Science news

• Earliest Homo sapiens exhibited unexpected sophistication

  15-03-2018 22:30
  WASHINGTON (Reuters) - On a grassy African landscape, some of the earliest members of our species, Homo sapiens, engaged in surprisingly sophisticated behaviors including using color pigments, creating advanced tools and trading for resources with other groups of people.
  
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• Excavation in Kenya uncovers ancient stone tools

  15-03-2018 21:54 via cbc.ca
  Stone tools and other items from ancient sites in Kenya give a glimpse at the emergence of some key human behaviours, perhaps including a building of relationships with distant neighbours, new research says.
  
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• Ending overfishing would stop the population declines of endangered bycatch species about half the time

  15-03-2018 20:54
  A study finds that ending overfishing would stop the population declines of endangered bycatch species about half the time.
  
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• Artificial sweetener could intensify symptoms in those with Crohn's disease

  15-03-2018 20:54
  In a study that has implications for humans with inflammatory diseases, researchers have found that, given over a six-week period, the artificial sweetener sucralose, known by the brand name Splenda, worsens gut inflammation in mice with Crohn's disease, but had no substantive effect on those without the condition.
  
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• AI bests humans at mapping the moon

  15-03-2018 20:53
  
  AI does a more thorough job of counting craters than humans.
  
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• Hawking remembered: Edmonton family mourns loss of physicist and friend

  15-03-2018 20:49 via cbc.ca
  Stephen Hawking may have been one of the most brilliant scientific minds of all time but he also had an affinity for marmalade toast, cozy slippers and was proud of the fact that he once drove over the foot of Prince Charles.
  
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• Mystery dinosaur skeleton to be auctioned in Paris

  15-03-2018 20:01
  LYON, France (Reuters) - The fossilized skeleton of an unidentified type of dinosaur is set to be auctioned in Paris in June, and could fetch up to 1.8 million euros ($2.22 million), auctioneers said.
  
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• Virtual coaches, fitness trackers help patients stay fit after cardiac rehab

  15-03-2018 19:50
  A 12-week mobile health, or mHealth, program not only kept cardiac rehab patients from losing ground, it appeared to help them maintain and even gain fitness.
  
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• Ancient climate shifts may have sparked human ingenuity and networking

  15-03-2018 19:48
  
  Stone tools signal rise of social networking by 320,000 years ago in East Africa, researchers argue.
  
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• Killer whale research gets $12M infusion from Canadian government

  15-03-2018 19:35 via cbc.ca
  The funding includes $9.1 million for developing and testing technology to better detect the endangered orcas and prevent collisions with vessels.
  
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• Scientists discover genomic ancestry of Stone Age North Africans from Morocco

  15-03-2018 19:12
  An international team of researchers have sequenced DNA from individuals from Morocco dating to approximately 15,000 years ago. This is the oldest nuclear DNA from Africa ever successfully analyzed. The study shows that the individuals, dating to the Late Stone Age, had a genetic heritage that was in part similar to ancient Levantine Natufians and an uncharacterized sub-Saharan African lineage to which modern West Africans are genetically closest.
  
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• New understanding of parasite biology might help stop malaria transmission

  15-03-2018 19:12
  Researchers made an important step toward deeper understanding of how malaria blood stage parasites turn the switch to become transmissible to other humans. This knowledge is fundamental for future research aiming to interrupt malaria transmission.
  
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• New methods find undiagnosed genetic diseases in electronic health records

  15-03-2018 19:12
  Researchers have found a way to search genetic data in electronic health records to identify undiagnosed genetic diseases in large populations so treatments can be tailored to the actual cause of the illness.
  
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• Improved capture of cancer cells in blood could help track disease

  15-03-2018 19:12
  New research builds on several years of work in isolating circulating tumor cells, or CTCs, by demonstrating improved methods for their capture on clinical samples for the first time.
  
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• Democratizing single-cell analysis

  15-03-2018 19:12
  Scientists have developed a new low-cost technique for profiling gene expression in hundreds of thousands of cells.
  
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• Clearing clumps of protein in aging neural stem cells boosts their activity

  15-03-2018 19:12
  Young, resting neural stem cells in the brains of mice store large clumps of proteins in specialized cellular trash compartments known as lysosomes, researchers have found.
  
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• Changing environment influenced human evolution

  15-03-2018 19:11 via bbc.co.uk
  New evidence from Kenya suggests that local climate change drove early human innovation.
  
