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Opioid medications offer people relief from debilitating pain, but these drugs come with dangers: the risk for addiction, miserable withdrawal symptoms and the potential for fatal overdose. Researchers have now identified a strategy to design safer opioids. They showed that an experimental opioid, which binds to an unconventional spot in the receptor, suppresses pain in animal models with fewer side effects -- most notably those linked to fatal overdoses.

When you think of a battery, you probably don't think stretchy. But batteries will need this shape-shifting quality to be incorporated into flexible electronics, which are gaining traction for wearable health monitors. Now, researchers report a lithium-ion battery with entirely stretchable components, including an electrolyte layer that can expand by 5000%, and it retains its charge storage capacity after nearly 70 charge/discharge cycles.

When you think of a battery, you probably don't think stretchy. But batteries will need this shape-shifting quality to be incorporated into flexible electronics, which are gaining traction for wearable health monitors. Now, researchers report a lithium-ion battery with entirely stretchable components, including an electrolyte layer that can expand by 5000%, and it retains its charge storage capacity after nearly 70 charge/discharge cycles.

A newly engineered type of soil can capture water out of thin air to keep plants hydrated and manage controlled release of fertilizer for a constant supply of nutrients.

The newly discovered planet TIC 241249530 b has the most highly elliptical, or eccentric, orbit of any known planet. It appears to be a juvenile planet that is in the midst of becoming a hot Jupiter, and its orbit is providing some answers to how such large, scorching planets evolve.

PrISMa is a new platform that uses advanced simulations and machine learning to streamline carbon capture technologies, by taking into account the perspectives of diverse stakeholders early in the research process.

Researchers have demonstrated that the layered multiferroic material nickel iodide (NiI2) may be the best candidate yet for devices such as magnetic computer memory that are extremely fast and compact. Specifically, they found that NiI2 has greater magnetoelectric coupling than any known material of its kind.

Researchers have demonstrated that the layered multiferroic material nickel iodide (NiI2) may be the best candidate yet for devices such as magnetic computer memory that are extremely fast and compact. Specifically, they found that NiI2 has greater magnetoelectric coupling than any known material of its kind.

Damping vibrations is crucial for precision experiments, for example in astronomy. A new invention uses a special kind of magnets to achieve this -- electropermanent magnets. They consist of a permanent magnet and a coil. In contrast to electromagnets, they do not have to be permanently supplied with energy. In contrast to permanent magnets, their strength can be tuned: Whenever necessary, a strong electric pulse is sent through the coil, adapting the properties of the magnet.

Damping vibrations is crucial for precision experiments, for example in astronomy. A new invention uses a special kind of magnets to achieve this -- electropermanent magnets. They consist of a permanent magnet and a coil. In contrast to electromagnets, they do not have to be permanently supplied with energy. In contrast to permanent magnets, their strength can be tuned: Whenever necessary, a strong electric pulse is sent through the coil, adapting the properties of the magnet.

This is an open letter to Noa Tishby because, as a passionate defender of Israel, she made a rather serious mistake about biology, and I tried to contact her about it via her publicist. I don’t know if she got my email, so I’m putting it below lest any Jews (or other people) be led to that we carry genes for inherited trauma.  We almost certainly don’t!

Noa Tishby is an Israeli actress who moved to the U.S. and has largely given up acting to advocate for Israel, in which she’s done an exemplary job. She wrote, for example, a primer for the ignorant called Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth, setting out the background of the conflict between Israel and, well, the rest of the world. I read it, and although I already knew much of the material, many people don’t, as evidenced by the widespread and often willful ignorance among “anti-Zionists.” See the first video below!

Noa’s also got chutzpah, as you can tell from this video. She is not easily fazed or discombobulated, even when faced with arrogant stupidity combined with hatred:

In other words, I’m a fan and admire her resolve.

Her error: In the article below, published in the Jewish magazine Sapir, Tishby describes how nerdy she was when young, and now her “uncoolness” persists in her constant defense of Israel, an unpopular stand in much of the world.  While making this reasonable argument, though, Tishby also made a misguided claim about the “inherited” trauma of Jews. It’s a good article (click to read), but the epigenetics stuff bothered me.

