A miniature brain grown in a lab from human stem cells has developed a mind of its own - or at least enough awareness to send out neural 'tendrils' to connect to the spinal cord and muscle tissue of a mouse, then flex that muscle.

"We like to think of them as mini-brains on the move," said Madeline Lancaster of Cambridge University, who led the experiment with the Medical Research Council's Laboratory of Molecular Biology and published the results in Nature: Neuroscience.

The mini-brain is their most sophisticated "organoid" yet, approaching the complexity of a 12-16 week old fetus' brain. While the researchers claim it's "too small and primitive to have anything approaching thoughts, feelings or consciousness," there's no accurate way to measure consciousness, and the "organoid" has a couple million neurons - meaning it's operating with the same grey matter equipment as the average cockroach.

After placing a tiny 1mm-long piece of spinal cord and back muscle from a mouse next to the germinating brain-blob, the researchers watched (presumably in awe) as the brain shot out neuronal connections to intertwine with the spine, eventually sending out electrical impulses and causing the mouse muscle to twitch.

According to seismologists, Vancouver Island is overdue for a magnitude 7 earthquake and has entered a period of time where an additional magnitude 9 mega-thrust rupture earthquake, likely to cause a tsunami, can be expected.

"In our part of the world, there are the big Pacific and North American [tectonic] plates, and caught in-between the two is the Juan de Fuca plate system," says Taimi Mulder, seismologist at the Geological Survey of Canada (GSC), which monitors all seismic activity in Western Canada.

Over millions of years, these plates push and grind under and past each other in areas called subduction zones. Earthquakes are caused and can be tiny or they can be massive, like the 2004 Sumatran earthquake, which ruptured 1,000 kilometres of coastline.

"An earthquake is like ringing a bell. The earthquake is the clapper that sets it off and the bell reverberates," said Mulder. "In an earthquake, energy is sent shooting in all directions and it pings around inside the earth making the whole earth vibrate."

Magnitude 4 or 5 earthquakes will likely wake you up, while a 7 will result in toppled bookcases and fallen chimneys. Thanks to B.C.'s stringent building code, structural collapse is not expected in magnitude 7s. Magnitude 8 or 9s have the same severity of shaking as a 7, but their duration lasts longer, often over 2 or 3 minutes. They cause structural building damage and ruptured gas lines, often causing fire.

During development, cells seem to decode their fate through optimal information processing, which could hint at a more general principle of life.

In 1891, when the German biologist Hans Driesch split two-cell sea urchin embryos in half, he found that each of the separated cells then gave rise to its own complete, albeit smaller, larva. Somehow, the halves "knew" to change their entire developmental program: At that stage, the blueprint for what they would become had apparently not yet been drawn out, at least not in ink.

Since then, scientists have been trying to understand what goes into making this blueprint, and how instructive it is. (Driesch himself, frustrated at his inability to come up with a solution, threw up his hands and left the field entirely.) It's now known that some form of positional information makes genes variously switch on and off throughout the embryo, giving cells distinct identities based on their location. But the signals carrying that information seem to fluctuate wildly and chaotically - the opposite of what you might expect for an important guiding influence.

When it comes to health, race can be a double-edged sword.

On one hand, it's a dismal fact that being in certain ethnic groups is a sentence to poorer health. For example, a 2018 study of nearly 900,000 cases of lung, breast, bowel and prostate cancer found black patients had the lowest survival rates.

Some of that miserable outlook may be socio-economic, including less social support and access to healthcare, and more risk factors such as smoking. But part of the problem is biology.

Race can influence how invasive a cancer is and how well it does with treatment. A February 2019 study, for example, found African American men were more likely to have genes that predict aggressive prostate cancer.

But, and here's the upside, armed with a person's ethnicity doctors can get a jump on the problem with targeted screening and treatment. It's all part of the push for "precision medicine" that, in theory, works better because it is tailored to the individual.

A new study, however, led by Rick Kittles at the City of Hope Comprehensive Cancer Centre in Duarte, California, US, puts something of a spanner in those precision works.

The team decided to take a fresh look at a key research tool for targeted medicine: so-called "immortal" cell lines. These are cells, often sourced from human cancers, that replicate indefinitely and are crucial for modelling disease. They can be used to test, for instance, the effectiveness and toxicity of cancer drugs.

But there's a catch.

Because ethnicity is a risk factor for some cancers, it's essential the cell lines come from racially diverse groups to guide treatment across the divide. Kittles' team decided to test 15 commercially available cell lines to see if their ethnicity, as claimed by suppliers, squared with their genetic ancestry.

To do that, they used methods similar to those of the genealogy companies 23andMe and Ancestry.com. For a fee, those outfits take a spit sample and tell you whether your forebears were Manchurian, Iberian or perhaps Native American.

In 1962, Brian D. Josephson, a 22-year-old graduate student at England's Cambridge University, born on January 4, 1940, in Cardiff, Wales, predicted that electrical current would flow, or tunnel, between two superconducting materials - things that at low temperatures lack electrical resistance, even when they are separated by a non-superconductor, or insulator.

