Science

A collection of arrow points excavated in South Africa has provided the oldest direct evidence of hunters deploying plant-based poisons on their weapons, a practice that has continued into modern times in some traditional cultures

While US President Donald Trump and his administration are making false and debunked claims about the causes of autism, real research is improving our understanding of the condition

After finding success with last year's New Year's resolution, health reporter Grace Wade has grand plans for 2026 – and the science to back them up

With a new 28 Days Later movie and a new Dune, not to mention films from Stephen Spielberg and Ridley Scott, this is shaping up to be a vintage year for sci-fi, says Simon Ings

The Nesin Mathematics Village in western Turkey was dreamed up by award-winning mathematician Ali Nesin to engage his students

We are going to be getting a lot of exciting new information about galaxies in 2026, says Chanda Prescod-Weinstein, who can't wait to see what it can tell us

There is a growing trend to see our relationship with nature as a spiritual thing. This is a mistake, argues Richard Smyth

From Fallout and Gen Z Star Trek to the classic Neuromancer, you will be glued to the TV this year, says TV columnist Bethan Ackerley

Matthew Cobb’s new biography of Francis Crick has been out for only a short time, but I’ve never seen a review less than enthusiastic (check out this NYT review). I finished it last week, and was also enthusiastic, finding it one of the best biographies of a scientist I’ve ever read. It concentrates on Crick’s science, but his accomplishments were inseparable from his personality, which focused not only on science but also on poetry (the book begins and ends with a poet), drugs, women, and philosophy (he was, by the way, a hardcore atheist and determinist).

But I digress. I really recommend that if you have any interest in the man and his work, which of course includes helping reveal the structure of DNA, you get this book and read it. It is a stupendous achievement, based on tons of research, sleuthing, and interviews, and only a geneticist could have written it. But it’s not dull at all: Matthew has always written lively and engaging prose. Crick is also a good complement to Matthew’s previous book, Life’s Greatest Secret, about how the genetic code was cracked.

As a complement, a biography of Jim Watson by Nathaniel Comfort is in the works, but hasn’t yet been published.

After I finished the book,  I had a few questions about Crick and his work, and asked Matthew if I could pose them to him and post his answers. on this site  He kindly said “yes,” and so here they are. My questions are in bold; Matthew’s answers in plain text. Enjoy:

What one question would you ask Crick if he could return from the dead? (Perhaps something that you couldn’t find out about him from your research.)

I think I would probably ask him about his view of the state of consciousness research. His key insight, with Christof Koch, was that rather than trying to explain everything about consciousness, researchers should look for the neural correlates of consciousness – neurons that fired in a correlated manner with a visual perception – and ask what (if anything) was special about how they fired, their connections, and the genes expressed within them. Since his death, we have obtained recordings from such neurons, but far from resolving the issue, consciousness studies have lost their way, with over 200 different theories currently being advanced. What did he think went wrong? Or rather, is it time to use a more reductionist approach, studying simpler neural networks, even in animals that might not be thought to be conscious?

 

Why did it take ten years—until the Nobel prize was awarded—for people to appreciate the significance of DNA?

Most people imagine that when the double helix was discovered it immediately made Watson and Crick globally famous and the finding was feted. That was not the case, mainly because the actual evidence that DNA was the genetic material was restricted to Avery’s 1944 work on one species of bacterium (this was contested) and a rather crappy experiment on bacteriophage viruses (this was the famous paper by Hershey and Chase from 1952; the experiment was so messy that Hershey did not believe that genes were made solely of DNA). So although the structure of DNA was immediately obvious in terms of its function – both replication and gene specificity, as it was called, could be explained by reciprocal base pairs and the sequence of bases – there was no experimental proof of this function. Indeed, the first proof that DNA is the genetic material in eukaryotes (organisms with a nucleus, including all multicellular organisms) did not appear until the mid-1970s! Instead, people viewed the idea that DNA was the genetic material as a working hypothesis, which became stronger through the 1950s as various experiments were carried out (eg., Meselson and Stahl’s experiment on replication) and theoretical developments were made (eg Crick’s ideas about the central dogma). Its notable that the Nobel Prize committee awarded the prize in 1962, just after the first words in the genetic code were cracked and the relation between DNA, RNA and protein had been experimentally demonstrated.

