For many children, the revelation that there's such a thing as a Venus Flytrap, Dionaea muscipula, is an amazing moment. The choppers of the sneaky plant predators are like something out of a fairy tale gone wrong. Adults can't help but be fascinated by them too, and now scientists at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JSU) and the Helmholtz Institute Mainz in Germany have discovered something new that's surprising about these little demons: Every time they entrap prey, they give off a measurable magnetic charge.

"We have been able to demonstrate that action potentials in a multicellular plant system produce measurable magnetic fields, something that had never been confirmed before," says lead author Anne Fabricant.

Guilt as magnetically charged

According to Fabricant, the finding isn't that much of a shock: "Wherever there is electrical activity, there should also be magnetic activity," she tells Live Science. And it is electrical activity in the form of action potentials that trigger its maw—really a pair of leaf lobes—to close when a hapless bug lands inside them, attracted by the nectar with which the plants bait their trap.

Along the inner surfaces of the lobes are trichomes, hair-like projections that cause the trap to close when they're disturbed by prey. One touch of a trichome is unlikely to cause the trap to shut — perhaps a mechanism that helps the plant avoid wasting energy on false alarms. A couple of touches, though, and it's chow time. The lobes come together as the bristles at their edges intertwine to help contain the prey. As the traps compress the trapped insect, its own secretions such as uric acid cause the trap to shut even more tightly, and then digestion begins.

In any event, just because the JSU researchers had reason to suspect the plant would give off a magnetic charge, catching it doing so was not a simple task.

Reading the Venus flytrap's magnetic output

"The problem," says Fabricant, "is that the magnetic signals in plants are very weak, which explains why it was extremely difficult to measure them with the help of older technologies." Still, where there's a will: "You could say the investigation is a little like performing an MRI scan in humans."

It's not just trichome flicks that trigger the trap — it will also close if triggered by salt-water, or with an application of either hot or cold thermal energy. The researchers applied heat via a purpose-built Peltier device that wouldn't introduce any background magnetic noise to mask or overwhelm the faint magnetic signal they were seeking. For the same reason, the experiments were conducted in a magnetically shielded room at Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt (PTB) in Berlin.

The researchers used atomic magnetometers to measure the planets magnetic charges. The atomic magnetometer is a glass cell containing a vapor of rubidium atoms. When the traps were triggered, the magnetic charges released changed the spins of the atoms' electrons.

The researchers picked up magnetic signals at an amplitude of up to 0.5 picoteslas. "The signal magnitude recorded is similar to what is observed during surface measurements of nerve impulses in animals," says Fabricant. It's over a million times weaker than the Earth's own magnetic field.

Biomagnetism

Other researchers have detected magnetic charges coming the firing of animal nerves — including within our own brain. The phenomenon is referred to as "biomagnetism." Since other plants have action potentials, they may also generate biomagnetism, though less research has been done on them.

It's to other plants that the attention of the JSU team now turns, as they go looking for even smaller magnetic charges from other species. In addition to providing new understanding of nature's use of electricity, non-invasive detection technologies such as the one employed by the group could one day be utilized for more insightful monitoring of crops as they respond to thermal, pest, and chemical influences.

This story originally appeared on: Big Think - Author:Robby Berman

Imagine you're about to cross a busy street. You look right and see a car coming towards you two short blocks away. You look the other way, and no cars are coming. Should you cross? No. Why not? Because your brain retains the memory of that approaching car even when you look the other way.

The ability to remember things we're not currently looking at allows us to construct and maintain a cohesive picture in our working memory of the physical context in which we find ourselves.

"You need to know where things are in the real world, regardless of where you happen to be looking or how you are oriented at a given moment," says Scott Brincat, senior author of a new study from researchers at The Picower Institute for Learning and Memory at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts. "But the representation that your brain gets from the outside world changes every time you move your eyes around."

The study, published in Neuron, describes what a fancy bit of brainwork this is.

Two sides of the big picture

In our working memories, the left and right hemispheres work independently when it comes to memory storage — what we see on our left is immediately stored in the right hemisphere and vice versa.

The Picower researchers have found, however, that things get substantially more interesting when we shift our gaze in the opposite direction, or if an object we're looking at moves from one side to the other.

Using our street-crossing example, when you look to the right and spot the approaching vehicle, a memory of the car is stored in our brain's left hemisphere. When you look left, a copy of that memory is quickly sent to the right hemisphere, but the copy is somehow marked in such a way that the brain understands it's not actually located on your left but is just a memory of something that's currently out of view on your right. The net result is that your working memory remains aware of traffic on both sides even when it's just looking in one direction.

"If you didn't have that," says Earl Miller, senior author of the study and in whose lab the research was conducted, "we would just be simple creatures who could only react to whatever is coming right at us in the environment, that's all. But because we can hold things in mind, we can have volitional control over what we do. We don't have to react to something now, we can save it for later."

Games animals play

For the study's experiments, monkeys were taught to identify onscreen objects that didn't match something they had viewed moments earlier, such as an image of a banana. To do this, they had to hold a memory of the original object in memory to make the comparison.

As this happened, researchers monitored the electrical activity of hundreds of neurons in the prefrontal cortices of both hemispheres. The researchers observed memory transfers as they happened thanks to characteristic patterns in the synchronization of brainwave frequencies that occurred each time a memory was stored, an action that takes mere milliseconds. A software decoder identified the telltale patterns.

The trials began with the monkeys staring at one side of the screen as an object appeared in the screen's center. As the monkeys perceived the object as belonging primarily to one side or the other, the researchers saw the original memory being stored in the corresponding hemisphere and a copy being made in the other.

Monkeys were also instructed at times to look from one side to the other, reassigning the central object to a new primary side as the researchers observed the memories being re-written. The speed with which monkeys could spot non-matching objects slowed down during these shifts, giving some hint of the complicated memory gymnastics going on. "It feels trivial to us, but it apparently isn't," says Miller.

An ensemble surprise and mystery

The memory is transferred from a group, or ensemble, of neurons in one hemisphere to another ensemble on the other side. One of the surprises in the study is that even though the original memory and its copy describe the same object in the same location, they use completely different neuron ensembles on each side to represent it.

Miller notes that it used to be believed that individual neurons stored memories but that over time it became clear that groups, or ensembles, of neurons were the actual memory receptacles. Now however, if the same memory is stored in two different types of ensembles due to a difference in their role within a particular hemisphere, maybe things are even more complex than that. "Perhaps even ensembles aren't the functional units of the brain," he surmises. "So what is the functional unit of the brain? It's the computational space that brain network activity creates."

This story originally appeared on: Big Think - Author:Robby Berman

In the life-or-death scramble to fertilize an egg, not all sperm are alike. A new study of mice by researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics (MPIMG) in Berlin identifies a genetic factor called "t-haplotype," whose tag-team act with the protein RAC1 helps a spermatozoan speed straight to the prize.

The study is published in PLOS Genetics.

The weird power of the t-haplotype

The researchers conducted experiments with mouse sperm to learn more about the properties of the t-haplotype, a group of genetic alleles that are known to appear on Chromosome 17 of mice.

Comparing the movement of mouse sperm with the t-haplotype against sperm without it, the researchers, led by first author Alexandra Amaral of MPIMG, definitively demonstrated the difference t-haplotype makes. Sperm with the gene factor progressed quickly forward, while "normal" sperm didn't exhibit the same degree of progress.

While most genes operate cooperatively with others, some don't. Among these "selfish" genes are the t-haplotype.

"Genes that violate this rule by unfairly increasing their chance of transmission can gain large fitness advantages at the detriment of those that act fairly. This leads to selection for selfish adaptations and, as a result, counter-adaptations to this selfishness, initiating an arms race between these selfish genetic elements and the rest of the genome." — Jan-Niklas Runge, Anna K. Lindholm, 2018

"Sperm with the t-haplotype manage to disable sperm without it," says corresponding study author Bernhard Herrmann, also of MPIMG.

"The trick is that the t-haplotype 'poisons' all sperm," he explains, "but at the same time produces an antidote, which acts only in t-sperm and protects them. Imagine a marathon in which all participants get poisoned drinking water, but some runners also take an antidote."