Here’s the part that rankled:

What haunts us, even those of us who have lived through only the most recent pogrom, is the familiarity of even the oldest testimony. “We were awakened by a terrifying noise, we didn’t know what was happening . . . ” two millennia ago in Jerusalem. “We realized they’d broken into our neighbors’ house. . . .  We heard them screaming until silence fell. We thought of escaping into the forest, but everyone who tried to escape found it was impossible” one millennium ago in Cologne. This history has shaped us: “Deep inside I know it,” each survivor says in unison as they stand together at the close of the video. The weight of our past is in our blood.

Perhaps literally. Recent studies suggest that these traumatic stories have become woven into our hereditary fabric through epigenetic change. Epigenetic changes are additions to our DNA that influence the way our genetic code is read by our bodies. Studies show that epigenetic change can occur from traumatic experience, and that these changes can be inherited. The idea is intuitive to us: It’s long been suggested that historical traumas can be psychologically passed down from generation to generation. Epigenetic fear is the biological manifestation of historical traumas alongside our genetic code. A review found that “there is now converging evidence supporting the idea that offspring are affected by parental trauma exposures occurring before their birth, and possibly even prior to their conception.” One study found that “in the absence of their own traumatic exposures, offspring of Holocaust survivors” were more likely to exhibit biological signs associated with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Other studies have suggested that epigenetic changes can be passed down for many generations.

After the pogrom of October 7 and the global reactions to it, our epigenetic inheritance may have been activated in our veins. As the researcher behind the study of offspring of Holocaust survivors observed, “Epigenetic changes often serve to biologically prepare offspring for an environment similar to that of the parents.”

In this respect, Jews have a built-in mechanism that gives acts of barbarism against us a certain familiarity and triggers an almost automatic response. Though the threats have come from different neighbors — Romans, Germans, Baghdadis — across time and place, they have always been similar enough to inoculate us against being truly surprised.

Here’s another version of it on her Facebook page.

Now if you know anything about epigenetics, a form of inheritance of acquired characteristics, you’ll know two things.  First, in nearly all organisms the acquired trait gets passed on for only a single generation, as the modifications of DNA that cause the trait (in this case trauma), is wiped out as the DNA sheds its modifications when producing gametes for the next generation.  Second, there is no evidence that I know of in mammals (including us) that even if a trauma causes something to be inherited by modifying our DNA, that “something” is not the trauma itself, but whatever developmental change happens to be wrought by environmental effects on the DNA.  In the most famous widespread case of “inherited trauma”, the Dutch case of famine during the “hunger winter” of 1944, what was inherited wasn’t the trauma of not getting enough food, but a number of developmental aberrations that lasted only a single generation:

The Dutch Hunger Winter has proved unique in unexpected ways. Because it started and ended so abruptly, it has served as an unplanned experiment in human health. Pregnant women, it turns out, were uniquely vulnerable, and the children they gave birth to have been influenced by famine throughout their lives.

When they became adults, they ended up a few pounds heavier than average. In middle age, they had higher levels of triglycerides and LDL cholesterol. They also experienced higher rates of such conditions as obesity, diabetes and schizophrenia.

By the time they reached old age, those risks had taken a measurable toll, according to the research of L.H. Lumey, an epidemiologist at Columbia University. In 2013, he and his colleagues reviewed death records of hundreds of thousands of Dutch people born in the mid-1940s.

They found that the people who had been in utero during the famine — known as the Dutch Hunger Winter cohort — died at a higher rate than people born before or afterward. “We found a 10 percent increase in mortality after 68 years,” said Dr. Lumey.

The change lasted only one generation; as far as I know, the grandchildren of survivors don’t show this syndrome. Thus, Ms. Tishby erred when implying that the trauma itself faced by Jews could presumably last for a long time, perhaps generations.  If we are indeed traumatized by centuries of antisemitism, it’s certainly because the trauma comes from the environment (i.e., antisemites), and persists because antisemitism persists. Certainly I didn’t want a famous defender of Israel to popularize misguided biology.

