Trumpet: Ibrahim Maalouf
Music: Frank Woeste — ‘Moving Light’
Author Archives: Attention to the Unseen
Evidence mounts for interbreeding bonanza in ancient human species
Nature reports: The discovery of yet another period of interbreeding between early humans and Neanderthals is adding to the growing sense that sexual encounters among different ancient human species were commonplace throughout their history.
“As more early modern humans and archaic humans are found and sequenced, we’re going to see many more instances of interbreeding,” says Sergi Castellano, a population geneticist at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany. His team discovered the latest example, which they believe occurred around 100,000 years ago, by analysing traces of Homo sapiens DNA in a Neanderthal genome extracted from a toe bone found in a cave in Siberia.
“There is this joke in the population genetics community — there’s always one more interbreeding event,” Castellano says. So before researchers discover the next one, here’s a rundown of the interbreeding episodes that they have already deduced from studies of ancient DNA. [Continue reading…]
Music: Frank Woeste — ‘Zone Amazone’
Music: Frank Woeste — ‘Pocket Rhapsody’
Meet the world’s most notorious taxonomist
Susie Neilson writes: In 2005, the taxonomist Quentin Wheeler named a trio of newly discovered slime-mold beetles after George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, and Dick Cheney. He believed the names could increase public interest in the discovery and classification of new species, and help combat the quickening pace of extinction. (Species go extinct three times faster than we can name them.)
He knew he was onto something when, having received a call from the White House, it was Bush on the other end, thanking him for the honor. Wheeler, now the president of SUNY’s College of Environmental Science and Forestry, began attributing all sorts of provocative names to his bugs, including Darth Vader, Stephen Colbert, Roy and Barbara Orbison, Pocahontas, Hernan Cortez, and the Aztecs — he has even named 6 species after himself. Youcan call his strategy “shameless self-promotion” — Wheeler already has.
Nautilus spoke with Wheeler about his work.
What’s exciting about taxonomy?
It is the one field with the audacity to create a living inventory of every living thing on the entire planet and reconstruct the history of the diversity of life. Who else would tackle 12 million species in 3.8 billion years on the entire surface of the planet? If that isn’t real science, I don’t know what is. It infuriates me that taxonomy is marginalized as a bookkeeping activity, when in fact it has the most audacious research agenda of any biological science. [Continue reading…]
Music: Frank Woeste — ‘Minimal Animal’
Vocal: Malik Mezzadri
Music: Gary Burton — ‘Las Vegas Tango’
Gary Slutkin: Let’s treat violence like a contagious disease
Scientists glimpse Einstein’s gravitational waves
Phys.org reports: In a landmark discovery for physics and astronomy, scientists said Thursday they have glimpsed the first direct evidence of gravitational waves, ripples in the fabric of space-time that Albert Einstein predicted a century ago.
When two black holes collided some 1.3 billion years ago, the joining of those two great masses sent forth a wobble that hurtled through space and reached Earth on September 14, 2015, when it was picked up by sophisticated instruments, researchers announced.
“Up until now we have been deaf to gravitational waves, but today, we are able to hear them,” said David Reitze, executive director of the LIGO Laboratory, at a packed press conference in the US capital.
Reitze and colleagues compared the magnitude of the discovery to Galileo’s use of the telescope four centuries ago to open the era of modern astronomy.
“I think we are doing something equally important here today. I think we are opening a window on the universe,” Reitze said. [Continue reading…]
Gravity waves can’t be understood without understanding Einstein’s idea of gravity
By David Blair, University of Western Australia
I have spent almost 40 years trying to detect gravity waves.
When I started there were just a few of us working away in university labs. Today 1,000 physicists working with billion-dollar observatories are quietly confident the waves are within our grasp.
If we are right, the gravity wave search will have taken 100 years from the date of Einstein’s prediction.
In 100 years’ time the discovery of Einstein’s gravity waves will be one of the landmarks in the history of science. It will stand out like the discovery of electromagnetic waves in 1886, a quarter of a century after these waves were predicted by physicist James Clerk Maxwell.
The problem of talking about gravity waves is that you can’t explain them without explaining Einstein’s idea of gravity. Recently I began to ask why it is so difficult to explain gravity, why the concept is met with glazed eyes and baffled looks. Eventually I came up with a theory I call the Tragedy of the Euclidean Time Warp.
Music: Bill Laurance — ‘Money In The Desert’
Music: Bill Laurance — ‘Red Sand’
Music: Snarky Puppy — ‘Young Stuff’
Music: Snarky Puppy — ‘Whitecap’
Revealed: Honeybees are being killed off by a manmade pandemic
By Stephen John Martin, University of Salford
We live in a world where large numbers of people are connected by just a few degrees of separation. But while having friends of friends all over the globe can be great for holidays, trade and networking, travel also allows viruses to move like never before.
Zika is the latest “explosive pandemic” to be declared a global emergency by the World Health Organisation. But viruses don’t just target humans – they can infect all forms of life from bacteria to bananas, horses to honeybees.
A lethal combination of the Varroa mite and the deformed wing virus has resulted in the death of billions of bees over the past half century. In a study published in the journal Science, colleagues from the Universities of Exeter, Sheffield and I report how the virus has spread across the globe.
Music: Snarky Puppy — ‘Flood’
Race is a social construct, scientists argue
Scientific American: More than 100 years ago, American sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois was concerned that race was being used as a biological explanation for what he understood to be social and cultural differences between different populations of people. He spoke out against the idea of “white” and “black” as discrete groups, claiming that these distinctions ignored the scope of human diversity.
Science would favor Du Bois. Today, the mainstream belief among scientists is that race is a social construct without biological meaning. And yet, you might still open a study on genetics in a major scientific journal and find categories like “white” and “black” being used as biological variables.
In an article published today (Feb. 4) in the journal Science, four scholars say racial categories are weak proxies for genetic diversity and need to be phased out. [Continue reading…]
Music: Wayne Shorter & Milton Nascimento — ‘Lilia’