The t-haplotype distributes a factor that distorts, or "poisons," the integrity of genetic regulatory signals. This goes out to all mouse sperm that carry the t-haplotype in the early stage of spermatogenesis. Chromosomes split as they mature, and half the sperm that retain the t-haplotype produce another factor that reverse the distortion, neutralizing the "poison." These t-sperm hold onto this antidote for themselves.

Even the t-haplotype needs a friend

RAC1 acts as a molecular switch outside the sperm cell. It is known to be a protein that guides cells to different places in the body. For example, it directs white blood cells and cancer cells towards other cells that are putting out specific chemical signatures. The study suggests that RAC1 may point sperm toward an egg, helping it "sniff" out its target.

In addition, the presence of RAC1 seems to help the t-sperm carry out their sabotage. The researchers demonstrated this by introducing an RAC1 inhibitor to a mixed population of sperm. Prior to its introduction, the t-sperm in the group were "poisoning" their normal neighbors, causing them to move poorly. When the inhibitor neutralized the populations' RAC1, the t-sperms' dirty trick no longer worked, and the normal sperm began moving progressively.

However important RAC1 may be to t-sperm, too much or too little is problematic. Says Amaral, "The competitiveness of individual sperm seems to depend on an optimal level of active RAC1; both reduced or excessive RAC1 activity interferes with effective forward movement."

When females have two t-haplotypes on Chromosome 17, they are fertile. When sperm have one t-haplotype, their motility may be negatively affected, but when they have two, they are sterile. The researchers discovered the reason: They have much higher levels of RAC1.

At the same time, the study finds that normal sperm who aren't being held back by t-sperm stop moving progressively when RAC1 is inhibited, meaning that too little RAC1 also results in low motility.

It’s a jungle in there

Hermann sums up the insights the study offers:

"Our data highlight the fact that sperm cells are ruthless competitors. Genetic differences can give individual sperm an advantage in the race for life, thus promoting the transmission of particular gene variants to the next generation."

This story originally appeared on: Big Think - Author:Robby Berman

You know the drill. You're having dinner when suddenly a black nose appears under the table between your legs. You tilt back and there are those eyes. Those eyes. If you're a savvy dog owner, you resist sliding down there — eating from the table is a bad habit you don't want to encourage. Plus, this is your food. It's people food. We don't eat animal food. Dogs have their own food, specially formulated for their dietary needs. Right?

Well, maybe not. A new study from researchers at the University of Illinois (U of I) finds that not only is human-grade food digestible for dogs, but it's actually more digestible than much dog food. The proof is in the pooing.

The study is an accepted manuscript for the peer-reviewed Oxford Academic Journal of Animal Science.

Four diets were tested

The researchers tested refrigerated and fresh human-grade foods against kibble, the food most dogs live on. The ingredients of kibble are mashed into a dough and then extruded, forced through a die of some kind into the desired shape — think a pasta maker. The resulting pellets are sprayed with additional flavor and color.

For four weeks, researchers fed 12 beagles one of four diets:

1. a extruded diet — Blue Buffalo Chicken and Brown Rice Recipe
2. a fresh refrigerated diet — Freshpet Roasted Meals Tender Chicken Recipe
3. a fresh diet — JustFoodforDogs Beef & Russet Potato Recipe
4. another fresh diet — JustFoodforDogs Chicken & White Rice Recipe.

The two fresh diets contained minimally processed beef, chicken, broccoli, rice, carrots, and various food chunks in a canine casserole of sorts.

(One can't help but think how hard it would be to get finicky cats to test new diets. As if.)

Senior author Kelly S. Swanson of U of I's Department of Animal Sciences and the Division of Nutritional Sciences, was a bit surprised at how much better dogs did on people food than even refrigerated dog chow. "Based on past research we've conducted I'm not surprised with the results when feeding human-grade compared to an extruded dry diet," he says, adding, "However, I did not expect to see how well the human-grade fresh food performed, even compared to a fresh commercial processed brand."

Tracking the effect of each diet

The researchers tracked the dogs' weights and analyzed the microbiota in their fecal matter.

It turned out that the dogs on kibble had to eat more to maintain their body weight. This resulted in their producing 1.5 to 2.9 times the amount of poop produced by dogs on the fresh diets.

Says Swanson, "This is consistent with a 2019 National Institute of Health study in humans that found people eating a fresh whole food diet consumed on average 500 less calories per day, and reported being more satisfied, than people eating a more processed diet."

Maybe even more interesting was the effect of fresh food on the gut biome. Though there remains much we don't yet know about microbiota, it was nonetheless the case that the microbial communities found in fresh-food poo was different.

"Because a healthy gut means a healthy mutt," says Swanson, "fecal microbial and metabolite profiles are important readouts of diet assessment. As we have shown in previous studies, the fecal microbial communities of healthy dogs fed fresh diets were different than those fed kibble. These unique microbial profiles were likely due to differences in diet processing, ingredient source, and the concentration and type of dietary fibers, proteins, and fats that are known to influence what is digested by the dog and what reaches the colon for fermentation."

How did kibble take over canine diets?

Historically, dogs ate scraps left over by humans. It has only been since 1870, with the arrival of the luxe Spratt's Meat Fibrine Dog Cakes—made from "the dried unsalted gelatinous parts of Prairie Beef", mmm—that commercial dog food began to take hold. Dog bone-shaped biscuits first appeared in 1907. Ken-L Ration dates from 1922. Kibble was first extruded in 1956. Pet food had become a great way to turn human-food waste into profit.

Commercial dog food became the norm for most household canines only after a massive marketing campaign led by a group of dog-food industry lobbyists called the Pet Food Institute in 1964. Over time, for most households, dog food was what dogs ate — what else? Human food? These days more than half of U.S. dogs are overweight or obese, and certainly their diet is a factor.

We're not so special among animals after all. If something's healthy for us to eat—we're not looking at you, chocolate—maybe we should remember to share with our canine compatriots. Not from the table, though.

This story originally appeared on: Big Think - Author:Robby Berman

When it comes to senses like ours, tiny single-celled organisms floating in the ocean don't have much going on. And yet, as Sacha Coesel, the lead author of a new study from University of Washington researchers, puts it: "If you look in the ocean environment, all these different organisms have this day-night cycle. They are very in tune with each other, even as they get moved around. How do they know when it's day? How do they know when it's night?"

The answer, according to Coesel and her colleagues, is four previously unknown groups of photoreceptors that may help these organisms detect day, night, and each other.

Light and dark are vital to these organisms. When the sun is up, they become energized and grow. Cell division occurs at night when the darkness' ultraviolet wavelengths are less damaging to their DNA.

"Daylight is important for ocean organisms," says senior author Virginia Armbrust, "we know that, we take it for granted. But to see the rhythm of genetic activity during these four days, and the beautiful synchronicity, you realize just how powerful light is."

Photoreceptors and optogenetics

Aside from being fascinating in their own right, these little "light switches" are likely to be of great interest to people working in optogenetics, a transformative area of scientific research.

This combination of optical technologies and genetics is giving researchers new insights into the workings of the brain, allowing them to, for example, turn on and off single neurons as they explore the brain's myriad pathways and interactions. Optogenetics also holds promise for better management of pain, and has cast new light on brain motor decision-making.

These new-found, naturally occurring photoreceptors may substitute for, or complement, human-made photoreceptors currently used in optogenetics. It's hoped that these newcomers will prove more sensitive and better equipped to respond to particular light wavelengths. Possibly because water filters out red light—the reason the ocean looks blue—the new photoreceptors are sensitive to blue and green wavelengths of light.

"This work dramatically expanded the number of photoreceptors — the different kinds of those on-off switches — that we know of," offers Armbrust.

Finding the new photoreceptors

The researchers identified the previously undiscovered groups of photoreceptors by analyzing RNA they'd filtered from seawater samples taken far from shore. The samples were collected every four hours over the course of four days from the Northern Pacific Ocean near Hawaii. One set of samples was collected from currents running about 15 meters beneath the surface. A second set sampled deeper down, gathering water from between 120 and 150 meters, in the "twilight zone" where organisms get by with little sunlight.

Filtering the samples produced protists—single-celled organisms with a nucleus—measuring from 200 nanometers to one tenth of a millimeter across. Among these were light-activated algae as well as simple plankton that derive their energy from the organisms they consume.

