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Japan's Next Sample-Return Mission Could be to a Comet

Promoting Substainable Lunar Bases With Bio-Concrete

Roman ships equipped with bronze rams sank dozens of Carthaginian ships during a major naval battle in 241 BCE – now we know how the rams were made

The UK government needs to go beyond offering subsidies for low-carbon technologies (LCTs) like electric cars and solar panels for energy and heating, if it is to meet its net-zero targets by 2050, a report suggests.

Researchers unlock the mystery of bound states in the continuum using compact mechanical systems.

Quasicrystals are intriguing materials with long-range atomic order that lack periodicity. It has been a longstanding question whether antiferromagnetism, while commonly found in regular crystals, is even possible in quasicrystals. In a new study, researchers have finally answered this question, providing the first definitive neutron diffraction evidence of antiferromagnetism in a real icosahedral quasicrystal. This discovery opens a new research area of quasiperiodic antiferromagnets, with potential applications in spintronics.

Quasicrystals are intriguing materials with long-range atomic order that lack periodicity. It has been a longstanding question whether antiferromagnetism, while commonly found in regular crystals, is even possible in quasicrystals. In a new study, researchers have finally answered this question, providing the first definitive neutron diffraction evidence of antiferromagnetism in a real icosahedral quasicrystal. This discovery opens a new research area of quasiperiodic antiferromagnets, with potential applications in spintronics.

Astronomers are investigating the longest and most energetic bursts of X-rays seen from a newly awakened black hole. Watching this strange behavior unfold in real time offers a unique opportunity to learn more about these powerful events and the mysterious behavior of massive black holes.

In a striking demonstration of molecular control, a team of scientists has harnessed light to reverse the twist in self-assembling molecules. The study identifies how trace residual aggregates in photo-responsive azobenzene solutions can reverse helical chirality through secondary nucleation. By using precise control of ultraviolet and visible light, the researchers could switch between the rotation of helices, offering a breakthrough for novel materials with tunable properties.

In a striking demonstration of molecular control, a team of scientists has harnessed light to reverse the twist in self-assembling molecules. The study identifies how trace residual aggregates in photo-responsive azobenzene solutions can reverse helical chirality through secondary nucleation. By using precise control of ultraviolet and visible light, the researchers could switch between the rotation of helices, offering a breakthrough for novel materials with tunable properties.

Engineers have made bacteria to produce hyperspectral signals that can be detected as far as 90 meters away. Their work could lead to the development of bacterial sensors for agricultural and other applications, which could be monitored by drones or satellites to monitor crop health, for example.

Scientists have developed a scalable method to produce porous graphene membranes that efficiently separate carbon dioxide. The breakthrough could significantly reduce the cost and footprint of carbon capture technology.

A reporter from ABC News interviewed me yesterday about the Dire Wolf, and her piece appears on their website today (see below). I had to find it myself because, as is usual, when I ask reporters to send me the link to a story for which I was interviewed, they all say “yes”, but only about 10% ever do.  Frankly, I think it’s kind of selfish to exploit scientists for their expertise and not even send them a lousy link.

Well, I digress, but this is in line with the kind of science journalism that has often accompanied the Dire Wolf story. Fortunately, the ABC article is pretty good.

First I’ll add a few comments.  My own view is that Colossal has behaved in a sleazy and overly secretive way with respect to their “de-extinction” and “we-are-big-conservationists” claims.  Some of the secrecy seems unwarranted. For example, they told the New Yorker reporter who wrote about the “Dire Wolf” what genes they had edited, but did not permit him to publish their identity.  Since the faux Dire Wolves are now romping around a secret pasture monitored by drones, there’s no chance that anybody else is going to do what Colossal did, so no need to hide the genes.

The paper about the “woolly mouse” is on bioRχiv, but is still not accepted for publication. (The accompanying note says “This article is a preprint and has not been certified by peer review.”)

And Colossal Bioscience is getting considerable flak from the better science journalists, and is getting peevish about it. They issued a press release yesterday that was defensive, clearly a response to the pushback they’re getting and heavily concerned with species definitions, trying to argue that the dire wolf is a “new species” even though it’s just a gray wolf with 20 DNA letters changed.  Here’s short excerpt of the two-page release:

We invested over a year collaborating with academic colleagues to improve the dire wolf paleogenome and decode the dire wolf’s evolutionary history. Our scientific manuscript has been submitted for peer review and posted to the preprint server–please go check it out.

I cannot find the preprint of the Dire Wolf paper anywhere on the web. If you can find it, let us all know. It would of course list the genes that had been changed.