So I sent the letter below a while back to Ms. Tishby. Since I couldn’t find a way to contact her directly, I sent it to her public relations person with a request that it be passed on to Tishby. So far I have no reply, and though I didn’t expect one from Tishby, I have no way to know if she ever got my correction.  Ergo I’m publishing it here in hopes that she’ll see it and the “inherited trauma of antissemitism” business will stop.  Yes, call me a Pecksniff. . .

Dear Ms. Tishby,

I’m writing just to urge you to be a bit cautious about the “epigenetic” aspect of Jewish trauma that you mentioned in your otherwise admirable Sapir article. I’m only writing because I’ve long admired your advocacy of Israel in the face of huge pushback, and don’t want you to fall into the errors of others who have mischaracterized epigenetics.

I am Jewish and also an evolutionary geneticist, and know a great deal about epigenetics: environmentally-induced changes in the DNA that usually occur by attaching a methyl group to various parts of DNA. It’s been known, as you said, that this can be inherited: rarely, the effects of parental trauma can cause inherited change in their offspring, though those changes don’t usually involve a child inheriting the trauma itself of their mothers.

What’s more important is that, because DNA changes are “reset” every generation when sperm or eggs are formed, epigenetic modifications usually disappear after one generation, so they can’t be inherited beyond parent—>offspring.  Further, if they do occur (usually through trauma affecting a mother’s physiology or placenta), what is inherited via methylation is not the trauma itself, but various other effects. The famous “Dutch famine study” from the “hunger winter” during the war didn’t involve inheritance of trauma, but a degradation of the offspring’s health that led to various other diseases. In other words, trauma was not inherited, but caused other effects in the children of the traumatized. And that lasted but a single generation.  There’s simply no evidence in humans that trauma itself can be coded into the genome and passed from parent to offspring.

You also mention that ” Other studies have suggested that epigenetic changes can be passed down for many generations.” But the study you cite involved roundworms, and had nothing to do with either humans or trauma (only one study, not “studies” was linked).

In short, there are no studies showing that parental trauma itself is inherited epigenetically. Instead, the effects of trauma on the physiology or development of offspring can be inherited. But they’re inherited, at most, for only one generation. Ergo, it’s a bit misleading to suggest that “the weight of the past is in our blood—literally.” That would be true only, and only in part, for the one generation of offspring of those experiencing the Holocaust. The rest of the Jews would be unaffected, so it wouldn’t be a general phenomenon.  And it would last only for a single generation at most—and what would be inherited wouldn’t be trauma itself but whatever developmental aberrations devolved upon fetuses developing during their mother’s trauma.

It’s really not necessary to invoke dubious science in support of your cause, for we Jews have suffered environmental trauma generation after generation via antisemitism, and this is due to a continuing culture, not to genes.  I myself have been traumatized by the resurgence of antisemitism after October 7, even though I’m at best a secular Jew. But none of my relatives were in the Holocaust, though they came from Eastern Europe.  My own “trauma” comes from seeing the world buy into the big lies about Israel (genocide, apartheid, “disproportinal” killing of Gazans, etc.)

My suggestion, then, is to stay far away from epigenetics as you promulgate your message. And of course your message is vital and important. As I said, I greatly admire your courage in going out there and speaking the truth, and wanted to let you know that the “truth” about epigenetics isn’t very solid!

Best wishes,
Jerry Coyne
Emeritus professor of Ecology and Evolutino
The University of Chicago

I’ve done what I can, and we’ll see if Ms. Tishby continues to spread the fallacious notion of “trauma literally in our blood” (it would have to be in the white cells, since red blood cells lack nuclei!)

Researchers have developed the chatbot Iris, which offers informatics students personalized assistance with programming assignments. A study has now confirmed the chatbot's success: Iris improves the understanding of programming concepts and represents a valuable complement to human tutors.