Under-appreciated, tiny drivers of sea health

The new photoreceptors help fill in at least one of the blanks in our knowledge of the countless floating communities of microscopic creatures in our seas, communities that have a far greater impact on our planet than many people realize.

Says Coesel, "Just like rainforests generate oxygen and take up carbon dioxide, ocean organisms do the same thing in the world's oceans. People probably don't realize this, but these unicellular organisms are about as important as rainforests for our planet's functioning."

This story originally appeared on: Big Think - Author:Robby Berman

If we became especially interested in another solar system and wanted to send an exploratory craft, how would we do it? Even the nearest solar system—Proxima Centauri is its sun—is about 40,208,000,000,000 kilometers from here, so there's no way our scout could carry enough fuel to get there. Might we could use something like a light, or solar, sail? Light-sail craft already exist, and they do work.

Harvard University astronomer Avi Loeb made headlines in 2018 when he suggested that the extra-solar object 'Oumuamua—which, after all, does mean "scout" in Hawaiian—was just such a craft sent to have a look at our solar system. Since then, if anything he's become even more convinced, and Loeb has just published his reasoning and other thoughts in a new book, "Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life beyond Earth."

But it's a rock

The visual image that comes to mind in thinking about 'Oumuamua is the artist's rendition (above top) that was released by the European Southern Observatory when the object was discovered on its way out of our solar system in 2017. Listening to Loeb's claims, one may think, "What light sail? It's a rock."

However, it's all too easy to forget that this ubiquitous image is just an artists' rendition after all, based on the assumption that our visitor was a rock. It need not have looked like this at all. We have no idea what 'Oumuamua really looked like, since the image at the bottom shows the best look at the object we really got.

What is a light sail?

A light sail is a spacecraft constructed from panels of a lightweight, reflective material such as Mylar or polyimide treated with a metallic reflective coating. When photons from a star, such as our Sun, hit the sail, they give it a small push. When the photons bounce back off of the sail, they give it another one. It doesn't take much of a shove to move a light sail through a vacuum of space, and it's believed light sails can pick up quite a lot of speed as they go. Loeb himself is involved in the Breakthrough Starshot project that envisions light-sail craft shooting through space at 100 million miles an hour.

The first functioning light sail, LightSail Sail 2 was sent aloft by the Planetary Society in June 2019, and is currently orbiting the Earth. This year, NASA plans to deploy the NEA Scout mission that will send an 86-square-meter light sail off from Moon orbit to explore the near-Earth asteroid Itokawa.

Loeb's clues

To Loeb, the object's apparent appearance and behavior doesn't suggest a rock.

First off, what appears to be 'Oumuamua's shape—described as being about 100 meters long and resembling either a cigar or pancake—doesn't describe previously seen comets or asteroids. Second, 'Oumuamua was also exceptionally bright, 10 times moreso than space rocks typically seen whizzing around our solar system. This high level of reflectivity would consistent with a shiny, metallic surface.

Finally, 'Oumuamua accelerated as it whipped around the sun as if it was picking up energy from the star. While such behavior is common when comets speed up, pushed forward by evaporating gasses from the sun's warm, no such gases were observed with 'Oumuamua.

With all this in mind, Loeb, along with co-author Shmuel Bialy, published a controversial paper in Fall of 2018 in the Astrophysical Journal Letters hypothesizing the object might be an extraterrestrial craft. The paper suggested that maybe "'Oumuamua is a lightsail, floating in interstellar space," perhaps "debris from advanced technological equipment." It also posited an admittedly more "exotic" possibility, "that 'Oumuamua may be a fully operational probe sent intentionally to Earth vicinity by an alien civilization."

Needless to say, the paper was met with a great deal of excitement. Did 'Oumuamua signify the presence of intelligent life beyond our solar system, or—as many scientists felt—was such conjecture unworthy of serious consideration?

Welcome to 2021

As the title of his new book implies, Loeb continues to assert the validity of his earlier analysis, demanding that the scientific community at least consider the possibility that 'Oumuamua was an exploratory craft.

One of the underlying themes of the book is Loeb's concern about the "health" of a scientific community that can't even entertain a hypothesis such as his and Bialy's. (This month, Scientific American published an extended and thought-provoking interview with Loeb.) In the book and interview, Loeb attributes his notoriety to an overreaction by the scientific community to his 2018 paper. While much of the book is autobiographical, Loeb claims he isn't interested in his own fame, and he recently stepped down from Harvard's Astronomy department.

"My message is that something is wrong with the scientific community today in terms of its health," Loeb told Scientific American, adding that too many in the science community are motivated by ego and self-image, when science should be about taking risks and trying to understand the world.

"People ask why I get this media attention. The only reason is because my colleagues are not using common sense," Loeb said. "Contrast string theory and multiverses with what I and many others say, which is that based on the data from NASA's Kepler mission, roughly half of the galaxy's sunlike stars have a planet about the size of the Earth, at about the same distance of the Earth from the sun, so that you can have liquid water on the surface and the chemistry of life as we know it. So if you roll the dice on life billions of times in the Milky Way, what is the chance that we are alone?"

This story originally appeared on: Big Think - Author:Robby Berman

The color you're looking at in the unretouched photo above is a stunning new blue called "YInMn Blue." It's the first new inorganic blue pigment developed in hundreds of years. "YInMn Blue" is a contraction of Yttrium, Indium, and Manganese, and the pigment was invented by a team of chemists led by Mas Subramanian at Oregon State University (OSU).

The color was invented in 2009, but it took until last spring for the U.S. EPA to approve it for general use — the agency refers to it as "Blue 10G513." Before that, the Shepherd Color Company had licensed it in 2016 for exterior use, and knockoffs of the color popped up here and there in Etsy offerings. It even inspired a new Crayola color called "Bluetiful." Appropriate.

Invisible blue

YInMn Blue is the latest character in an odd story: humanity's relationship with the color blue.

For a long time, humans apparently took no note of blue, which is weird. Though blue isn't especially common in vegetation and stone, there's no other color that so envelops us — in the sky above and on the face of the oceans that surround us. (BTW, the late George Carlin once lamented a paucity of blue foods.)

There are no ancient European year-old cave paintings with blue pigments, though it does appear in some African cave art. There's no mention of it in the Bible. Though there are plenty of references in Homer's Odyssey to white and black, and a few to red and yellow, there's no blue. He refers to the color of the sea as "wine-dark."

Some historians hypothesize that early humans might have been color-blind, capable only of seeing black, white, red, and eventually yellow and green. Perhaps they just weren't very interested in the idea of color altogether.

Maybe, though, a more likely explanation is that lacking a concept, and a word, for blue, ancient people lacked a frame of reference for understanding what they were seeing. Radiolab did a fascinating episode about this possibility.

A BBC documentary found that people from a Namibian tribe with no separate words for green and blue couldn't differentiate green from blue squares, though there's some controversy about the experiment. What is true, though, is that Eskimos see more types of snow because they have 50 words for it. (The word "Eskimo" groups together the people of the Inuit and Yupik families.) We see just a few.

Blue arrives

While Homer, et al., were stumbling around clueless, it seems that the first folks to get blue were the ancient Egyptians, who were entranced by the semiprecious Afghan stone lapis lazuli about 6,000 years ago. They gave the color a name — ḫsbḏ-ỉrjt — and used the stone liberally in jewelry and headdresses.

The Egyptians even attempted to make paint from the mineral, but failed. In 2,200 B.C. they finally succeeded at producing a light-blue paint, cuprorivaite or "Egyptian blue," from heated limestone, sand, and azurite or malachite. Egypt's precious blue pigments eventually became valued by royalty in Persia, Mesoamerica, and Rome.

The earliest successful lapis lazuli paint — and ultimately Europe's first great blue — appeared in 6th century Buddhist paintings from Bamiyan, Afghanistan. Imported into Europe in the 14th and 15th centuries, ultramarine — from ultramarinus, or "beyond the sea" — was used only in expensive commissioned artwork until a French chemist developed a cheaper, synthetic version in 1826. True ultramarine was both so coveted and pricey that, according to the Metropolitan Museum, Vermeer impoverished his family to purchase it, and there's a story that one of Michelangelo's paintings, "The Entombment," was left unfinished because he couldn't afford the ultramarine it required. At the other end of the cost spectrum was the affordable blue dye indigo, made from the plant Indigofera tinctoria, and imported to Europe in the 16th-century.

