Here's a mysterious truth that scientists have known since 1983: Protons and neutrons act differently when they're inside an atom, versus floating freely through space. Specifically, the subatomic particles that make up those protons and neutrons, called quarks, slow down massively once they're confined to a nucleus in an atom.

Physicists really didn't like this, because neutrons are neutrons whether they're inside an atom or not. And protons are protons. Both protons and neutrons (which together make up the class of particles called "nucleons") are made up of three smaller particles, called quarks, bound together by the strong force.

"When you put quarks into a nucleus, they start to move slower, and that is very weird," said study co-author Or Hen, a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. That's strange because the powerful interactions between quarks mainly determine their speed, whereas forces that bind the nucleus (and also act on quarks inside the nucleus) are supposed to be very weak, Hen added.

And there's no other known force that should be modifying the behavior of quarks in a nucleus so intensely. Yet, the effect remains: Particle physicists call it the EMC effect, named for the European Muon Collaboration, the group that discovered it. And until recently, scientists weren't sure what caused it.

Two particles in a nucleus are typically pulled together by a force of around 8 million electron volts (8 MeV), a measure of energy in particles. Quarks in a proton or neutron are bound together by about 1,000 MeV. So it doesn't make sense that the comparatively mild interactions of the nucleus are dramatically impacting the powerful interactions inside quarks, Hen told Live Science.

"What is eight next to 1,000?" he said.

But the EMC effect doesn't look like a mild nudge from an outside force. Though it varies from one sort of nucleus to the next, "It's not like half a percent. The effect pops out of the data once you are creative enough to design an experiment to look for it," Hen said.

This is a tale of five documents. To help keep them straight I will introduce the documents here, followed by a shorthand designation for each. The many human actors will remain in the shadows as much as possible so as to avoid introducing personality issues.

1. Mike Behe's new book, Darwin Devolves. (Behe's book)
2. Review article in the journal Science, "A biochemist's crusade to overturn evolution misrepresents theory and ignores evidence," by Lents, Swamidass, and Lenski. (Review)
3. "Real-Time Evolution of New Genes by Innovation, Amplification, and Divergence," by Joakim Näsvall et al., Science 338:384, 2012. (Näsvall et al.)
4. For a brief overview see "New Genes Arise via Innovation, Amplification, Divergence," by Andersson and Näsvall," Microbe 8(4):166-179, 2013. (Overview)
5. "Reductive evolution can prevent populations from taking simple adaptive paths to high fitness" Gauger et al., BIO-Complexity 2010(2):1-9. (Our paper)

The dispute started when the review in Science proposed the 2012 article by Näsvall et al. as evidence against Behe's book.

A short article at Evolution News then criticized Näsvall et al. by quoting an excerpt from the book Heretic. This excerpt argued that Näsvall's carefully controlled experiment didn't supply proof that unguided evolution could produce entirely new functions. As I explain below, I agree with this basic point. However, the excerpt also included a discussion of our paper on reductive evolution, highlighting it as showing the limits of evolutionary processes. That is fine on its own. Nevertheless, in the context of the Evolution News article, this second part of the excerpt might be misleading. Some people might think our article was intended to refute Näsvall et al. As I will explain shortly, it wasn't, because it used different methodology. Then I'd like to add to the argument about why Näsvall et al. does not refute Mike Behe's book.

A research group from RIKEN and Kyushu University has developed a new type of material, based on ethylene, which exhibits a number of useful properties such as self-healing and shape memory. Remarkably, some of the materials can spontaneously self-heal even in water or acidic and alkali solutions. The new material is based on ethylene, a compound that is the source of much of the plastic in use today.
Materials that can self-heal have become a popular area of research during the last decade, and a variety of materials have been developed. However, most of the self-healing materials reported to date have relied on sophisticated designs that incorporate chemical mechanisms into polymer networks, such as irreversible or reversible covalent-bond formation, hydrogen bonding, metal-ligand interactions, or ionic interactions. As a result, they require some external stimulus, such as heat or pressure, to prompt them to heal, and in most cases, they do not function in water, acid or alkaline solutions because the chemical networks cannot survive such conditions. The ideal is to create a material that possesses sufficient toughness and can autonomously self-heal under various conditions.

So says Stephen L. Talbott in The Organism's Story (January 2019) at Nature Institute:

Organisms are purposive ("teleological") beings. Nothing could be more obvious. The fact of the matter is so indisputable that even those who don't believe it really do believe it. Philosopher of biology Robert Arp speaks for biology as a whole when he writes,

"Thinkers cannot seem to get around [evolutionary biologist Robert] Trivers' claim that "even the humblest creature, say, a virus, appears organized to do something; it acts as if it is trying to achieve some purpose", or [political philosopher Larry] Arnhart's observation that . . . "Reproduction, growth, feeding, healing, courtship, parental care for the young - these and many other activities of organisms are goal-directed".¹"

And yet, despite his acknowledgment that we "cannot get around" this truth, Arp again speaks for almost the entire discipline of biology when he tries, with some delicacy, to take it all back: "with respect to organisms, it is useful to think as if these entities have traits and processes that function in goal-directed ways" (his emphasis). This as if is a long-running cliché, designed to warn us that the organism's purposive behavior is somehow deceptive - not quite what it seems. The goal-directedness is, in the conventional terminology, merely apparent or illusory. Certainly it must not be seen as having any relation at all to human purposive activity - an odd insistence given how eager so many biologists are to make sure we never forget that the human being is "just another animal".