You can read the ABC article by clicking below; it’s free. The article includes a ten-minute video of the project showing the “Dire Wolves” (I have to admit that they’re cute).  Note that Colossal decline to let the reporter see the faux Dire Wolves “up close,” though they showed her the videos.  And Colossal co-founder Ben Lamm asserts that they are on target to produce woolly mammoths by 2028! I’m ready to bet a thousand dollars that that won’t happen—especially if you define “de-exincted woolly mammoth” as being something with at least 50 gene edits that’s ready to release on the tundra.

Three quotes from Beth Shapiro, the chief scientific officer of Colossal Biosciences, from the video in the article:

“. . . that animal looks like a dire wolf, it will behave like a dire wolf, and it is a dire wolf.”

“When I saw them born, and they were white, I was like: ‘we’ve done it–those are dire wolves.'”

“I think that the best definition of a species is if it looks like that species, if it is acting like that species, if it is filling the role of that species, then you’ve done it.”

They are heavily invested in the claim that this really IS a dire wolf.  The press release makes that clear, as they’re trying to revise species definitions so that the Dire Wolf qualifies as a new species. From Colossal’s press release:

So many experts out there are demanding that species are defined solely by their DNA. That’s some version of “insane”. Even evolutionary biologists can’t agree on species definitions. Mammoth species? Defined by teeth ridges. Ancient bison? Horn shapes. And so arbitrarily that someone accidentally mixing up length and width measurements had zero impact on species classification. Brown bears and polar bears, humans and Neanderthals, wolves and coyotes are all different species unless you apply the most commonly taught species concept, which would classify them as the same species because they can interbreed and produce healthy, fertile offspring.

Getting dragged into arguments about species definitions is a distraction from the real achievement. This is the most significant advancement in gene-editing in history. Even our harshest critics admit it. As one of our founders stated, “this is the moon landing of synthetic biology.”

. . .We get it. We totally understand that some scientists are not comfortable calling these dire wolves because they feel like the wolves are not sufficiently genetically similar to a particular extinct individual to merit that name. That’s ok with us.  This is not a fight that we care about. We’re calling them dire wolves, and if you prefer something else (how about “Colossal’s dire wolves”?) that works too. And maybe also take a breath and think about what the birth of these technologies means to the future of our planet instead of nitpicking terminology.

This is a fight they don’t care about? I think they should care, at least a bit. They are calling these tweaked canids members of a new species, the “Dire Wolf”.  I prefer “gray wolves with fifteen DNA letters from dire wolves” or, better, “genetic variants of the gray wolf.” The whole hype around this animal is that it is a new species that existed in the past, not simply a minor variant of the gray wolf that is nowhere near being genetically similar to the extinct gray wolf.

Quotes from the ABC piece, including what I said:

Colossal Laboratories & Biosciences, the company behind the revived dire wolf and based in Dallas, said it is “a scientific breakthrough for global conservation efforts” and is even trying to bring back the extinct woolly mammoth by 2028.

However, bioethicists and ecologists say they are skeptical that the animals created are actually dire wolves and said there are ethical concerns including where the animals would be kept and if they could ever survive in the wild.

“All claims of de-extinction are the invocation of a metaphor, and what they have produced and what they will at some point produce, may be technologically impressive, but they are not and never can be the actual previously extinct creatures,” Samuel Gorovitz, professor of philosophy at Syracuse University and a leader in the development of the medical ethics field, told ABC News.

“Only adult dire wolves can raise a dire wolf and there aren’t any. … One thing that we know for sure, that they are not, is dire wolves.”

. . . Stuart Pimm, Doris Duke professor of conservation ecology at Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment, called the news of the resurrected dire wolf a “colossal fabrication” and referred to the species created as a “designer dog.”

“This is just a big dog with a few genes inserted from a once extinct wolf,” Pimm told ABC News. “Incidentally, a dire wolf is not really closely related to a regular wolf.”

He went on, “It’s about as different to a regular wolf as we are from chimpanzees and if you inserted a chimpanzee gene into a human, I think that will be a horribly unethical thing to do.”

One of my beefs is that none of Colossal’s projects involve changing the behavior of the “de-extincted” organism, even though behavior is absolutely critical not only in bringing back a species as it really was, but allowing it to survive in nature.  Remember, wolves and mammoths are social animals, programmed to learn many things from their parents. And they have genetically coded behavioral repertoires whose genetic basis we do not understand. For example, maybe lichens tasted good to a Woolly Mammoth but wouldn’t to a replica tweaked by Colossal. Such a difference, if it existed, would likely be genetic.