Over time, more blues appeared. In 1706, German dye-maker Johann Jacob Diesbach came up with Berliner Blau, or Prussian blue, accidentally when potash he was using to make red pigment was contaminated with animal blood that paradoxically turned it blue. 1802 saw the invention of cobalt blue, based on the 8th- and 9th-century blue pigments used in Chinese porcelain, by French chemist Louis Jacques Thénard. Cerulean blue — from caerulum, meaning "heave" or "sky" — was the last major blue introduced before YInMn Blue. It was invented by Albrecht Höpfner in 1789.

Back to the new blue

The discovery of YInMn Blue occurred when chemistry grad student Andrew Smith was heating manganese oxide to approximately 1200 °C (~2000 °F) to investigate its electronic properties. To his surprise, what emerged from the heat was a brilliant blue compound. Recalls Subramanian: "If I hadn't come from an industry research background — DuPont has a division that developed pigments, and obviously, they are used in paint and many other things — I would not have known this was highly unusual, a discovery with strong commercial potential."

Subramanian knew, he told NPR in 2016, "People have been looking for a good, durable blue color for a couple of centuries." OSU art students soon began experimenting with the new color, incorporating it in watercolors and printing. In 2012, Subramanian's team received a patent for YInMn Blue.

Bonus: Previous blue pigments are prone to fading and are often toxic. These are problems that don't afflict YInMn Blue. "The fact that this pigment was synthesized at such high temperatures signaled that this new compound was extremely stable, a property long sought in a blue pigment," says Subramanian in the study documenting YInMn Blue.

Subramanian and his colleagues have been developing colors ever since, including new bright oranges, new purples, and turquoises and greens. Currently, they're on the hunt for a chromatic Holy Grail: a stable, heat-reflective, and brilliant, red. It's a challenge. While red is among the oldest colors, Subramanian calls the shade he seeks "the most elusive color to synthesize."

This story originally appeared on: Big Think - Author:Robby Berman

Twitter is experimenting with a new community-moderation system that puts users in the position of keeping other users honest. It's a system that's not completely different from the surprisingly successful manner in which Wikipedia vets posted content, and it functions similarly to Reddit's rating system as well.

Like everything else on Twitter, the response to the announcement of what the platform calls "Birdwatch" (get it?) has been over-the-top and riddled with untruths and conspiratorial paranoia. Also, some people think it's an idea worth exploring. Sounds about right.

Test flight

For now, Birdwatch is being tested from its own site — it's not something Twitter users can currently see unless they volunteer to contribute to it. When someone signs up to test Birdwatch, a new option appears among the actions available for responding to a tweet on Twitter proper. Eventually, if it works out, Birdwatch labels and comments would appear publicly affixed to tweets.

Here's how Birdwatch works once you sign up:

1. When you click on the three-dot menu to the right of a questionable tweet, a new option appears at the bottom of the actions presented: "Contribute to Birdwatch."
2. If you choose this option, you're brought to a list of reasons you might have for feeling the tweet should be tagged as iffy — you check the box that reflects your opinion.
3. Next, you tell Twitter the damage the tweet could potentially cause if it's left unflagged.
4. You're asked for a comment about your objection to the tweet.
5. Finally, you're asked to assess the current Birdwatch consensus regarding the tweet.

Twitter intends to develop an algorithmic approach to collating Birdwatch responses, and is also planning review sessions with subject-matter experts, since, as one Twitter user posted, "The plural of anecdote is not fact."

🐦 Today we’re introducing @Birdwatch, a community-driven approach to addressing misleading information. And we want your help. (1/3) pic.twitter.com/aYJILZ7iKB

— Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) January 25, 2021

Birdwatch reactions

So far, the Twitter community's response to Birdwatch covers the whole spectrum, with some people hopeful and many more, this being the internet, skeptical. (We'll talk about politicians' response to Birdwatch below.)

How Donald Trump gave Twitter its wings

Birdwatch, um, flies in the face of what has made Twitter so central to the U.S. politics since around 2015. Prior to the entry of Donald Trump into the 2016 presidential race, Twitter seemed to many to be on its way out, yet another discarded novelty of the internet age.

Candidate Trump changed all that and continued to use his Twitter account as his primary platform throughout his presidency. In terms of the day-to-day drama that accompanied his time in office, the president's expulsion from Twitter felt more like the end of his term than did the official transfer of power on January 20.

That expulsion itself was apparently the end result of considerable turmoil and discord internally within Twitter. That's because Donald Trump's artful deployment of Twitter has been the primary driver behind its resurgence and the reason it continues to play a significant role in U.S. politics.

What @realDonaldTrump understood was that a deliberately outrageous tweet is an easy way to immediately grab the public's attention, either for sheer publicity value or as a means of distraction. Truth and accuracy matter far less than what social media calls "engagement." Post-Trump, other publicity-hungry politicians continue to follow the ex-president's playbook. Some of them are even doing so as they attack Birdwatch.

And herein lies Twitter's dilemma. When provocative content draws attention to a tweet poster, it also draws attention to Twitter, and that benefits the platform by increasing the size of the audience it can sell to advertisers. At the same time, there's growing political pressure on the company to control the dissemination of content that's harmful to the public and American political process.

Birdwatch may let Twitter off the hook: Truth would be crowdsourced and enforced without Twitter, or its advertisers, having to get its hands dirty with endless controversies.

Politics and politicians

The pressure to do better largely comes in the form of threats to repeal Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. This is the regulation that absolves a social media platform from legal liability for content its users post. Though the rule's purpose is to promote the use of unfettered expression on social media, there's an inherent problem — this kind of content tends to go viral and that increases audience size, which increases a platform's advertising sales and that means more profit.

Some of the loudest voices, ironically, are politicians who themselves use Twitter for spreading this very type of content. The former president, in fact, vetoed a defense bill because it didn't contain a repeal of Section 230 — it doesn't seem to have occurred to him that his own inflammatory tweets and posts wouldn't be published if platforms were concerned about being held responsible.

Note: If you're outraged at some politician's disingenuous behavior and tweet or retweet about their hypocrisy, that's perfectly fine with them since you'd only be helping them get more attention.

It may not surprise you that some politicians who want social media to step up are up in arms over Birdwatch, accusing Silicon Valley of making a power grab that will place Truth under their control and of violating their own First Amendment right to free speech. This last charge is a Constitutional canard, even though some of these folks have a law degree — legal experts agree that Free Speech is about public speech and not about the ability to say whatever you want through a private company's platform.

No one knows if Birdwatch will work in the end, but if it does, let's hope that unscrupulous politicians find it more difficult to post outrageous tweets that draw them eyeballs and campaign contributions, the country's well-being be damned. Truth is always a slippery worm. Let's hope Birdwatch bites down.

This story originally appeared on: Big Think - Author:Robby Berman

Lying one-on-one is hard when done correctly. Some people lie compulsively, with little regard to getting caught — for them it's a no-brainer. But concocting a believable lie, selling it, and maintaining it without inadvertently tripping oneself up takes effort. According to a new study, it takes a little too much effort — your brain is so occupied by the lie that your body is at risk of giving off universal "tell" to anyone who knows to look for it.

The study, by Dutch and U.K. researchers, is published in the journal Royal Society Open Science

The tell

The tell? Someone who is lying to your face is likely to copy your motions. The trickier the lie, the truer this is, according to experiments described in the study.

The researchers offer two possible explanations, both of which have to do with cognitive load. In a press release, the authors note that "Lying, especially when fabricating accounts, can be more cognitively demanding than truth telling."

The first hypothesis is that when a liar is lying, their brain is simply too occupied with the subterfuge to pay any attention to the control of physical movements. As a result, the unconscious part of the liar's brain controlling movements defaults to the easiest course of action available: It simply imitates the motions of the person they're lying to.

The second possibility is that the liar's cognitive load deprives a liar of sufficient bandwidth to devise a clever, effective physical strategy. Instead, while lying, their attention is so laser-focused on their listener's reaction that the liar unconsciously parrots it.

