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What fossil plants say about the evolution of life, and more…
Is our universe inside a black hole? New evidence from JWST galaxy imagesNew images from the James Webb Space Telescope of distant galaxies could support a mind-bending idea: that our universe was born in a black hole. The images show more of these galaxies spin clockwise, than counterclockwise. Lior Shamir, a computational astrophysicist from Kansas State University, says that may mean our universe inherited the spin of the black hole we’re currently living in, though he thinks its more likely that there’s something wrong with how we’re measuring objects in deep space. The study is published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Modern-day Antarctic explorers go where no-one has gone beforeCBC Reporter Susan Ormiston spent a month on the Canadian Navy ship HMCS Margaret Brooke as it took a team of 15 scientists on a research trip to Antarctica. She brings us the story of Kevin Wilcox, a researcher using an uncrewed sonar vehicle to map the previously inaccessible near-shore waters of the icy continent.Finding out what juvenile sea turtles do during their ‘lost years’Once baby sea turtles swim away from their natal beaches, they enter what marine biologists call their “lost years,” a time of critical growth spent wandering the open sea. A new study is filling in the picture of what they do during this time. The research, led by marine ecologist Katrina Phillips, involved playing a game of oceanic hide and seek to find and track over 100 sea turtles as they moved through the ocean. The work was published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.Concrete plans to transform cement production’s CO2 waste into new building materialsCement production is responsible for five to eight per cent of global carbon dioxide emissions. A new study suggests that waste could be made into even more construction materials. Inspired by the way sea creatures build shells, Allesandro Rotto Loria — a civil and environmental engineer from Northwestern University — says they can use CO2 to boost the process to produce carbon-negative materials that could be used in materials like plaster, cement and as a replacement for sand in concrete. Their research is in the journal Advanced Sustainable Systems. A Dinosaur expert goes green — with a deep look at plant evolutionPaleontologist Riley Black has authored several books on dinosaurs. But she realized she had been neglecting the organisms that made dinosaurs – and all other animals – possible: plants. Her new book, When the Earth Was Green: Plants, Animals, and Evolution's Greatest Romance, looks at how plant fossils are telling the billion-years old tale of the evolution of complex life on Earth, from creating the oxygen that we breathe, to coaxing us out of the water and onto land, and even forming the forests that humans evolved in, which shaped our very anatomy from long arms and grippy toes.
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The silent, long-term effects of COVID, and more...
Watching polar bear mums and cubs emerge from their winter densPolar Bear mothers spend the winter in warm and cozy dens, gestating and then birthing their cubs, and right about now the baby bears are taking their first steps out of the dens and beginning to explore the real world. Using satellite collars and remote camera technology, researchers from Polar Bears International, the Norwegian Polar Institute, and the San Diego Wildlife alliance, now have an exciting new picture of how and when they leave their winter refuges. The team included Louise Archer, Polar Bears International Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto Scarborough, and their observations were published in The Journal of Wildlife Management.Lousy sleep? It’s quality, not quantity that may be your problemResearchers from the University of Toronto Mississauga have compared sleep in modern, industrial societies with non-industrialised societies, such as remote tribes in Tanzania and the Amazon. The team, led by anthropologist David Samson, found that people in modern societies sleep for significantly longer, but have weaker natural circadian rhythms, and so their sleep is not as functional as it should be. The researchers say that could be because people in industrial societies have lost touch with cues that regulate our circadian rhythms, like light and temperature changes. The results were published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.Greenhouse gases are messing up low-earth orbit for satellitesWhile greenhouse gases are warming the Earth’s surface, they’re paradoxically cooling the upper atmosphere, causing it to contract. And this means trouble for low-earth orbit as space junk and defunct satellites are not running into the tenuous atmosphere and falling out of orbit as fast as they used to. This is making low earth orbit more crowded, and more dangerous. William Parker, a PhD candidate at MIT, led this research, which was published in the journal Nature Sustainability.A 3.5 billion year old crater in Australia is telling the story of the early EarthResearchers have discovered shattered rock in an area of rolling hills in Western Australia that they think is evidence of an enormous and ancient asteroid impact. This would be the oldest evidence of an impact crater preserved on Earth, and could tell us about how the surface of our planet was formed, and even how the conditions for life were created. Chris Kirkland, a professor of Geology at Curtain University in Perth Australia, was co-lead on this research with Dr. Tim Johnson. Their work was published in the journal Nature Communications.Beyond long COVID — how reinfections could be causing silent long term organ damageIt’s now been five years since the COVID pandemic stopped the world in its tracks. The virus is still with us, and continues to make people sick. As many as 1 in 5 Canadians have experienced symptoms of long COVID, but scientists are finding that beyond that, each infection can also lead to long term silent cellular and organ damage. David Putrino, who’s been studying COVID’s long term effects at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York City, says even mild or asymptomatic COVID infections can lead to a wide range of silent long term heath impacts — compromising our immune, vascular, circulatory, renal, metabolic, gastrointestinal systems and even cognitive function.