When Becky Evans started studying cat-human relationships, she kept hearing, over and over again, about how cats are psychopaths.

On one hand, anyone who has looked into the curiously blank face of a catloaf knows exactly what that means. But also, exactly what does it mean to apply a human mental diagnosis to felines? We let these clawed creatures into our homes and our beds, but we still have trouble understanding them on anything but our own human terms.

Evans, a psychology graduate student at the University of Liverpool, recently devised a survey for owners who think that their cats are psychopaths. The survey asks owners to describe the allegedly psychopathic behaviors, and so far they have included bullying other pets, taking over the dog's bed, and waiting on the kitchen counter to pounce on unsuspecting family members. In short, pretty typical cat behavior.

These answers get at the tricky semantics of calling a cat a "psychopath" when it is just ... a cat. There's always an implicit comparison when we talk about cats as aloof little jerks, says Mikel Maria Delgado, a postdoctoral researcher on cat behavior at the University of California at Davis. And that comparison is with dogs, which humans have spent thousands more years domesticating and molding in our image.

We like things that remind us of us," Delgado told me. "We like smiling. We like dogs doing what we tell them. We like that they attend to us very quickly. They make a lot of eye contact.

Cats, she pointed out, simply don't have the facial muscles to make the variety of expressions a dog (or human) can. So when we look at a cat staring at us impassively, it looks like a psychopath who cannot feel or show emotion. But that's just its face. Cats communicate not with facial expressions but through the positions of their ears and tails. Their emotional lives can seem inscrutable-and even nonexistent-until you spend a lot of time getting to know one.

A species of giant tortoise thought to have gone extinct over a century ago was found on the Galapagos island of Fernandina, stunning researchers and bringing hope to conservationists.

According to Ecuador's Ministry of the Environment, the female Fernandina Giant Tortoise found Sunday is likely over 100 years old. While genetic tests are still being conducted, the experts at the Giant Tortoise Restoration Initiative (GTRI) say they have made the first confirmed sighting of the species since 1906.

The world's two most innovative companies this year are both from Asia, with Chinese tech platform Meituan Dianping unseating 2018 champion and Silicon Valley giant Apple, according to ratings by US business magazine Fast Company.

While Washington keeps saying that Beijing is stealing its technology and uses this mantra to justify the ongoing trade war, the Chinese "transactional super app" claimed top spot among 50 of the most innovative companies in the world. It is the first time that a non-US company has emerged on top since Fast Company started running the rankings in 2008.

In its "definitive list of who matters in 2019," Fast Company gave the crown to Beijing-based Meituan Dianping, which was making its debut in the ratings. The app-based service expedites the booking and delivery of services such as hotel stays, movie tickets, and food.

The Chinese platform was followed by Singapore-based Grab, which forced American rival Uber out of the region in 2018 and acquired its local operations. The company now not only includes ride-hailing, ride-sharing services, food delivery and travel booking, but also offers its 130 million users financial services and will soon add healthcare services. Grab hit $1 billion in revenue last year and is likely to expand further after it managed to attract more than $3 billion in fresh funding.

After months of complaints by the US administration that China is stealing intellectual property from companies in the United States, a picture of a Chinese fighter jet has been publicized on social media featuring key technology systems developed for the American F-35.

Critics have previously noted that the Chengdu J-20 is all but a mirror copy of Lockheed Martin's F-22, an air superiority aircraft that is no longer in production. According to a report by the Washington Times, an anonymous user recently posted new images of the J-20 on Chinese military websites showing two key technologies that have long been touted as unique features of US fighter aircraft.

One of the technologies that apparently originated in the United States was the Distributed Aperture System (DAS), which is supposed to be one of the F-35's most important sensors (the aircraft itself is often colloquially described as a flying computer). DAS has been billed by advocates as a revolutionary capability allowing a pilot to see exactly what's going on 360 degrees around the aircraft - all but eliminating blind spots.

Earth might have a dizzying array of life forms, but our biology ultimately remains a solitary data point - we simply don't have a reference for life based on DNA different from our own. Now, scientists have taken matters into their hands to push the boundaries on what life could be like.

Research funded by NASA and led by the Foundation for Applied Molecular Evolution in the US has led to the creation of an entirely new flavour of the DNA double helix, one that has an additional four nucleotide bases.

It's being called hachimoji DNA (from the Japanese words for 'eight letters') and it includes two new pairs to add to the existing partnerships of adenine (A) paired with thymine (T), and guanine (G) with cytosine (C).

This work to expand on nature's own genetic recipe might sound a little familiar. The same scientists already successfully squeezed in two new letters in 2011. Only last year yet another version of an extended alphabet, also with six letters, was made to function inside a living organism.

Now, in what might seem like a case of overachievement, researchers have gone back to the drawing board to develop even more non-standard nucleotides.

They have a purpose for doubling the number of codes in the recipe book, though.

The spacecraft is on a mission to collect material that could provide clues to the origin of life and the solar system.

17 hours ago The asteroid is about 900 metres in diameter and 280 million kilometres from Earth [JAXA via AP] more on Japan

A Japanese spacecraft has successfully touched down on an asteroid some 280 million kilometres from the Earth, on a mission to collect material that could provide clues about the origin of life and the solar system.