Experimental whoppers

The phenomenon is referred to as "nonverbal coordination," and there is some existing evidence in deception research that it does occur when someone is under a heavy cognitive load. However, that evidence is based on observations of specific body parts and doesn't comprehensively capture whole-body behavior, and little research has mutually tracked both parties' movements in a lying scenario.

Nonetheless, say the authors, "Nonverbal coordination is an especially interesting cue to deceit because its occurrence relies on automatic processes and is therefore more difficult to deliberately control."

To track nonverbal coordination, pairs of participants in the study's two experiments were outfitted with motion-capture devices Velcroed to their wrists, heads, and torsos before being seated facing each other across a low table.

In the first experiment, a dynamic time-warping algorithm analyzed participants movements as they ran through exercises in which one individual told the truth, and then told increasingly difficult lies. In the second experiment, listeners were given instructions that influenced the amount of attention they paid to the liar's movements.

The researchers found "nonverbal coordination increased with lie difficulty." They also saw that this increase "was not influenced by the degree to which interviewees paid attention to their nonverbal behavior, nor by the degree of interviewer's suspicion. Our findings are consistent with the broader proposition that people rely on automated processes such as mimicry when under cognitive load."

Mirroring

There is, it must be said, a third possible reason that a liar copies their target's behavior: Maybe liars are subconsciously reinforcing their credibility with their victims using "mirroring."

As Big Think readers and anyone familiar with the art of persuasion knows, copying another person's actions is called "mirroring," and it's a way to get someone else to like you. Our brains have "mirror neurons" that respond positively when someone imitates our actions. The result is something called "limbic synchrony." Deliberately mirroring a companion's movements is an acknowledged sales technique.

So, how can you tell when mirroring signifies a lie and not benign interpersonal salesmanship? There is an overlap, of course — lying is one form of persuasion, after all. Perhaps the smartest response is to simply take mirroring as a signal that close attention is warranted. No need to automatically shout "liar!" when someone copies you. Just step back a little mentally and listen a bit more carefully to what your companion is saying.

This story originally appeared on: Big Think - Author:Robby Berman

There have been a fair number of voices—Stephen Hawking among them—raised in warning that a super-intelligent artificial intelligence could one day turn on us and that we shouldn't be in such a hot, unquestioning hurry to develop true AI. Others say, naw, don't worry. Now a new white paper from scientists at the Center for Humans and Machines at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development presents a series of theoretical tests that confirm the threat: Due to the basic concepts underlying computing, we would be utterly unable to control a super-intelligent AI.

"We argue that total containment is, in principle, impossible, due to fundamental limits inherent to computing itself," write the paper's authors.

The white paper is published in the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research.

Why worry?

"A super-intelligent machine that controls the world sounds like science fiction," says paper co-author Manuel Cebrian in a press release. "But there are already machines that perform certain important tasks independently without programmers fully understanding how they learned it. The question therefore arises whether this could at some point become uncontrollable and dangerous for humanity."

The lure of AI is clear. Its ability to "see" the patterns in data make it a promising agent for solving problems too complex for us to wrap our minds around. Could it cure cancer? Solve the climate crisis? The possibilities are nearly endless.

Connected to the internet, AI can grab whatever information it needs to achieve its task, and therein lies a big part of the danger. With access to every bit of human data—and responsible for its own education—who knows what lessons it would learn regardless of any ethical constraints built into its programming? Who knows what goals it would embrace and what it might do to achieve them?

Even assuming benevolence, there's danger. Suppose that an AI is confronted by an either/or choice akin to the Trolley Dilemma, maybe even on a grand scale: Might an AI decide to annihilate millions of people if it decided the remaining billions would stand a better chance of survival?

A pair of flawed options

The most obvious way to keep a super intelligent AI from getting ahead of us is to limit its access to information by preventing it from connecting to the internet. The problem with limiting access to information, though, is that it would make any problem we assign the AI more difficult for it to solve. We would be weakening its problem-solving promise possibly to a point of uselessness.

The second approach that might be taken is to limit what a super-intelligent AI is capable of doing by programming into it certain boundaries. This might be akin to writer Isaac Asimov's Laws of Robotics, the first of which goes: "A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm."

Unfortunately, says the study, a series of logical tests reveal that it's impossible to create such limits. Any such a containment algorithm, it turns out, would be self-defeating.

Containment is impossible

"If you break the problem down to basic rules from theoretical computer science, it turns out that an algorithm that would command an AI not to destroy the world could inadvertently halt its own operations. If this happened, you would not know whether the containment algorithm is still analyzing the threat, or whether it has stopped to contain the harmful AI. In effect, this makes the containment algorithm unusable."

The team investigated stacking containment algorithms, with each monitoring the behavior of the previous one, but eventually the same problem arises: The final check halts itself, rendering it unreliable.

Too smart?

The Planck researchers also concluded that a similar bit of logic makes it impossible for us to know when a self-learning computer's intelligence has come to exceed our own. Essentially, we're not smart enough to be able to develop tests for intelligence superior to ours.

"Machines take me by surprise with great frequency. This is largely because I do not do sufficient calculation to decide what to expect them to do." — Alan Turing

This means that it's entirely conceivable that an AI capable of self-learning may well quietly ascend to super-intelligence without our even knowing it — a scary reason all by itself to slow down our hurly-burley race to artificial intelligence.

In the end, we're left with a dangerous bargain to make or not make: Do we risk our safety in exchange for the possibility that AI will solve problems we can't?

This story originally appeared on: Big Think - Author:Robby Berman

Even different definitions of the word "clairaudience" reflect the way different people respond to the experience.

Merriam-Webster defines it as "hearing something not present to the ear but regarded as having objective reality," suggesting a hallucinatory experience. The Free Dictionary refers to it as the ability to hear things "outside the range of normal perception," suggesting a sort of superpower to hear what's there, but that others can't hear.

Often, what's heard are voices. In some cases, the hearer finds the experience distressing, and a mental health diagnosis, perhaps of schizophrenia, may result. For other people — such as seance mediums — the phenomenon has spiritual significance, and such voices are interpreted as messages from the dead.

Are these two different phenomena, or are they the same thing, understood differently depending on the context in which they occur? A new study in the journal Mental Health, Religion & Culture suggests the latter, and seeks to work out why hearing voices for some is a symptom of mental illness but for others a religious/spiritual experience (RSE). The study assumes sincerity on the part of those reporting hearing voices.

The study

The researchers, led by Adam Powell of Durham University's Hearing the Voice project and Department of Theology and Religion interviewed conducted online surveys of 65 clairaudient mediums they found through contact with spiritualist communities. The survey also included 143 people from the general population who responded in the affirmative to the question "Have you ever had an experience you would describe as 'clairaudient?'" posed through an online study recruitment tool.

All participants spoke English and were aged 18-75. 84.4% were from the U.K.with the rest mostly from the North Americas, Europe, or Australasia.

Of the spiritualists surveyed, 79% said hearing voices was a normal part of their lives at church and at home, while 44.6% said that they heard voices every day. Most respondents reported the voices as being inside their heads, though 31.7% said they came from outside their bodies.

Not surprisingly, more spiritualists reported believing in the paranormal than did the general population participants. They also cared less about what others thought of them.

Both groups were prone to visual hallucinations as well.

Youth and absorption

Spiritualist clairaudients reported their first experiences with other voices early in life. Of these participants, 18% said they had heard voices for as long as they remembered. The average age, however, for first hearing voices was 21.7 years. Schizophrenia typically presents when a person is somewhat older than this, in the late 20s.

Significantly, 71% said their experience with voices pre-dated their awareness of spiritualism. Rather than religion prompting the hearing of voices, it seems that it's more like the other way around — voices led them to religion.

Says Powell, "Our findings say a lot about 'learning and yearning.' For our participants, the tenets of spiritualism seem to make sense of both extraordinary childhood experiences as well as the frequent auditory phenomena they experience as practicing mediums."

Still, the voices came first he says, so "all of those experiences may result more from having certain tendencies or early abilities than from simply believing in the possibility of contacting the dead if one tries hard enough."