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The recipe for finding life on other planets, and more...
Big birds with bitty brains are still kind of brightWe’ve learned a lot about the remarkable intelligence of birds like crows and parrots, but not much work has been done on large flightless birds. A new study that explored the problem-solving abilities of emus, ostriches and rheas suggests that some of these birdy behemoths have impressive cognition too. In a first-of-its-kind study, a team led by University of Bristol’s Fay Clark trained the birds to use puzzles to get food, and they found that the rheas and emus were able to solve the puzzle easily, though the ostriches did not. The research was published in the journal Scientific Reports.Cows jump over the moon — maybe humans should tooResearchers have done a lot of work to try and understand how astronauts can best prepare for and compensate for the muscle and bone atrophy that they will experience after long periods in zero G. A new study, led by Marco Chiaberge at Johns Hopkins University, suggests that a workout that includes jumping might be beneficial. The researchers found that by training mice to repeatedly jump up from one level to another increased their knee cartilage thickness by 26 per cent. The research was published in the journal npj Microgravity.Mary had a little lamb – 11,000 years agoSheep are among the animals that humans domesticated first, in the middle east during the dawn of agriculture. A new genetic study of hundreds of ancient sheep remains, which date across 12 millennia, is shedding light on the intertwined history of sheep and humans. The work, led by geneticist Dan Bradley of Trinity College Dublin, tells the story of how the sheep’s domestication not only gave us clothes but also milk and meat which fueled our spread around the world for thousands of years, and how humans molded sheep by selecting them for colour and wool. The research was published in the journal Science.A tiny great ape lived in Europe 12 million years agoThe tiniest member of the great ape family — the group that today includes the chimpanzees, orangutans, bonobos, gorillas, and us — has been identified from fossils found in Germany. Nearly 12 million years ago, the 10-kilogram animal would have shared its environment with another, larger great ape species, something researchers didn’t think was possible. David Begun, a paleoanthropologist at the University of Toronto, said its two fossilized teeth and a single knee bone indicated that Buronius manfredschmidi had its own ecological niche high up in the trees. The study was published in the journal PLOS One. The recipe for finding life on other planetsIn the last two decades we’ve discovered literally thousands of planets orbiting nearby stars. And our technology has advanced to the point where we’re on the cusp of being able to investigate whether there’s life on those planets. We speak to astrophysicist Lisa Kaltenegger, the founder of Cornell University’s Carl Sagan Institute, about her work trying to answer that question, and her book Alien Earths: Planet Hunting in the Cosmos.
