science

Scientists investigating video of a cow using tools, and later conducting some basic psychology experiments on said cow, say their findings could expand the list of animals capable of tool use.

...While subducting slabs are known to transport water into the mantle, scientists have long assumed that most hydrous minerals dehydrate at high temperatures, releasing fluids as they descend...

...the researchers conducted free-energy calculations and found that the dehydration of δ-AlOOH is both energetically and kinetically unfavorable under deep lower mantle conditions. Because water exists as superionic ice rather than free fluid, the conventional dehydration mechanism is effectively suppressed.

As a result, water from Earth's early stages or carried into the mantle by subduction may be preserved over geological timescales, accumulating as a long-term water reservoir near the base of the mantle...

In our latest attempts to make lab rats immortal, a new compound has been shown to reverse late stage Alzheimer's disease in lab mice. This is a rare case where the title isn't even clickbait.

Scientists are considering the idea that our perception of reality is shaped not only by our senses but by our brains creating an internal map or model of the world around us.

This means our perception of what’s true or real is malleable, and we are at risk of losing our grasp on it. The result can be tragedies like the Jonestown mass suicide and Nazi Germany.

Some philosophers think that evolution cares more about how to survive than about any accurate version of reality, which can lead to “useful fictions” about the world.

If you put a pair of headphones on one of the earliest creatures resembling mammals, would it start rocking out to the music, or would it hardly be able to hear anything?

This question might seem a bit silly, but it has long puzzled paleontologists. Early therapsids—a group that includes now-extinct mammal ancestors and closely related creatures—known as cynodonts had a mashup of mammalian and reptilian characteristics. One of their more reptilian traits was a lack of visible ears, and there has long been an ongoing debate about whether they had evolved anything resembling an eardrum. After all, they would have had a significant survival advantage if they were able to pick up on the subtle sounds of predators and prey.

Nowadays, it’s another story. With technological advantages like upgraded imaging technology and simulation software, paleontologists Alec Wilken and Zhe-Xi Luo from the University of Chicago set out to determine just how well Thrinaxodon liorhinus—a cynodont that lived 250 million years ago and would have competed for food with dinosaurs—could hear. After taking extensive CT scans of a well-studied Thrinaxodon skull, the team used both its features and those of living animals to create a digital model that they put through a hearing simulation.

“An abundant fossil record shows that the malleus, incus, and ectotympanic ear bones of living mammals were derived from the postdentary bones of Paleozoic therapsids and Mesozoic cynodonts through their detachment from the mandible, change in shape, and reduction in size,” Wilken and Luo said in a study recently published in the journal PNAS. “The ectotympanic ultimately provided attachment for a soft tissue ear drum, or tympanum.”

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/42158359