The more likely factor is spiritualist clairaudients' relationship with absorption. Responses to questions based on the 34-point Tellegen Absorption Scale revealed that these people tended toward absorptive personality characteristics. These are described by the study's authors as "being readily captured by entrancing stimuli, reporting vivid mental imagery, becoming immersed in one's own thoughts."

Some, though not all, voice-hearing individuals from the general population were found to exhibit high levels of absorption — those that did were more likely to believe in the paranormal than others.

Implications

The study's finding regarding the relative young ages at which spiritualist clairaudients begin hearing voices suggests that these individuals' more welcoming attitude toward the phenomenon may have to do with malleability of youth — a belief in the fantastical is part of being young.

Says co-author Peter Moseley of Northumbria University, "Spiritualists tend to report unusual auditory experiences which are positive, start early in life and which they are often then able to control. Understanding how these develop is important because it could help us understand more about distressing or non-controllable experiences of hearing voices too."

The authors of the study do note, however, that their findings leave two big unanswered questions: Does a tendency toward absorption reveal "a predisposition to having RSEs or a belief in the plausibility of having RSEs?"

The other obvious big question? It's beyond the scope of this survey, but are those really the voices of the dead?

This story originally appeared on: Big Think - Author:Robby Berman

People make sense of the world by organizing things into categories and naming them. "These are circles." "That's a tree." "Those are rocks." It's one way we tame our world. There's a weird correspondence between different cultures, though — even though we come from different places and very different circumstances, cultures everywhere develop largely the same categorizations.

"But this raises a big scientific puzzle," says Damon Centola of the University of Pennsylvania. "If people are so different, why do anthropologists find the same categories, for instance for shapes, colors, and emotions, arising independently in many different cultures? Where do these categories come from and why is there so much similarity across independent populations?"

Centola is the senior investigator of a new study in the journal Nature Communications from the Network Dynamics Group (NDG) at the Annenberg School for Communication that explores how such categorization happens.

Some have theorized that these categories are innate—pre-wired in our brains—but the study says "nope." Its authors hypothesize that it has more to do with the dynamics of large groups, or networks.

The grouping game

The researchers tested their theory with 1,480 people playing an online "Grouping Game" via Amazon's Mechanical Turk platform. The individuals were paired with another participant or made a member of a group of 6, 8, 24, or 50 people. Each pair and group were tasked with categorizing the symbols shown above, and they could see each other's answers.

The small groups came up with wildly divergent categories—the entire experiment produced nearly 5,000 category suggestions—while the larger groups came up with categorization systems that were virtually identical to each other.

Says Centola, "Even though we predicted it, I was nevertheless stunned to see it really happen. This result challenges many long-held ideas about culture and how it forms."

Nor was this unanimity a matter of having teamed-up like-minded individuals. "If I assign an individual to a small group," says lead author Douglas Guilbeault, "they are much more likely to arrive at a category system that is very idiosyncratic and specific to them. But if I assign that same individual to a large group, I can predict the category system that they will end up creating, regardless of whatever unique viewpoint that person happens to bring to the table."

Why this happens

The striking results of the experiment correspond to a previous study done by NDG that investigated tipping points for people's behavior in networks.

That study concluded that after an idea enters a discussion among a large network of people, it can gain irresistible traction by popping up again and again in enough individuals' conversations. In networks of 50 people or more, such ideas eventually reach critical mass and become a prevailing opinion.

The same phenomenon does not happen often enough within a smaller network, where fewer interactions offer an idea less of an opportunity to take hold.

Beyond categories

The study's finding raises an interesting practical possibility: Would categorization-related decisions made by large groups be less likely to fall prey to members' individual biases?

With this question in mind, the researchers are currently looking into content moderation on Facebook and Twitter. They're investigating whether the platforms would be wiser when categorizing content as free speech or hate speech if large groups were making these decisions instead of lone individuals working at these companies.

Similarly, they're also exploring the possibility that larger networks of doctors and healthcare professionals might be better at making diagnoses that would avoid biases such as racism or sexism that could cloud the judgment of individual practitioners.

"Many of the worst social problems reappear in every culture," notes Centola, "which leads some to believe these problems are intrinsic to the human condition. Our research shows that these problems are intrinsic to the social experiences humans have, not necessarily to humans themselves. If we can alter that social experience, we can change the way people organize things, and address some of the world's greatest problems."

This story originally appeared on: Big Think - Author:Robby Berman

The idea of making food from little more than thin air— carbon dioxide, actually—is not a new one. NASA was tinkering with the idea in the 1960s as a means of growing food on future long missions. In recent years, as we've come to understand that Earth's resources—land and rainforests chief among them—are limited, interest in the concept has been renewed, with NASA doing new research and two companies racing to market with CO²-derived food products.

The basic idea

The basic mechanism for deriving food from CO² involves a fairly simple closed-loop system that executes a process over and over in a cyclical manner, producing edible matter along the way. In space, astronauts produce carbon dioxide when they breathe, which is then captured by microbes, which then convert it into a carbon-rich material. The astronauts eat the material, breathe out more CO², and on and on. On Earth, the CO² is captured from the atmosphere.

Drawing first breath

NASA's investigation into using CO² for food production began with a 1966 report written by R. B. Jagow and R. S. Thomas and published by Ames Research Center. The nine-chapter report was called "The Closed Life-Support System." Each chapter contained a proposal for growing food on long missions.

Chapter 8, written by J. F. Foster and J. H. Litchfield of the Battelle Memorial Institute in Columbus, Ohio, proposed a system that utilized a hydrogen-fixing bacteria, Hydrogenomonas—NASA had been experimenting with the bacteria for several years at that point—and recycled CO² in a compact, low-power, closed-loop system. The system would be able to produce edible cell matter in way that "should then be possible to maintain continuous cultures at high efficiencies for very long periods of time."

At the time, extended missions that would benefit from such a system were off in the future.

In 2019, and with its eye toward upcoming Mars missions, NASA returned to the idea, sponsoring the CO2 Conversion Challenge, "seeking novel ways to convert carbon dioxide into useful compounds." Phase 1 of the contest invited proposals for processes that could "convert carbon dioxide into glucose in order to eventually create sugar-based fuel, food, medicines, adhesives and other products."

In May 2109, NASA announced the winners of Phase 1. The space agency concluded acceptance of Phase 2 entries on December 4, 2020.

Approaching the Finnish line

We've written previously about Solar Foods, a company backed by the Finnish government who recently invested €4.3 million to help complete the company's €8.6 million commercialization of their nutrient-rich CO²-based protein powder, Solein. The company anticipates Solein will provide protein to some 400 million meals by 2025, and has so far developed 20 different food products from it.

In the air tonight

Another player, Air Protein, is based in California's Bay Area and is also bringing to market their own CO² protein named after the company. The company describes it as a "nutrient-rich protein with the same amino acid profile as an animal protein and packed with crucial B vitamins, which are often deficient in a vegan diet."

The company recently secured $32 million in venture-capital funding.

Although Air Protein is actually flour—like Solein—the company is positioning Air Protein as offering "the first air-based meat," while Solein was announced first, and there's no public timetable yet for the arrival of Air Protein products on store shelves. In any event, non-animal "meats" are a hot market these days with the success of Beyond Burger and Impossible Foods cruelty-free meat substitutes.

Striking oil

Though Air Protein's promotional materials emphasize meat substitutes that will be derived from their flour, a TED Talk by company co-founder Lisa Dyson reveals another Air Protein product that could arguably have an even greater impact by potentially eliminating the need for palm oil and the deforestation it requires — their CO² process can produce oils.

The company has already created a citrus-like oil that can be used for fragrances, flavoring, as a biodegradable cleaner, and "even as a jet fuel." Perhaps more excitingly, the company has made another oil that's similar to palm oil. Since palm trees are the crop most responsible for the decimation of the world's rain forests, an environmentally benign replacement for it would be a very big deal. Dyson also notes that their oils could substitute morally problematic coconut oil, whose harvesting has lately been reported to often involve the abuse of macaque monkeys.

Putting carbon dioxide to work

We know we have too much of the stuff, so finding a way of utilizing at least some CO² to create foods and other products that reduce the need for destructive commercial practices is a solid win for humankind. Harkening back to its NASA origins, Dyson notes in her talk that Earth, too, is sort of a self-contained spaceship, albeit a big one. Finding new ways to productively reuse what it has to offer clearly benefits us all.