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Is it Dark Energy, or is time just different in space? And more…
Scientists are recruiting elephant seals to learn more about the oceans’ twilight zoneBelow about 200 metres there’s still a lot going on in the ocean, but it’s tremendously hard to observe and understand even with modern technology. Scientists from the University of California, Santa Cruz have maintained a long-term monitoring study of elephant seals. The team, including PhD candidate Allison Payne, has discovered they can use the seals as scientific sentinels, to help humans better understand the conditions of the dark deep sea. The research was published in the journal Science.A cave in Poland reveals a grisly history of stone-age cannibalismA detailed study of the remains of ten individuals who lived — and died — 18,000 years ago in Poland has revealed that they were butchered and probably eaten as the final act in a prehistoric conflict. Characteristic cut marks on their skulls and bones show that they were systematically de-fleshed, before their fragmented remains were tossed aside. This research was led by Francesc Marginedas, a PhD candidate at the Catalan Institute of Human Palaeo-ecology and Social Evolution in Tarragona, Spain. Their research was published in Scientific Reports.Our ears are weird. Is that just because they’re gills?Evolution tends to repurpose things, even as it massively transforms organisms outwardly. A fascinating example is the new finding that the unique cartilage in our external ears seems to have once been gill tissue from our ancient fish ancestors. Gage Crump from the University of Southern California made the discovery using a series of gene-editing experiments on zebrafish. The research was published in the journal Nature.Rabbits replenish their calcium by digesting their teethRabbit teeth constantly grow during the life of the rodents, which means they need calcium to regrow them. A new study suggests that one of the ways rabbits supply calcium for their teeth is by ingesting and recycling the tooth material that grinds off as they chew. Dr. Johanna Mäkitaipale is a veterinary orthopedic surgeon and a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki, Finland. She led this research that was published in The Veterinary Journal.Is dark energy dying? A new theory suggests that the universe has different time zonesFor more than two decades, cosmologists have been invoking the idea of a mysterious dark energy to explain observations that appeared to show an acceleration in the expansion of the universe. But more recent observations are adding weight to a different theory that does away with the dark energy. Ryan Ridden, an astronomer from the University of Canterbury, said the “timescape theory” suggests time simply runs differently in the large empty regions of the universe. Their study is in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
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How AI is transforming science, and more...
As soon as the last ice age glaciers melted, Indigenous people occupied this siteA recently discovered archaeological site in Saskatchewan, dated to just less than 11,000 years ago is the oldest settlement in the region by about 1,500 years. It also is evidence that Indigenous people settled there as soon as the environment could support them after the glaciers disappeared. Glenn Stuart, from the University of Saskatchewan, is one of the archaeologists working along with local Indigenous community members to preserve and study the site.Just the right magnetic field will make sea turtles do a ‘happy dance’Researchers investigating how sea turtles navigate the vast and trackless ocean have discovered just how sensitive the reptiles’ magnetic sense is, as they can even use it to identify the location of food resources. While feeding the loggerhead turtles in the lab, Kayla Goforth, a postdoctoral researcher at Texas A&M University noticed that the turtles would perform a ‘happy dance’ when they recognized the right magnetic signature. She led this research that was published in the journal Nature.Intense exercise causes our bodies to belch out DNA that may reduce inflammationScientists were surprised to discover that the more intensely you exercise, the more certain immune cells belch out fragments of DNA that can form webs to trap pathogens, and lead to fewer pro-inflammatory immune cells circulating in our blood. Canadian researcher Stephen Montgomery, a professor of pathology at Stanford University, said their findings suggest that circulating cell-free DNA may play a role in how exercise lowers inflammation in the body. The study was published in the journal PNAS. An ancient Antarctic duck lived at the time of T-RexBirds are the last surviving lineage of dinosaurs, but modern birds are surprisingly ancient – dating to before the extinction of the rest of their family. An extremely rare, nearly intact bird skull found in Antarctica and dated to about 69 million years ago confirms this. This waterfowl had similarities to ducks and loons. Chris Torres is an assistant professor at the University of the Pacific in Stockton California and was part of the team that analyzed this fossil. Their research was published in the journal Nature.Science is being transformed by the AI revolutionThe stunning advances in artificial intelligence that we see with internet AI apps are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to science. Researchers from almost every field are experimenting with this powerful new tool to diagnose disease, understand climate change, develop strategies for conservation and discover new kinds of materials. And AI is on the threshold of being able to make discoveries all by itself. Will it put scientists out of a job?Producer Amanda Buckiewicz spoke with:Jeff Clune, a professor of computer science at the University of British Columbia, a Canada CIFAR AI Chair at the Vector Institute, and a senior research advisor to DeepMind. He’s also a co-author of The AI Scientist.Allison Noble, a Professor of Biomedical Engineering at the University of Oxford and a Foreign Secretary at the Royal Society, and chair of the Science in the Age of AI working group.Elissa Strome, executive director of the Pan-Canadian Artificial Intelligence Strategy at CIFAR.Cong Lu, postdoctoral research and teaching fellow at the University of British Columbia and the Vector Institute, and a co-author of The AI Scientist.Fred Morstatter, a research assistant professor at the University of Southern California, and a principal scientist at USC's Information Sciences Institute.
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