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• Topsy-turvy currents key to removing nitrate from streams

  15-03-2018 19:07
  More than 500 years ago, Leonardo da Vinci sketched what he called 'la turbolenza,' comparing chaotic swirls atop flowing water to curly human hair. It turns out those patterns influence myriad phenomena, from the drag on an airplane's wings and the formation of Jupiter's red spot to the rustling of tree leaves.
  
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• Potential for personalized immunotherapy to large variety of cancers

  15-03-2018 19:07
  A new study shows that ovarian cancer, which has proved resistant to currently available immunotherapies, could be susceptible to personalized immunotherapy.
  
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• New model links yellow fever in Africa to climate, environment

  15-03-2018 19:07
  The burden of yellow fever in any given area is known to be heavily dependent on climate, particularly rainfall and temperature which can impact both mosquito life cycle and viral replication. Now, researchers have developed a new model to quantify yellow fever dynamics across Africa using not only annual averages of these climatic measures, but seasonal dynamics.
  
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• Modern humans interbred with Denisovans twice in history

  15-03-2018 19:07
  Modern humans co-existed and interbred not only with Neanderthals, but also with another species of archaic humans, the mysterious Denisovans. Research now describes how, while developing a new genome-analysis method for comparing whole genomes between modern human and Denisovan populations, researchers unexpectedly discovered two distinct episodes of Denisovan genetic intermixing, or admixing, between the two. This suggests a more diverse genetic history than previously thought between the Deni
  
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• Infants can't talk, but they know how to reason

  15-03-2018 19:07
  A new study reveals that preverbal infants are able to make rational deductions, showing surprise when an outcome does not occur as expected.
  
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• How royal jelly helps honeybee larvae defy gravity and become queens

  15-03-2018 19:07
  Honeybee larvae develop into queen bees if they are fed large quantities of a food called royal jelly. But royal jelly does more than determine whether a larva becomes a queen: it also keeps her safely anchored to the roof of the queen cell in which she develops. Research explains how the pH of royal jelly helps make the substance viscous enough to keep the queen-to-be from falling.
  
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• Getting lost: Why older people might lose their way

  15-03-2018 19:07
  Researchers have found a possible explanation for the difficulty in spatial orientation experienced sometimes by elderly people. In the brains of older adults, they detected an unstable activity in an area that is central for spatial navigation.
  
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• Diabetes: Are high blood glucose levels an effect rather than the cause of the disease?

  15-03-2018 19:07
  Insulin resistance and elevated blood glucose levels are considered to be the cause of type 2 diabetes. However, scientists have now provided evidence that things might be completely different. They showed in flies that elevated levels of the metabolite MG (methylglyoxal) cause the typical diabetic disturbances of the metabolism and lead to insulin resistance, obesity and elevated blood sugar levels.
  
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• Bacterial and host cell proteins interact to regulate Chlamydia's 'exit strategy'

  15-03-2018 19:07
  Interactions between Chlamydia trachomatis proteins and host cell proteins help determine whether the bacterium leaves an infected cell via breakdown of the cellular membrane (lysis) or in a membrane-bound package, according to new research.
  
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• Altering songbird brain provides insight into human behavior

  15-03-2018 19:07
  A study demonstrates that a bird's song can be altered -- to the syllable -- by activating and deactivating a neuronal pathway responsible for helping the brain determine whether a vocalization is performed correctly.
  
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• Babies Can Think Logically before They Learn to Talk

  15-03-2018 19:00 via rss.sciam.com
  A new study shows language is not a prerequisite for some basic reasoning-- Read more on ScientificAmerican.com
  
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• Topological insulator laser: Theory

  15-03-2018 18:39
  Topological insulators are phases of matter characterized by topological edge states that propagate in a unidirectional manner that is robust to imperfections and disorder. These attributes make topological insulator systems ideal candidates for enabling applications in quantum computation and spintronics. We propose a concept that exploits topological effects in a unique way: the topological insulator laser. These are lasers whose lasing mode exhibits topologically protected transport without m
  
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• Topological insulator laser: Experiments

  15-03-2018 18:39
  Physical systems exhibiting topological invariants are naturally endowed with robustness against perturbations, as manifested in topological insulators—materials exhibiting robust electron transport, immune from scattering by defects and disorder. Recent years have witnessed intense efforts toward exploiting these phenomena in photonics. Here we demonstrate a nonmagnetic topological insulator laser system exhibiting topologically protected transport in the cavity. Its topological propertie
  
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• Rev-erb{alpha} dynamically modulates chromatin looping to control circadian gene transcription