This story originally appeared on: Big Think - Author:Robby Berman

We know at this point that there are species that can navigate using the Earth's magnetic field. Birds use this ability in their long-distance migrations, and the list of such species keeps getting longer, now including mole rats, turtles, lobsters, and even dogs. But exactly how they can do this remains unclear.

Scientists have for the first time observed changes in magnetism prompting a biomechanical reaction in cells. And if that's not cool enough, the cells involved in the research were human cells, lending support to theories that we ourselves may have what it takes to get around using the planet's magnetic field.

The research is published in PNAS.

Radical pairs

The phenomenon observed by scientists from the University of Tokyo matched the predictions of a theory put forward in 1975 by Klaus Schulten of the Max Planck Institute. Schulten proposed the mechanism through which even a very weak magnetic field—such as our planet's—could influence chemical reactions in their cells, allowing birds to perceive magnetic lines and navigate as they seem to do.

Shulten's idea had to do with radical pairs. A radical is a molecule with an odd number of electrons. When two such electrons belonging to different molecules become entangled, they form a radical pair. Since there's no physical connection between the electrons, their short-lived relationship belongs in the realm of quantum mechanics.

Brief as their association is, it's long enough to affect their molecules' chemical reactions. The entangled electrons can either spin exactly in sync with each other, or exactly opposite each other. In the former case, chemical reactions are slow. In the latter case, they're faster.

Cryptochromes and flavins

Previous research has revealed that certain animal cells contain cryptochromes, proteins that are sensitive to magnetic fields. There is a subset of these called "flavins," molecules that glow, or autofluoresce, when exposed to blue light. The researchers worked with human HeLa cells (human cervical cancer cells), because they're rich in flavins. That makes them of special interest because it appears that geomagnetic navigation is light-sensitive.

When hit with blue light, flavins either glow or produce radical pairs — what happens is a balancing act in which the slower the spin of the pairs, the fewer molecules are unoccupied and available to fluoresce.

The experiment

For the experiment, the HeLa cells were irradiated with blue light for about 40 seconds, causing them to fluoresce. The researchers' expectations were that this fluorescent light resulted in the generation of radical pairs.

Since magnetism can affect the spin of electrons, every four seconds the scientists swept a magnet over the cells. They observed that their fluorescence dimmed by about 3.5 percen each time they did this, as shown in the image at the beginning of this article.

Their interpretation is that the presence of the magnet caused the electrons in the radical pairs to align, slowing down chemical reactions in the cell so that there were fewer molecules available for producing fluorescence.

The short version: The magnet caused a quantum change in the radical pairs that suppressed the flavin's ability to fluoresce.

The University of Tokyo's Jonathan Woodward, who authored the study with doctoral student Noboru Ikeya, explains what's so exciting about the experiment:

"The joyous thing about this research is to see that the relationship between the spins of two individual electrons can have a major effect on biology."

He notes, "We've not modified or added anything to these cells. We think we have extremely strong evidence that we've observed a purely quantum mechanical process affecting chemical activity at the cellular level."

This story originally appeared on: Big Think - Author:Robby Berman

For some time, scientists have suspected the reason men require recovery time between ejaculations has to do with the hormone prolactin. During the "post-ejaculation refractory period" (PERP) following orgasm, levels of prolactin spike, and since high prolactin levels have been linked to a lack of sexual desire, it's been thought that this surge has to subside before men are ready for another go. It takes a little while for this to happen, though there's no consensus on exactly how long a wait is necessary.

A new study from researchers at the Champalimaud Research Center for the Unknown in Portugal involving mice suggests that prolactin may not be the only, or even the main, factor in post-coital downtime. Its first author Susan Lima says prolactin's presence during the PERP may have been misinterpreted: "This means it was just correlation. Causation was never tested," she tells Inverse.

The study's finding was a bit of surprise, in fact, says Lima in a press release: "When we started working on this project, we actually set off to explore the theory. Our goal was to investigate in more detail the biological mechanisms by which prolactin might generate the refractory period."

The research is published in the journal Communications Biology.

PERP

From an evolutionary standpoint, as the study puts it, "The PERP is thought to allow replacement of sperm and seminal fluid, functioning as a negative feedback system where, by inhibiting too-frequent ejaculations, an adequate sperm count needed for fertilization is maintained." The length of time involved appears to be influenced by a range of factors, including age and the excitement associated with having a new sexual partner.

Prolactin itself serves a variety of functions in the human body for both sexes. Its most well-known role is to promote lactation—it's released by the female body during nursing. Estrogen triggers its production by the pituitary gland, while dopamine restrains it.

Though prolactin's other roles remain under investigation, it's also believed to be involved in behavior regulation, and in maintaining the immune, metabolic, and reproductive systems.

No smoking gun

The authors write that "the sequence of sexual behavior in the mouse is very similar to the one observed in humans, making it an ideal system to test this hypothesis."

Therefore, for the study, Lima and her colleagues studied prolactin's role during and after sexual activity for two types of male mice—one type required several days to recover from ejaculation while the other had a relatively short PERP.

The researchers took blood from the males before they were introduced to female partners from whom they'd been kept separated. Blood was again taken after a preliminary mounting, again after a number of mounts that depended on the male's PERP—five mounts for the slow-recoverers and three for the males with the shorter turnaround time. Finally, blood was taken after ejaculation, which was fairly easy to discern since it was accompanied by what the study calls "stereotypical shivering" in the males, who also fell over afterward.

The researchers did find that the males' recovery was accompanied by higher levels of prolactin. However, during subsequent experiments in which the scientists boosted prolactin levels prior to sex—which, if the prevailing theory was correct, would have reduced their interest in copulation—no change in their sexual behavior was observed. Says Lima, "Despite the elevation in prolactin levels, both strains of mice engaged in sexual behavior normally."

Repressing prolactin levels after ejaculation also failed to reduce the males' PER interval. "If prolactin was indeed necessary for the refectory period," says Lima, "males without prolactin should have regained sexual activity after ejaculation faster than controls. But they did not."

Lima does caution that there are some differences between mice and men when it comes to prolactin dynamics, so more study is warranted.

So, what is going on?

Lima suggests that there's likely some complex interaction between the two systems involved in ejaculation: the central brain system that manages desire and the peripheral system that handles the physical aspects of ejaculation.

At the very least, the research suggests that we don't yet know why men experience their mandatory time-out. "Our results indicate that prolactin is very unlikely to be the cause," Lima summarizes. "Now we can move on and try to find out what's really happening."

This story originally appeared on: Big Think - Author:Robby Berman

There are about a thousand different bacterial species living in the human gut, a population of about 10 trillion individual microbial cells. Ideally, together they help us maintain our health, but things don't always work out that way. According to a new study from Oregon State University (OSU), four microbes in particular are especially influential when it comes to whether or not we develop type 2 diabetes. The discovery of this important microbial quartet may lead to new probiotic approaches that prevent and treat the disease.

Type 2 diabetes

Insulin is a hormone produced in the pancreas that regulates the level of glucose—a sugar found in many carbohydrates—by controlling its absorption into liver, fat, and skeletal muscle cells. If there's too much glucose in the blood, insulin stores away the extra sugar in the liver for later use when your blood sugar is low, or if you need a jolt of energy.

With type 2 diabetes, the body no longer responds sufficiently to insulin. As a result, in an attempt to compensate and keep blood sugar at acceptable levels, the body increases its production of insulin, and this, over time, wears out the pancreas' ability to produce the hormone. At that point, the person requires injections of supplemental insulin to maintain blood sugar levels.

The most significant risk factor for developing type 2 diabetes is being overweight, which is typically a product of insufficient exercise and diet. "Type 2 diabetes is in fact a global pandemic and the number of diagnoses is expected to keep rising over the next decade," study co-leader Andrey Morgun of OSU tells the university's Newsroom. Driving this is the rising percentage of people who are overweight. "The so-called 'western diet' — high in saturated fats and refined sugars," says Morgun, "is one of the primary factors. But gut bacteria have an important role to play in modulating the effects of diet."