A few more criticisms from the ABC piece:

However, today’s environment does not resemble the environment in which historic dire wolves lived and releasing them into the wild could harm the ecosystem.

“It has to live somewhere, and it isn’t clear what the environment was that the dire wolf lived in, or what it ate, or sort of its behavior, and so you kind of face a possibility you won’t know where to keep this animal that you made healthy,” Arthur Caplan, a professor of bioethics at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine, told ABC News.

He added that the behavior of dire wolves was likely shaped by the packs they roamed in or packs that they may have competed against. However, those groups also don’t exist anymore.

“If you bring back something that’s been dead 10,000 or 40,000 or 100,000 years, you need to bring back its environment, not just the animal,” Caplan continued. “Otherwise, you potentially are going to have issues.”

Jerry Coyne, professor emeritus in the department of ecology and evolution at the University of Chicago, said there is no way to release the “de-extincted” dire wolves back into the wild because they wouldn’t know how to survive.

Coyne told ABC News that if the revived dire wolves are let loose into the wild “without the social group that they’re evolved to be in” it would be hard to expect them to “behave properly” around other animals because they’ve never been exposed to other species.

“So that’s also unethical, because those animals are kind of separate. They’re not going to have the right thing to eat, it’s not going to know what to eat, how to eat, probably got the wrong digestive system. … So that’s one of the ethical considerations.”

Colossal Laboratories did not reply to ABC News’ request for comment on these concerns.

Of course they wouldn’t!

Again, I think there is a destructive and perhaps unwitting collusion between Colossal and much of the press. Now the ABC piece by Mary Kakatos is fine, and gives the proper caveats and room for critics, but a lot of pieces don’t (see the New Yorker piece, for instance).  But the press isn’t going to get clicks by saying that “this is not a real Dire Wolf,” so they amp up the gee-whiz factor and dial down the critics. And, as you see above, Colossal is perfectly happy with the rah-rah press coverage. The real losers in all this are the public, who miss the chance to learn something about genetics and conservation.

And, by the way, Colossal should stop spreading the view that de-extinction is one way to keep us from worrying about endangered species, implying that we can always bring them back again with cloning, Crispr and surrogate mothers!

UPDATE: Beth Shapiro defends the criticisms leveled against the Dire Wolf project. Many of her points was in the press release. Click to hear (h/t Matthew Cobb). She is quite defensive.

An analysis of this statement followed by a thread. I can’t embed the Bluesky post, but click on it to go to the thread:

Today Mark Sturtevant has returned with pictures of diverse critters, including insects, amphibians, and gastropods. Mark’s IDs, links, and narrative are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them.

Here are more pictures of various critters in my area, which is in eastern Michigan.

The first picture is a young treefrog, and it is about as big as your thumbnail. This will be one of two sister species in the area, either Cope’s Gray Treefrog, Dryophytes chrysoscelis, or the Gray Treefrog, D. versicolor. They are commonly green in green surroundings. If it is the latter species, then it is tetraploid and that is why it is a separate species from the former. Polyploidy is one way to quickly form a new species, and this is a classic example.

Next up are a couple of our local snails, the Brown-lipped snails, Cepaea nemoralis. I was not sure what to do with them, and so I did this. These snails were introduced from Europe, and are now widespread in the U.S.

The next several pictures are manual focus stacks that were staged on the ‘ol dining room table. First up is a young Flower Crab Spider. That name applies to many species of crab spiders that often lurk on flowers to capture prey. Based on its eye arrangement and prominent hairs, I am pretty sure this one is Mecaphasa sp.

The jumping spiders that follow are species that I’ve shown here many times. The first is a Dimorphic Jumping Spider, Maevia inclemens. This one was very fidgety and it needed something to eat to help settle down. The lights in the eyes of the first picture came from an LED modeling light to help me to focus. I liked the look and so I did not remove the highlighting in post-processing. In the second picture you can see reflections of my fingertips in the large frontal eyes.

Another common spider is the Bold Jumping Spider, Phidippus audax. This youngster was very easy to work with.

The weird creature shown in the next picture is one of our Harvestmen, I think Phalangium opilio. I don’t see this species very often even though it’s distributed all around me. I like them because males have really long pedipalps and horned chelicerae. In some populations, the chelicerae horns are much longer than what is seen here.

Next is a moth that flew inside the house one evening. I think it’s a new species for me – the Lunate Zale Moth, Zale lunata.