 

A lot of the latter part of the book is on Crick’s work on neuroscience (and, later, consciousness). You claim that he made enormous contributions to the field that really pushed it forward. Could you tell us a bit about what those contributions were?

Although he did not make a great breakthrough, he helped transform the way that neuroscience was done, the ideas and approaches it used. From the outset – a 1979 article in a special issue of Scientific American devoted to the brain – he focused attention on one particular aspect of brain function (he chose visual perception), the importance of theoretical approaches rooted in neuroanatomy, the need for detailed maps of brain areas and the promise of computational approaches to neural networks. All these things shaped subsequent developments – in particular the work on neural networks, which he played a fundamental part in, and which gave rise to today’s Large Language Models (he worked with both Geoffrey Hinton and John Hopfield, who shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics for their work on this in the 1980s). And, of course, he made the scientific study of consciousness scientifically respectable, taking it out of the hands of the philosophers who had been tinkering with the problem for three thousand years and hadn’t got anywhere. Later, in a perspective article he published on the last day of the old millennium, he reviewed recent developments in molecular biology and predicted that three techniques would become useful: classifying neurons not by their morphology but by the genes that are expressed in them, using genetic markers from the human genome to study the brains of primates (the main experimental system he advocated using), and controlling the activity of neurons with light by using genetic constructs. All these three techniques – now called RNAseq, transcriptional mapping and neurogenetics – are used every day in neuroscience labs around the world. Indeed, within a few months of the article appearing, Crick received a letter from a young Austrian researcher, Gero Miesenböck, telling him that his lab was working on optogenetics and the results looked promising. During his lifetime, Crick’s decisive leadership role was well known to neuroscientists; now it has largely been forgotten, unfortunately.

 

Is there anything a young scientist could learn from Crick’s own methods that would be helpful, or was he a one-off whose way of working cannot be imitated?

I think the key issue is not so much Crick as the times in which he worked. As he repeatedly acknowledged, he was amazingly lucky. From 1954-1977 he worked for the Medical Research Council in the UK. He did no teaching, no grading, was not involved in doctoral supervision (I’m not even clear how many PhD students he technically supervised – 4? 3? 5? – which highlights that even if he had his name on a bit of paper, he had little to do with any of them). Apart from a couple of periods, he had no administrative duties, and only one major leadership post, at the Salk, which nearly killed him. He wrote one major grant application at the Salk (the only one he ever wrote), but basically he was funded sufficiently well to simply get on with things. And what did he do? ‘I read and think,’ he said. Try getting that past a recruitment or promotions panel today! In a way, the onus for the creation of more Cricks does not lie with young researchers, but with established scientists – they need to allow young people the time to ‘read and think’, and value failure. Most ideas will turn out to be wrong; that’s OK. Or at least, it was to Crick. Many senior researchers (and funders) don’t see things that way. However, even without such changes, young scientists can adopt some of Crick’s habits. Here’s my attempt to sum up what I think were the lessons of his life and work:

• Read widely and avidly, even engaging with ideas that might seem eccentric or pointless, as ‘there might be something in it’ (one of his favourite phrases).
• Talk through your ideas with your peers – try to find the weak spots in each other’s arguments.
• At least in the initial stages of research, don’t get bogged down in the details that might counter your interpretation/theory – Crick and Brenner called this the ‘don’t worry’ approach. They figured that unconnected contrary data points might not undermine their ideas, and would eventually turn out to have specific, varied explanations.
• Write down your ideas in the form of memos or short documents (keep them short). Writing helps you clarify your ideas and shaped your mind – do not use AI to do this! You can then share your writing with peers, which can be used as a target for discussion and debate.
• Master the art of clear writing. Avoid jargon, keep your ideas straightforward. Again, the only way to develop this skill is to write – badly at first. So rewrite, edit, recast your writing – it will improve your thinking.
• Above all, make sure that the science you do is *fun*. That was a word that Crick repeatedly used, and he genuinely got great pleasure from doing science and thinking about it. Seek out an area in which you can have fun and aren’t bogged down by drudgery.

