Do you know what science field has the hardest time filling positions? Physics.
Because so many of them end up being theoretical.
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"Your Doppelgänger Is Out There and You Probably Share DNA With Them"
I have had a number of incidences of me going somewhere new for the first time and being treated as a long time customer only to discover they think I'm someone else. I fully believe I have a clone out there somewhere, and when we meet - we will go full Highlander.
There can be only one.
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Study shows that electrical impulse treatment to senior brains could help resist effects of Alzheimers
A new study with the following dense title, "Long-lasting, dissociable improvements in working memory and long-term memory in older adults with repetitive neuromodulation" is pretty hard to grok and I bounced off of it. I heard about it from this article on Verge.com.
The Abstract:
The development of technologies to protect or enhance memory in older people is an enduring goal of translational medicine. Here we describe repetitive (4-day) transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS) protocols for the selective, sustainable enhancement of auditory–verbal working memory and long-term memory in 65–88-year-old people. Modulation of synchronous low-frequency, but not high-frequency, activity in parietal cortex preferentially improved working memory on day 3 and day 4 and 1?month after intervention, whereas modulation of synchronous high-frequency, but not low-frequency, activity in prefrontal cortex preferentially improved long-term memory on days 2–4 and 1?month after intervention. The rate of memory improvements over 4?days predicted the size of memory benefits 1?month later. Individuals with lower baseline cognitive function experienced larger, more enduring memory improvements. Our findings demonstrate that the plasticity of the aging brain can be selectively and sustainably exploited using repetitive and highly focalized neuromodulation grounded in spatiospectral parameters of memory-specific cortical circuitry.
Will be curious to see if further studies come out of this and perhaps a new treatment for seniors becomes standard in an effort to improve memory recall for them.
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"Effectiveness of vaccination mandates in improving uptake of COVID-19 vaccines in the USA"
Medical study found on thelancet.com looks at how effective mandates were in getting people to get vaccinated. The following comes from their conclusion:
First, abundant evidence shows that school-entry mandates have been highly effective in improving uptake of childhood vaccines. Second, the current evidence regarding the safety of COVID-19 vaccines in adults is sufficient to support mandates. Third, because of distinctive implementation challenges, the effectiveness of adult COVID-19 vaccination mandates in increasing vaccination uptake might be lower than the very high effectiveness of school-entry mandates observed for other vaccinations in the past. Therefore, mandate policies cannot be the only approach, especially given the ongoing legal uncertainties surrounding them. Fourth, COVID-19 vaccine requirements will probably be most effective when enforced by employers and educational institutions. Fifth, consideration of school-entry mandates should follow review of real-world safety data and full licensure of the vaccines for children, which could come as soon as the start of the 2022–23 school year.
Finally, active surveillance for adverse events following immunisation and clear, sophisticated communication of findings to the public are essential for effective vaccination policies, including mandates. Imposing mandates does not remove the need for effective messaging to overcome vaccine hesitancy. Giving appropriate emphasis to the major headline of the accreting vaccine safety studies—the vaccines are indeed safe—can create more fertile soil for vaccination mandates to take root.
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A Biochemist’s View of Life’s Origin Reframes Cancer and Aging
I've added his book to my always-growing list of books to read. Boling below is Quanta's question which he answers:
Your book argues that the flow of energy and matter structures the evolution of life and is how metabolism “conjures genes into existence.” What’s the most compelling reason to think metabolism, not genetic information, evolved first?
The purist view of “information first” is the RNA world, where some process in the environment makes nucleotides, and the nucleotides go through a process that makes them link up into polymer chains. Then we have a population of RNAs, and they invent everything, because they’re capable of both catalyzing reactions and copying themselves. But then how did the RNAs invent all of metabolism, cells, spatial structure and so on? Genes don’t actually do that even today. Cells come from cells, and genes go along for the ride. So why would genes do it at the very beginning?
And how would they do it? Let’s say there are 10 steps in a biochemical pathway, and any one step by itself is not of much use. Every product in a pathway would have to be useful for it to evolve, which is not the case. It just looks so difficult to evolve even a single pathway.
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17-year old improves electric motor design such that it might see commercial uses in things like electric vehicles, and in doing so ease reliance on rare elements
As much as I enjoy the 17-year old inventor angle, this was also a great deep dive into electric motors and their production and environmental issues.
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Cornea made from pig collagen gives people who were blind 20/20 vision
Bear in mind it is still a small sample size, just twenty people. But still, potentially a very exciting development:
Corneas made from pig collagen have restored sight for people who were previously legally blind or visually impaired. Two years after the operations, none of the recipients have reported serious complications or adverse side effects.
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"How Much Will the Climate Bill Reduce Emissions? It Depends"
This is an absolutely fantastic breakdown and explanation of how climate emission predictions are made, their shortcomings, etc.