Snot might not be the first place you'd expect nanobots to be swimming around. But this slimy secretion exists in more places than just your nose and piles of dirty tissues -- it also lines and helps protect the lungs, stomach, intestines and eyes. And now, researchers have demonstrated in mice that their tiny, enzyme-powered 'snot bots' can push through the defensive, sticky layer and potentially deliver drugs more efficiently.

Snot might not be the first place you'd expect nanobots to be swimming around. But this slimy secretion exists in more places than just your nose and piles of dirty tissues -- it also lines and helps protect the lungs, stomach, intestines and eyes. And now, researchers have demonstrated in mice that their tiny, enzyme-powered 'snot bots' can push through the defensive, sticky layer and potentially deliver drugs more efficiently.

Mixing protein-based drugs with hydrogels can keep the atomic bonds in the medication safe from high temperatures or shaking

A drug that inhibits inflammation helped mice live longer and reduced the animals’ incidence of cancer and age-related health problems

An aerial robot weighing 4 grams is powered by tiny solar panels that produce extremely high voltages – an approach that could enable drones to fly indefinitely

The lifestyle choices you make in middle age play a particularly important role in how your brain ages

Hunting in packs seems like a complex social behaviour, but it isn't limited to large carnivores like wolves. A simple sea slug species teams up to swarm its venomous anemone prey as a group

A brand-new paper from Nature Ecology & Evolution used a clever technique to estimate the age of “LUCA”,. the “last universal common ancestor” of all living things. What that means is LUCA is the last creature whose descendants include every species alive: the ancestor of all of us.  And it dates LUCA to about 4.2 billion years ago! That is far older than people thought. Previous estimates were in the 3.5-3.8 billion-year range, after the famous “Late Heavy Bombardment” (LHB), during which the Earth was continually battered with asteroids and comets. It was assumed that nothing alive on Earth could have survived those impacts. But if the authors are right, LUCA’s ancestors did survive this, for 4.2 billion years is probably a big underestimate of of when life on earth began.

The earliest generally accepted fossil evidence for life is about 3.7 billion years, which is based on isotopes that, scientists think, could have been produced only by living creatures. But the earliest genuine fossilized organisms occur a bit later than that: fossilized blue-green algae (“stromatolites”), whose fossils go back 3.5 billion years ago.

The new paper by Moody et al., which has an accompanying research brief (click screenshots below to access, or find the pdf here) pushes the age of LUCA back to 4.2 billion years ago, which actually precedes the LHB. And the new LUCA date comes soon after the Earth actually formed (about 4.54 billion years ago) and after the Moon was created, probably by a huge, Mars-size planet striking Earth and throwing off debris that consolidated to create our Moon. (That occurred soon after the Earth formed.)  Surely no life could have survived that collision, so if the authors are right, it took only about  0.3 billion years, or 300 million years after the Earth was formed, before life existed.

But LUCA wasn’t the first life on Earth: it is simply the bacteria-like species of organism that gave rise to all living creatures. Surely life originated before that, and the new paper suggests that the 4.2 billion year old (byo) LUCA was only one of a number of life forms existing back then, with the rest going extinct without leaving descendants. The authors think this because LUCA probably needed complex carbon compounds to live, and is also likely to have provided niches for other creatures.  That means that life itself began well before LUCA, especially because, based on its genome, the authors conclude that LUCA was quite complex— about as complex as modern bacteria. Surely it would take millions of years of evolution to get to the point where a LUCA-like creature could have existed.  See below for the diagram of what LUCA was like.

The main lesson from the paper is that life began very, very soon after the Earth had cooled off and the dust had settled from the LHB and carving out of the Moon. If that’s the case, then perhaps life on other planets could evolve more easily than we thought.

But on to the paper. If you want the whole megillah, click on the first link, while the second gives a two-page précis.  It’s a very complicated and long paper, so give me kudos for reading it twice to distill it here. But I can’t claim to have understood everything, as the analyses of the data, or even the methodology, is quite arcane and sophisticated.

