science

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

...“The calculation results show enhancements of fusion yields by orders of magnitude with currently available intense low-frequency laser fields,” highlighted the study.

For a collision energy of 1 keV—a level where fusion is normally almost impossible—the application of a 1.55 eV low-frequency laser can transform the reaction rate.

At 10^20 W/cm² intensity, the fusion probability increases by three orders of magnitude, while increasing the intensity to 5×10^21 W/cm² boosts the efficiency by a staggering nine orders of magnitude.

This dramatic increase effectively makes fusion at 1 keV (relatively low temperature) as probable as fusion at 10 keV without laser assistance...

Osuna-Mascaró hopes the work will inspire scientists to pay more attention to farm animals as well. Though he’s largely studied chimpanzees and cockatoos until now, he wants to continue to work with cows. He’s even put a cow screensaver on his phone. “I think most animals are living a rich life and have something really interesting to tell us,” he says. “We just have to ask the right questions.”

The continuing row highlights long-standing tensions over clinical research trials in Africa that are proposed and run by researchers in other countries. African scientists say that the Guinea-Bissau study shows how political pressure, funding interests and fragmented oversight can push local health priorities aside.

We’re not sure if it’s exciting or not that scientists just discovered new ‘lifeforms’ inside of our bodies. Tiny bits of RNA, smaller than a virus, colonize bacteria inside our mouths and guts and have the power to transfer information that can be read by a cell.

Dubbed ‘wildly weird’ by the team of Stanford scientists writing about the find in Nature, the discovery now has a name: obelisks. And we ... don’t really know their end goal.

“It’s insane,” said Mark Peifer, a cell and developmental biologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, according to Science. “The more we look, the more crazy things we see.”

Named obelisks because of their rod-shaped structures, they are even smaller than viruses, but they can still transmit instructions to cells. What they’re saying, however, we just don’t know.

It looks more like a worn sock than a fearsome predator. It moves slower than an escalator. By most accounts, it is a clumsy and near-sightless relic drifting in the twilight waters of the Arctic, lazily searching for food scraps.

But the Greenland shark, an animal one researcher (lovingly) said, “looks like it’s already dead”, is also one of the least understood, biologically enigmatic species on the planet.

But this month, scientists made a groundbreaking discovery: the sharks are not, in fact, blind. The newly published findings upend commonly held beliefs and expose the challenges of studying a shark that has long resisted the reaches of science. But the disruptive nature of the research also underscores the challenges scientists face in predicting how a rapidly changing climate might harm or help the elusive fish.