  15-03-2018 18:39
  Mammalian physiology exhibits 24-hour cyclicity due to circadian rhythms of gene expression controlled by transcription factors that constitute molecular clocks. Core clock transcription factors bind to the genome at enhancer sequences to regulate circadian gene expression, but not all binding sites are equally functional. We found that in mice, circadian gene expression in the liver is controlled by rhythmic chromatin interactions between enhancers and promoters. Rev-erbα, a core repressi
  
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• Response to Comment on "Synthesis and characterization of the pentazolate anion cyclo-N5- in (N5)6(H3O)3(NH4)4Cl"

  15-03-2018 18:39
  Huang and Xu argue that the cyclo-N5– ion in (N5)6(H3O)3(NH4)4Cl we described in our report is theoretically unfavorable and is instead protonated. Their conclusion is invalid, as they use an improper method to assess the proton transfer in a solid crystal structure. We present an in-depth experimental and theoretical analysis of (N5)6(H3O)3(NH4)4Cl that supports the results in the original paper.
  
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• Real-time imaging of adatom-promoted graphene growth on nickel

  15-03-2018 18:39
  Single adatoms are expected to participate in many processes occurring at solid surfaces, such as the growth of graphene on metals. We demonstrate, both experimentally and theoretically, the catalytic role played by single metal adatoms during the technologically relevant process of graphene growth on nickel (Ni). The catalytic action of individual Ni atoms at the edges of a growing graphene flake was directly captured by scanning tunneling microscopy imaging at the millisecond time scale, while
  
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• Random heteropolymers preserve protein function in foreign environments

  15-03-2018 18:39
  The successful incorporation of active proteins into synthetic polymers could lead to a new class of materials with functions found only in living systems. However, proteins rarely function under the conditions suitable for polymer processing. On the basis of an analysis of trends in protein sequences and characteristic chemical patterns on protein surfaces, we designed four-monomer random heteropolymers to mimic intrinsically disordered proteins for protein solubilization and stabilization in n
  
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• Protecting marine mammals, turtles, and birds by rebuilding global fisheries

  15-03-2018 18:39
  Reductions in global fishing pressure are needed to end overfishing of target species and maximize the value of fisheries. We ask whether such reductions would also be sufficient to protect non–target species threatened as bycatch. We compare changes in fishing pressure needed to maximize profits from 4713 target fish stocks—accounting for >75% of global catch—to changes in fishing pressure needed to reverse ongoing declines of 20 marine mammal, sea turtle, and seabird popul
  
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• Precursors of logical reasoning in preverbal human infants

  15-03-2018 18:39
  Infants are able to entertain hypotheses about complex events and to modify them rationally when faced with inconsistent evidence. These capacities suggest that infants can use elementary logical representations to frame and prune hypotheses. By presenting scenes containing ambiguities about the identity of an object, here we show that 12- and 19-month-old infants look longer at outcomes that are inconsistent with a logical inference necessary to resolve such ambiguities. At the moment of a pote
  
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• Phenotype risk scores identify patients with unrecognized Mendelian disease patterns

  15-03-2018 18:39
  Genetic association studies often examine features independently, potentially missing subpopulations with multiple phenotypes that share a single cause. We describe an approach that aggregates phenotypes on the basis of patterns described by Mendelian diseases. We mapped the clinical features of 1204 Mendelian diseases into phenotypes captured from the electronic health record (EHR) and summarized this evidence as phenotype risk scores (PheRSs). In an initial validation, PheRS distinguished case
  
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• Organometallic and radical intermediates reveal mechanism of diphthamide biosynthesis

  15-03-2018 18:39
  Diphthamide biosynthesis involves a carbon-carbon bond-forming reaction catalyzed by a radical S-adenosylmethionine (SAM) enzyme that cleaves a carbon-sulfur (C–S) bond in SAM to generate a 3-amino-3-carboxypropyl (ACP) radical. Using rapid freezing, we have captured an organometallic intermediate with an iron-carbon (Fe–C) bond between ACP and the enzyme’s [4Fe-4S] cluster. In the presence of the substrate protein, elongation factor 2, this intermediate converts to an organic
  
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• Oklahoma's induced seismicity strongly linked to wastewater injection depth

  15-03-2018 18:39
  The sharp rise in Oklahoma seismicity since 2009 is due to wastewater injection. The role of injection depth is an open, complex issue, yet critical for hazard assessment and regulation. We developed an advanced Bayesian network to model joint conditional dependencies between spatial, operational, and seismicity parameters. We found that injection depth relative to crystalline basement most strongly correlates with seismic moment release. The joint effects of depth and volume are critical, as in
  
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• Mutation dynamics and fitness effects followed in single cells