In quantum physics, matter can be described as both waves and particles. Emerging from this is the phenomenon of tunnelling, which sees particles pass through barriers that according to classic physics should be impassable.

Josephson's tunnelling theory was later confirmed, and in 1973 he was one of three scientists who shared the Nobel Prize in physics. (The others were Leo Esaki and Ivar Giaever)

This tunnelling phenomenon is today known as the "Josephson effect", an important piece of evidence in the ongoing development of superconductivity.

He went on to make several other discoveries, including those leading to the development of the "Josephson junction switch", which allows extreme high-speed switching on the molecular level. The junctions are the key components in superconducting quantum interference devices (SQUIDs), widely used to make extremely sensitive measurements of magnetic fields.

A new paper in PNAS confirms that the Cambrian explosion cannot be denied. Paterson, Edgecombe, and Lee report:

The abrupt first appearance of a multitude of animal fossils in early Cambrian rocks (Terreneuvian to Series 2; ca. 541-509 Ma) epitomizes one of the most significant evolutionary events in Earth's history. This sudden burst of diversity and abundance across most eumetazoan (especially bilaterian) phyla over a relatively short geologic time span, and lack of obvious Precambrian precursors, poses a conundrum when attempting to reconcile the fossil record with the true tempo of early animal evolution. [Emphasis added.]

It's important to note that the "true tempo of early animal evolution" exists in evolutionists' imaginations, not in the rocks. They write:

Fast evolutionary rates during the early Cambrian have been used to explain the rapid emergence of animals, providing support for a more literal reading of the fossil record.

Translated into active voice verbs, what they are saying is: "We Darwinians explain the rapid emergence of animals by speeding up the rate of evolution." Their proposal might make Darwin the gradualist uncomfortable, but it allows them to be "fossil literalists." But how far can the pace of Darwinian evolution be adjusted?

This is the second in a series of posts responding to the extended critique of Darwin Devolves by Richard Lenski at his blog, Telliamed Revisited. Professor Lenski is perhaps the most qualified scientist in the world to analyze the arguments of my book. He is the Hannah Distinguished Professor of Microbial Ecology at Michigan State University, a MacArthur ("Genius Award") Fellow, and a member of the National Academy of Sciences. With hundreds of publications, he also has a strong interest in the history and philosophy of science. His own laboratory evolution work is a central focus of the book. I am very grateful to Professor Lenski for taking time to assess Darwin Devolves. His comments will allow interested readers to quickly gauge the relative strength of arguments against the book's thesis.

In my first post I responded (out of order) to Professor Lenski's second post, which discussed the polar bear genome. I showed that, regarding my argument that the polar bear's more efficient lipid metabolism (compared to the brown bear) arose by degradative mutations, his skepticism was unfounded. Briefly, the APOB gene of polar bears is mutated with changes that were predicted by computer methods to be damaging. A 1995 study showed that a mouse model that had one copy of the APOB gene knocked out actually had lower plasma cholesterol levels and increased resistance to hypercholesterolemia from a high fat diet. If the polar bear mutations acted to lower the activity of its own APOB, a result similar to that for the mouse might be expected. Thus there is no good reason to speculate about new functions, as Professor Lenski and others did.

A new paper in the journal Nature reads like a veiled message to China.

Several of the world's leading CRISPR scientists and bioethicists are calling for a global moratorium on editing human genes that can be passed on from parents to children.

In a new Nature commentary, published Wednesday, Feng Zhang and Emmanuelle Charpentier - two discoverers of the revolutionary CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing system - along with MIT biologist Eric Lander and 15 other researchers from around the world, outlined the urgent need to put a pause on the editing of sperm, eggs, and embryos - known as the human germline - to create genetically modified babies until countries agree on the best way forward.

Earth is a less volatile version of the sun, according to Canberra scientists who are working to address one of the most important missing pieces of information in determining whether other planets could be habitable.

The Australian National University team found Earth was made of the same elements as the sun, but compared to the star at the centre of the solar system, our planet had less of the volatile elements like hydrogen, helium, oxygen and nitrogen.

Dr Haiyang Wang led the study, which made the most comprehensive estimate yet of the composition of Earth and the sun.

He said the researchers carried out the work as part of their aim to create a new tool that could measure the elemental composition of other stars and the rocky planets that orbit them.

"The composition of a rocky planet is one of the most important missing pieces in our efforts to find out whether a planet is habitable or not," Dr Wang said.

Other rocky planets in the universe, like Earth, are de-volatised pieces of their host stars.

By exposing mice to a unique combination of light and sound, MIT neuroscientists have shown that they can improve cognitive and memory impairments similar to those seen in Alzheimer's patients.

This noninvasive treatment, which works by inducing brain waves known as gamma oscillations, also greatly reduced the number of amyloid plaques found in the brains of these mice. Plaques were cleared in large swaths of the brain, including areas critical for cognitive functions such as learning and memory.

"When we combine visual and auditory stimulation for a week, we see the engagement of the prefrontal cortex and a very dramatic reduction of amyloid," says Li-Huei Tsai, director of MIT's Picower Institute for Learning and Memory and the senior author of the study.