.

These gaps could offer important insights into the architecture of our solar system, and into Earth's evolution. To fill them in, Kane ran dynamic computer simulations of a planet between Mars and Jupiter with a range of different masses, and then observed the effects on the orbits of all other planets.

The results, published in the Planetary Science Journal, were mostly disastrous for the solar system. "This fictional planet gives a nudge to Jupiter that is just enough to destabilize everything else," Kane said. "Despite many astronomers having wished for this extra planet, it's a good thing we don't have it."