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"JWST has released a striking new image of the strange Cartwheel galaxy"
Simply stunning and fascinating to see.
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"Pompeii: Ancient Roman who died in volcanic eruption has had their genome sequenced"
The hot volcanic ash that buried the ancient Roman town of Pompeii killed many of the town’s inhabitants – but it didn’t destroy their DNA. The first complete genome from Pompeii reveals genetic markers that haven’t been seen before in ancient Roman DNA.
[...]
“There was the expectation that the high temperatures would make our effort in DNA sequencing in Pompeii fruitless,” says Gabriele Scorrano at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. “Cremated bodies, for example, show no sign of DNA preservation according to multiple studies.”
But Scorrano and his colleagues decided to look for ancient DNA anyway. They focused on the skeletal remains of two people discovered in a building called the Casa del Fabbro, which translates to House of the Craftsman. The pair – a man in his 30s and a woman who was at least 50 years old – seem to have been lying on a low couch in what may have been a dining room at the moment they died.
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"New studies bolster theory coronavirus emerged from the wild"
The research, published online Tuesday by the journal Science, shows that the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market was likely the early epicenter of the scourge that has now killed nearly 6.4 million people around the world. Scientists conclude that the virus that causes COVID-19, SARS-CoV-2, likely spilled from animals into people two separate times.
“All this evidence tells us the same thing: It points right to this particular market in the middle of Wuhan,” said Kristian Andersen a professor in the Department of Immunology and Microbiology at Scripps Research and coauthor of one of the studies. “I was quite convinced of the lab leak myself until we dove into this very carefully and looked at it much closer.”
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A fascinating summary and overview of the fast and furious science being done with JWST's new data and images
One of JWST’s much-touted abilities is the power to look back in time to the early universe and see some of the first galaxies and stars. Already, the telescope — which launched on Christmas Day 2021 and now sits 1.5 million kilometers from Earth — has spotted the most distant, earliest galaxy known.
Two teams found the galaxy when they separately analyzed JWST observations for the GLASS survey, one of more than 200 science programs scheduled for the telescope’s first year in space. Both teams, one led by Rohan Naidu at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Massachusetts and the other by Marco Castellano at the Astronomical Observatory of Rome, identified two especially remote galaxies in the data: one so far away that JWST detects the light it emitted 400 million years after the Big Bang (a tie with the oldest galaxy ever seen by the Hubble Space Telescope), and the other, dubbed GLASS-z13, seen as it appeared 300 million years after the Big Bang. “It would be the most distant galaxy ever found,” said Castellano.
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Absolutely stunning space photos by Judy Schmidt, thanks to James Webb Telescope data
Credit to Judy Schmidt, an amateur space image processor (that's what BoingBoing called her, which brought her work to my attention.) The post's link is to her Flickr account with this and many more amazing pictures she's created.
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"The Bizarre Bird That’s Breaking the Tree of Life"
I'd never heard of a hoatzin until I came across this article. Then, while the article sit in my virtual "to read" pile, I saw a Twitter thread of discussion about it which only reaffirmed that I needed to read both it and then the thread.
When Stiller joined the project, her colleagues were combing through museums and laboratories to sample three hundred and sixty-three bird species, chosen carefully to represent the diversity of living birds. With help from four supercomputers in three different countries, they began to compare each bird’s DNA to figure out how they were related. “I think there was always this idea that, once we sequence full genomes, we will be able to solve it,” Stiller told me. But, early in the process, she encountered an evolutionary enigma called Opisthocomus hoazin. “I was completely amazed by this bird,” she said.
I thought this quote in the article was really interesting:
The hoatzin may be more than a missing piece of the evolutionary puzzle. It may be a sphinx with a riddle that many biologists are reluctant to consider: What if the pattern of evolution is not actually a tree?
As mentioned (and linked) above, here's the Twitter thread which should be read after the article that supports the author's premise:
In that thread, I particularly like this point, noting that many scientists aren't being beholden to 'Darwin's monument' (tree thinking):
To me, "Tree thinking" as the article and the Twitter thread discuss, is actually "Forest thinking" to accept that there might be multiple trees and that some trees might connect on various branches. But, I'm not a biologist, and given that this is hugely complex overall - even that might be problematically simplifying it.
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"‘Bees are really highly intelligent’: the insect IQ tests causing a buzz among scientists"
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"World's oldest tree still growing near the Norwegian-Swedish border"
Emphasis mine:
Not many years ago, Norwegian schoolchildren learned that spruce trees came to Norway from the east between 2 000 and 3 000 years ago.
But ten years ago, researchers at Umeå University in Sweden discovered a tree up on Fulufjället – in Sweden just east of Trysil municipality in Norway. The tree turned out to be 9 500 years old.
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