A two -age summary from the same journal:

Why do we think that all life descended from a single species rather than having multiple origins? Because all living creatures have some similarities that probably reflect the workings of chance: whatever mutations happened to give rise to our ancestor. The paper explains:

The common ancestry of all extant cellular life is evidenced by the universal genetic code, machinery for protein synthesis, shared chirality of the almost-universal set of 20 amino acids [JAC: all amino acids used in modern creatures are the L rather than the D form] and use of ATP as a common energy currency. The last universal common ancestor (LUCA) is the node on the tree of life from which the fundamental prokaryotic domains (Archaea and Bacteria) diverge. As such, our understanding of LUCA impacts our understanding of the early evolution of life on Earth.

The way scientists usually estimate LUCA is using molecular dating based on DNA divergence among living organisms. Because there is a “molecular clock”, with the DNA changing roughly in a linear fashion with time, you can back-calculate from living creatures to estimate when their DNA sequences would have converged on a single sequence, which would be the DNA sequence of LUCA.  But there are formidable problems with this, making DNA-based estimates  contentious. But the authors found a way around this.

What they did is to estimate divergence times of all living creatures (for practicality, they used bacteria [prokaryotes] and Archaea, bacteria-like organisms that form their own kingdom) using DUPLICATED GENES.  These are genes that, tracing the sequences of living organisms back, had already been duplicated in LUCA.  As you may know, genes often get duplicated during cell division or (in sexual organisms) meiosis, so a single gene can now occur in two copies. Those two copies will initially be identical, but then, being genetically independent, will begin to diverge via mutation and then selection or drift. (Examples of duplicated genes are are different forms of globins in humans, two of which, alpha and beta, produce products that combine to make adult hemoglobin.  But many, many genes have duplicated over the history of life.)

A gene that is duplicated (based on sequence similarity) in LUCA must have been present in the ancestor of LUCA, and have duplicated before LUCA existed. Thus an estimate of the age of a duplicated gene in LUCA gives us a lower-bound on the age of LUCA itself. And since some genes are already duplicated in LUCA, we can use them, combined with a molecular clock (and other statistics) to estimate how long it took for each copy to give rise to the diversity of DNA-sequences in descendant copies in modern microbes.  The advantage comes because we have two estimated DNA sequences in LUCA that began identically but then diverged over evolutionary time. This gives us two chances to estimate the age of the creature. Using other methods, we can estimate how many genes there were in LUCA, the size of its genome, and what kind of genes it had.  The latter can then give us an idea of what kind of creature it was and how it lived.

Here are the results, in short:

a.) LUCA lived about 4.2 billion years ago. Here’s the reconstructed phylogeny (note that there are two estimates of its age since they use two copies of each of the five genes they chose for age estimation). Click to enlarge. On the right are all the kingdoms of living organisms, traced back to LUCA.  The use of two gene copies give similar estimates, about 4.2 billion years ago. I’ve circled the two LUCA estimates, which work out to a similar age (see age scale at top for divergence times):

(From paper): Our results suggest that LUCA lived around 4.2 Ga, with a 95% confidence interval spanning 4.09–4.33 Ga under the ILN relaxed-clock model (orange) and 4.18–4.33 Ga under the GBM relaxed-clock model (teal). Under a cross-bracing approach, nodes corresponding to the same species divergences (that is, mirrored nodes) have the same posterior time densities. This figure shows the corresponding posterior time densities of the mirrored nodes for the last universal, archaeal, bacterial and eukaryotic common ancestors (LUCA, LACA, LBCA and LECA, respectively); the last common ancestor of the mitochondrial lineage (Mito-LECA); and the last plastid-bearing common ancestor (LPCA). Purple stars indicate nodes calibrated with fossils. Arc, Archaea; Bac, Bacteria; Euk, Eukarya.

b.) LUCA had a big genome and many genes. The authors estimate that LUCA’s genome had 2.75 million DNA base pairs, capable of making 2,657 proteins (an underestimate of gene number). That is a big and complex organism, comparable to existing bacteria. (Modern E. coli produce about 4288 proteins from 4.6 million base pairs.) This complexity shows that even LUCA was preceded by a long period of evolution.