  15-03-2018 18:39
  Mutations have been investigated for more than a century but remain difficult to observe directly in single cells, which limits the characterization of their dynamics and fitness effects. By combining microfluidics, time-lapse imaging, and a fluorescent tag of the mismatch repair system in Escherichia coli, we visualized the emergence of mutations in single cells, revealing Poissonian dynamics. Concomitantly, we tracked the growth and life span of single cells, accumulating ~20,000 mutations gen
  
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• Lysosome activation clears aggregates and enhances quiescent neural stem cell activation during aging

  15-03-2018 18:39
  In the adult brain, the neural stem cell (NSC) pool comprises quiescent and activated populations with distinct roles. Transcriptomic analysis revealed that quiescent and activated NSCs exhibited differences in their protein homeostasis network. Whereas activated NSCs had active proteasomes, quiescent NSCs contained large lysosomes. Quiescent NSCs from young mice accumulated protein aggregates, and many of these aggregates were stored in large lysosomes. Perturbation of lysosomal activity in qui
  
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• GDV1 induces sexual commitment of malaria parasites by antagonizing HP1-dependent gene silencing

  15-03-2018 18:39
  Malaria is caused by Plasmodium parasites that proliferate in the bloodstream. During each replication cycle, some parasites differentiate into gametocytes, the only forms able to infect the mosquito vector and transmit malaria. Sexual commitment is triggered by activation of AP2-G, the master transcriptional regulator of gametocytogenesis. Heterochromatin protein 1 (HP1)–dependent silencing of ap2-g prevents sexual conversion in proliferating parasites. In this study, we identified Plasmo
  
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• Factoring stream turbulence into global assessments of nitrogen pollution

  15-03-2018 18:39
  The discharge of excess nitrogen to streams and rivers poses an existential threat to both humans and ecosystems. A seminal study of headwater streams across the United States concluded that in-stream removal of nitrate is controlled primarily by stream chemistry and biology. Reanalysis of these data reveals that stream turbulence (in particular, turbulent mass transfer across the concentration boundary layer) imposes a previously unrecognized upper limit on the rate at which nitrate is removed
  
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• Diurnal transcriptome atlas of a primate across major neural and peripheral tissues

  15-03-2018 18:39
  Diurnal gene expression patterns underlie time-of-the-day–specific functional specialization of tissues. However, available circadian gene expression atlases of a few organs are largely from nocturnal vertebrates. We report the diurnal transcriptome of 64 tissues, including 22 brain regions, sampled every 2 hours over 24 hours, from the primate Papio anubis (baboon). Genomic transcription was highly rhythmic, with up to 81.7% of protein-coding genes showing daily rhythms in expression. In
  
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• Comment on "Synthesis and characterization of the pentazolate anion cyclo-N5- in (N5)6(H3O)3(NH4)4Cl"

  15-03-2018 18:39
  Zhang et al. (Reports, 27 January 2017, p. 374) reported synthesis of a cyclo-N5– ion putatively stabilized in a solid-state salt by hydrogen bonding from surrounding counterions. We performed theoretical calculations suggesting that HN5 would be favored over the anion in the reported pentazolate salt via proton transfer.
  
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• Astrocyte-derived interleukin-33 promotes microglial synapse engulfment and neural circuit development

  15-03-2018 18:39
  Neuronal synapse formation and remodeling are essential to central nervous system (CNS) development and are dysfunctional in neurodevelopmental diseases. Innate immune signals regulate tissue remodeling in the periphery, but how this affects CNS synapses is largely unknown. Here, we show that the interleukin-1 family cytokine interleukin-33 (IL-33) is produced by developing astrocytes and is developmentally required for normal synapse numbers and neural circuit function in the spinal cord and th
  
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• STEVE the aurora makes its debut in mauve

  15-03-2018 18:15
  
  A newly discovered type of aurora is a visible version of usually invisible charged particles drifting in the upper atmosphere.
  
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• Power utilities forced to adapt as climate change brings wilder weather

  15-03-2018 16:06 via cbc.ca
  The increasing intensity of storms that lead to massive power outages highlights the need for Canada's electrical utilities to be more robust and innovative, climate change scientists say.
  
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• Male red squirrels kill offspring of rivals, new University of Alberta study suggests

  15-03-2018 16:00 via cbc.ca
  Male squirrels kill the young of rival males during years when food is abundant, according to new University of Alberta research conducted in Yukon.
  
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• Egyptian alchemist's recipe brings ancient beer to life in Winnipeg

  15-03-2018 14:49 via cbc.ca
  An idea that began when a classicist went to a brewery to sip beers and ponder the history of hops has brought to life an ancient ale.
  
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