And finally, I spotted this large caterpillar one day when out with the cameras. This is a mature Polyphemus Moth larva, Antheraea polyphemus, and it will become maybe the 2nd or 3rd largest moth in the U.S. For the portrait picture, I was trying to get it to look all haughty and Offended, as caterpillars like this often look very offended when being handled. But instead, this one looked like it was Eevil and plotting something, Mwa ha ha haa.

Bioreactors housing methane-eating bacteria could offer a portable, off-grid solution for soaking up methane leaks from sites like landfills and coal mines

We may have a unique opportunity to make an infrastructure investment that can demonstrably save money over the long term – by burying power and broadband lines. This is always an option, of course, but since we are in the early phases of rolling out fiber optic service, and also trying to improve our grid infrastructure with reconductoring, now may be the perfect time to also upgrade our infrastructure by burying much of these lines.

This has long been a frustration of mine. I remember over 40 years ago seeing new housing developments (my father was in construction) with all the power lines buried. I hadn’t realized what a terrible eye sore all those telephone poles and wires were until they were gone. It was beautiful. I was lead to believe this was the new trend, especially for residential areas. I looked forward to a day without the ubiquitous telephone poles, much like the transition to cable eliminated the awful TV antennae on top of every home. But that day never came. Areas with buried lines remained, it seems, a privilege of upscale neighborhoods. I get further annoyed every time there is a power outage in my area because of a downed line.

The reason, ultimately, had to be cost. Sure, there are lots of variables that determine that cost, but at the end of the day developers, towns, utility companies were taking the cheaper option. But what price do we place on the aesthetics of the places we live, and the inconvenience of regular power outages? I also hate the fact that the utility companies have to come around every year or so and carve ugly paths through large beautiful trees.

So I was very happy to see this study which argues that – Benefits of aggressively co-undergrounding electric and broadband lines outweigh costs. First, they found that co-undergrounding (simply burying broadband and power lines at the same time) saves about 40% over doing each individually. This seems pretty obvious, but it’s good to put a number on it. But more importantly they found that the whole project can save money over the long term. They modeled one town in Mass and found:

“Over 40 years, the cost of an aggressive co-undergrounding strategy in Shrewsbury would be $45.4 million, but the benefit from avoiding outages is $55.1 million.”

The reduced cost comes mostly from avoiding power outages. This means that areas most prone to power outages would benefit the most. What they mean by “aggressive” is co-undergrounding even before existing power lines are at the end of their lifespan. They do not consider the benefits of reconductoring – meaning increasing the carrying capacity of power lines with more modern construction. The benefit here can be huge as well, especially in facilitating the move to less centralized power production. We can further include the economic benefits of upgrading to fiber optic broadband, or even high end cable service.

This is exactly the kind of thing that governments should be doing – thoughtful public investments that will improve our lives and save money in the long term. The up front costs are also within the means of utility companies and local governments. I would also like to see subsidies at the state and federal level to spread the costs out even more.

Infrastructure investments, at least in the abstract, tend to have broad bipartisan support. Even when they fight over such proposals, in the end both sides will take credit for them, because the public generally supports infrastructure that makes their lives better. For undergrounding there are the immediate benefits of improved aesthetics – our neighborhoods will look prettier. Then we will also benefit from improved broadband access, which can be connected to the rural broadband project which has stalled. Investments in the grid can help keep electricity costs down. For those of us living in areas at high risk of power outages, the lack of such outages will also make an impression over time. We will tell our kids and grandkids stories about the time an ice storm took down power lines, which were laying dangerously across the road, and we had no power for days. What did we do with ourselves, they will ask. You mean – there was no heat in the winter? Did people die? Why yes, yes they did. It will seem barbaric.

This may not make sense for every single location, and obviously some long distance lines are better above ground. But for residential neighborhoods, undergrounding power and broadband seems like a no-brainer. It seemed like one 40 years ago. I hope we don’t miss this opportunity. This could also be a political movement that everyone can get behind, which would be a good thing in itself.

 

The post Bury Broadband and Electricity first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.

Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) are commonly found in the bodies of short-beaked common dolphins that get stranded on UK beaches, and are linked to the animals’ risk of infectious diseases

Culture editor Alison Flood rounds up the book club’s thoughts on our latest read, the weird and wild Dengue Boy by Michel Nieva. Warning: spoilers ahead  

The author of the award-winning classic science fiction novel, the latest read for the New Scientist Book Club, on the science behind his creation

In this extract from the classic science fiction novel, the latest read for the New Scientist Book Club, we meet Ringworld’s protagonist Louis Wu, as he travels a future Earth