Click below to get the book on Amazon:

It feels like every time we publish an article about an exciting discovery of a potential biosignature on a new exoplanet, we have to publish a follow-up one a few months later debunking the original claims. That is exactly how science is supposed to work, and part of our job as science journalists is to report on the debunking as well as the original story, even if it might not be as exciting. In this particular case, it seems the discovery of dimethyl sulfide in the atmosphere of exoplanet K2-18 b was a false alarm, according to a new paper available in pre-print form on arXiv by Luis Welbanks of Arizona State University and his co-authors.

The jawbones and vertebrae of a hominin that lived 773,000 years ago have been found in North Africa and could represent a common ancestor of Homo sapiens, Neanderthals and Denisovans

Most planetary systems contain worlds larger than Earth but smaller than Neptune, and the low-density planets around one young star should help us understand how such systems form

You might feel like the days and weeks are slipping by. Here is how one psychologist says you can shift your experience of time

As anticipated, RFK Jr. continues to be a wrecking ball on the American healthcare scene as HHS secretary. His latest move to undermine vaccines in any way possible is to reduce the number of vaccines on the routine vaccine schedule from covering 17 illnesses to covering only 11. This will have the predictable result of reducing vaccine compliance and increasing preventable disease. […]

The post RFK Decimates Vaccine Schedule first appeared on Science-Based Medicine.

Today’s Jesus and Mo strip, called “divide”, came with a caption: “Are you sure it’s not in their cardiovascular system?”  When you read the strip, you’ll understand:

What I don’t get about this strip is that even if Jesus were real, and was conversing with his believers, it would have to be in their heads.  What’s the alternative: Jesus appearing before people and having a chat with them?  Well, you tell me, but this is one I don’t get, though it’s clearly meant to satirize the “personal conversations” people have with Jesus.

I bet there’s a chatbot for that, though. . .

It was a question I heard lots this past weekend. “What’s that bright star near the Full Moon?” That ‘star’ was actually a planet, as Jupiter heads towards opposition rising ‘opposite’ to the setting Sun this coming weekend. This places the King of the Planets high in the northern sky, in the same general spot the Full Moon occupies in January.

It seems that one reader or another always comes through when we run out of photos. (But after today, we’ll be in that situation again!)  The helper today is Pratyaydipta Rudra, a statistics professor at Oklahoma State University. Pratyay’s captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge the photos by clicking on them. Pratyay and his wife Sreemala have a big bird-and-butterfly website called Wingmates.

There was a terrible ice storm in North-Central Oklahoma in October, 2020. It was extremely cold, raining all day, and the trees were having a hard time surviving with all the ice on them. Several trees fell in our neighborhood, and a lot of others lost big branches. The birds had a tough time. It was good to see that the tough little Yellow-rumped Warblers were quite resilient. This particular bird was actually quite active hopping around the icicles to catch insects (frozen food?). Here’s an image of it posing with a catch.

Yellow-rumped Warbler (Setophaga coronata) with a spider catch:

The icicles on the branches and the leaves created some interesting shapes with “frozen hearts” and “ice covered pecans” abound! Everything was quite photogenic, but it was hard for the birds.

A Fox Squirrel (Sciurus niger) navigating the icy terrain:

I found several hungry Yellow-rumped Warblers jumping around among the icicles.

Northern Mockingbird (Mimus polyglottos):

Eastern Bluebird (Sialia sialis) in the rain:

Chipping Sparrow (Spizella passerina):

As this was not enough, a huge snowstorm rolled in 3 months later which nearly killed off all our local bluebirds. I have not seen a storm like that one in Oklahoma, but that’s for another day.

AI models such as ChatGPT and Gemini fail to give adequate advice for 60 per cent of queries relating to women’s health in a test created by medical professionals

Immune cells are most commonly engineered to kill cancers, but now, scientists have shown the technique makes the gut lining of older mice resemble that of younger mice, raising hopes that the same approach could work in people

Scientists are learning to engineer light in rich, multidimensional ways that dramatically increase how much information a single photon can carry. This leap could make quantum communication more secure, quantum computers more efficient, and sensors far more sensitive. Recent advances have turned what was once an experimental curiosity into compact, chip-based technologies with real-world potential. Researchers say the field is hitting a turning point where impact may soon follow discovery.