c.) LUCA was probably an anaerobic and autotrophic creature, which means that it didn’t need oxygen to grow and flourish, and also that it produced its own “food”, getting energy from substances like hydrogen and carbon dioxide.  The authors suggest two places where such a creature could have lived: in warm hydrothermal vents in the ocean, or on the ocean surface, where it would have ample access to the gases that constitute its food.  There was no evidence that the organism was photosynthestic, as it lacked genes involved in modern photosynthesis.

Here’s a sketchy diagram of what kind of genes LUCA had (note the “immune” system, based on CRISPR-like genes that are used to destroy viruses. LUCA probably had a virus problem, too! Figure b) show us how LUCA fit into the tree of life:

(From paper): a, A representation of LUCA based on our ancestral gene content reconstruction. Gene names in black have been inferred to be present in LUCA under the most-stringent threshold (PP = 0.75, sampled in both domains); those in grey are present at the least-stringent threshold (PP = 0.50, without a requirement for presence in both domains). b, LUCA in the context of the tree of life. Branches on the tree of life that have left sampled descendants today are coloured black, those that have left no sampled descendants are in grey. As the common ancestor of extant cellular life, LUCA is the oldest node that can be reconstructed using phylogenetic methods. It would have shared the early Earth with other lineages (highlighted in teal) that have left no descendants among sampled cellular life today. However, these lineages may have left a trace in modern organisms by transferring genes into the sampled tree of life (red lines) before their extinction. c, LUCA’s chemoautotrophic metabolism probably relied on gas exchange with the immediate environment to achieve organic carbon (Corg) fixation via acetogenesis and it may also have run the metabolism in reverse.

d.) LUCA was part of a community of other organisms.  It’s inconceivable that LUCA. which was a sophisticated organism, could live without a source of organic compounds (like amino acids) to use for constructing its body (remember, these organic compounds were not a “food,” but a construction material). Further, LUCA would itself provide organic compounds that would create niches for other species. (It’s likely that viruses, which aren’t good candidates for a LUCA-like creature, already existed.) The phylogeny in figure (b) just above shows how LUCA would fit into the tree of life, giving rise to all modern creatures via speciation  events, but would itself also be part of an earlier family tree, all of whose members save LUCA went extinct without leaving descendants.

These are the four big conclusions of the paper, with the most interesting to me being how short the time was after Earth’s formation for complex life to have evolved.  And the age of LUCA, remember, is an UNDERESTIMATE of how long it took complex life to evolve after the Earth’s conditions were suitable for such evolution.

I’ll end with the authors’ own conclusions, which are lucid enough for the layperson (bolding is mine)

Conclusions:

By treating gene presence probabilistically, our reconstruction maps many more genes (2,657) to LUCA than previous analyses and results in an estimate of LUCA’s genome size (2.75 Mb) that is within the range of modern prokaryotes. The result is a picture of a cellular organism that was prokaryote grade rather than progenotic  [JAC: not having the characteristic of a prokaryote, which LUCA did] and that probably existed as a component of an ecosystem, using the WLP [JAC: the Wood-Ljungdahl pathway for producing energy, based on hydrogen and carbon dioxide] for acetogenic [JAC: producing acetate as a product of anaerobic metabolism] growth and carbon fixation. We cannot use phylogenetics to reconstruct other members of this early ecosystem but we can infer their physiologies based on the metabolic inputs and outputs of LUCA. How evolution proceeded from the origin of life to early communities at the time of LUCA remains an open question, but the inferred age of LUCA (~4.2 Ga) compared with the origin of the Earth and Moon suggests that the process required a surprisingly short interval of geologic time.

Oh, and the authors suggest the intriguing possibility that if we could reconstruct the DNA sequence of LUCA—something that is not beyond the realm of possibility—then perhaps we could perhaps make in the lab a LUCA-like organism, and actually see what our ancestor looked like!