Tracing dysbiosis

The OSU study explores the microbial mechanism behind "dysbiosis," or microbiome imbalance, and its role in type 2 diabetes.

Co-author OSU's Natalia Shulzhenko says, "Some studies suggest dysbiosis is caused by complex changes resulting from interactions of hundreds of different microbes. However, our study and other studies suggest that individual members of the microbial community, altered by diet, might have a significant impact on the host."

The researchers used transkingdom network analysis, a recently developed data-driven, systems-biology methodology, to examine host-microbe interactions, looking for specific microbe species that might be involved in dysbiosis.

In fact, they found some. "The analysis pointed to specific microbes that potentially would affect the way a person metabolizes glucose and lipids," explains Morgun. "Even more importantly, it allowed us to make inferences about whether those effects are harmful or beneficial to the host. And we found links between those microbes and obesity." The first step was identifying four groups of closely related species, or operational taxonomical units (OTUs), that appeared to be associated with glucose management, and that may play a role in obesity as a precursor of type 2 diabetes.

The OTUs pointed to four microbial species in particular: Lactobacillus johnsonii, Lactobacillus gasseri, Romboutsia ilealis, and Ruminococcus gnavus. As Shulzhenko explains, "The first two microbes are considered potential 'improvers' to glucose metabolism, the other two potential 'worseners.' The overall indication is that individual types of microbes and/or their interactions, and not community-level dysbiosis, are key players in type 2 diabetes." (Previous research has also associated Romboutsia ilealis, or "R. ilealis", with obesity.)

That Lactobacillus is an improver is encouraging, as it's a species often found in existing probiotic supplements, yogurts, fermented foods, and some dairy products. Shulzhenko says that in "looking at all of the metabolites, we found a few that explain a big part of probiotic effects caused by Lactobacilli treatments."

Of mice and men. And women.

To confirm their suspicions, the researchers performed an experiment with mice, putting them on the mouse equivalent of the Western diet, and then feeding them improver and worsener microbe species for eight weeks.

Mice that were fed the two Lactobacilli improvers proved healthier in two ways. Their liver health—specifically, the efficiency with which they metabolized lipids and glucose—was improved, and they wound up with a lower fat mass index rating.

Comparing the results of their mice experiment with data from previous research on humans, the pattern held. The presence of more improver microbes was correlated with a lower BMI, and a stronger presence of worsens was associated with a higher BMI. Says Shulzhenko, "We found R. ilealis to be present in more than 80% of obese patients, suggesting the microbe could be a prevalent pathobiont in overweight people."

The researchers hope that their findings can help lead to new prevention and treatment approaches for type 2 diabetes. Summarizes Morgun:

"Our study reveals potential probiotic strains for treatment of type 2 diabetes and obesity as well as insights into the mechanisms of their action. That means an opportunity to develop targeted therapies rather than attempting to restore 'healthy' microbiota in general."

This story originally appeared on: Big Think - Author:Robby Berman

Science can run along separate, even contradictory, paths simultaneously. At the same time as some research is revealing more and more about animal intelligence and self-awareness, other research seems to be pursuing novel ways in which humans can expand the exploitation of animals on the assumption that they lack these attributes. Growing appreciation for the intellectual and emotional lives of pigs, for example, is counterbalanced by news that the FDA has just certified that pigs bred by a company looking to harvest their organs for transplantation in humans are safe for food and medical use. The contrast can be head-snapping.

Revivicor, a subsidiary of Maryland-based biotech company United Therapeutics, received the FDA clearance in December 2020. To the FDA, this "represents a tremendous milestone for scientific innovation." Revivicor's chief scientific officer, David Ayares, tells Future Human that the company's "ultimate goal is to essentially have an unlimited supply of organs," and clearance for their "GalSafe pigs" brings that goal one step closer.

Waiting lists

The U.S. Health Resources and Services Administration says that 109,000 Americans are currently waiting for organ transplants. Seventeen people die each day while waiting, and every nine minutes a new name goes on the waiting list.

Companies such as Revivicor are hoping to meet this need with xenotransplants, in which organs from non-human species are transplanted into humans. Scientists have been seeking a way to perform successful xenotransplantation for decades—a newborn referred to publicly as "Baby Fae" rejected a transplanted baboon heart as far back as 1984.

Ayares says his company is "right on the cusp" of overcoming such rejection issues, anticipating their first transplants may occur in 2021 or 2022.

Animal tissue may also find use in the formulation of medications.

Rejection

The rejection problem stems from the human body's immune system expelling cells from other animals as foreign substances. (Rejection can also be an issue with human-to-human transplants.)

In 2003, Revivicor began development of GalSafe pigs by removing a gene that appears on the surface of porcine cells, and that produces a sugar called "alpha-gal." It's believed that alpha-gal sugar is the agent that causes the most acute rejections experienced with heart and kidney transplants.

Alpha-gal is also implicated in a meat food-allergy that occurs after a person is bitten by a Lone Star tick that leaves alpha-gal sugar behind in its victims' skin. Over time, the individual develops an allergy to pork, red meat, and lamb. Revivicor's Gal Pigs may one day be available to such people as non-allergenic pork.

Revivicor's manipulation of pig genes to support xenotransplantation compatibility doesn't end with eliminating alpha-gal sugar. Today's GalPig carries a total of 10 different genomic modifications—four pig genes have been turned off and six human genes have been introduced.

Tests so far

The company, working with the National Institutes of Health, says that they managed to avoid rejection of pig hearts transplanted into baboons for six years, though these didn't replace the animals' own, original hearts. Rather, the pig hearts were transplanted into the abdomens of the baboons simply to assess rejection. Ayares also says GalPig kidneys survived in monkeys for over six months, though it's unclear if they were functioning as kidneys or simply implanted.

For human trials, Revivicor plans to begin with kidney transplants before attempting heart replacements. They expect to perform these early trials with people awaiting human transplants. XenoTherapeutics of Boston is already testing GalPig skin transplants as a temporary measure for burn victims as their own skin regenerates.

Other companies are also exploring porcine genetic modifications for xenotransplants, including eGenesis in Boston and its partner Qihan Biotech in Zhejiang, China, who are using CRISPR to perform gene edits.

This story originally appeared on: Big Think - Author:Robby Berman

It's a rhythm that preceded our presence on Earth: The moon's inexorable push and pull on our planet's oceans. According to researchers at University of Tromsø, The Arctic University of Norway, it turns out that the moon does more than move the tides—it also controls the release of methane into the atmosphere from below the Arctic Ocean. There's no reason to think it's not true in other seas as well.

This is yet another example of the complexity of global warming, methane being the other major greenhouse gas. All sorts of things are involved in keeping the environment in balance that one would never expect, like the moon. The study points out that it's not all bad news, however, since as the oceans rise they may help the moon in controlling methane's release.

The study is published in the journal Nature Communications.

Tidal methane

Methane often takes second billing to carbon dioxide in discussions of climate change, likely because it dissipates much more quickly. However, its warming effect is actually far more intense that CO2's — it is 84 times more potent. Methane makes up about 25 percent of our greenhouse gases.

Says co-author of the study Andreia Plaza Faverola, "We noticed that gas accumulations, which are in the sediments within a meter from the seafloor, are vulnerable to even slight pressure changes in the water column. Low tide means less of such hydrostatic pressure and higher intensity of methane release. High tide equals high pressure and lower intensity of the release."

This phenomenon has not been previously observed. While significant gas hydrate concentrations have been sampled in the area, no methane release had been documented. "It is the first time that this observation has been made in the Arctic Ocean," says co-author Jochen Knies. "It means that slight pressure changes can release significant amounts of methane. This is a game-changer and the highest impact of the study."

Detecting the tidal story

The researchers buried a tool called a piezometer in the sediment on the ocean floor, and left it in place for four days. During that time, the instrument made hourly measurements of pressure and temperature in the sediments, and these indicated the presence of methane close to the sea floor, increasing at low tide and decreasing at high tide.

Their first notable observation was, of course, the presence of the gas on the Arctic Ocean floor despite a lack of other more visible indicators of its presence. "This tells us that gas release from the seafloor is more widespread than we can see using traditional sonar surveys," says Plaza Faverola. "We saw no bubbles or columns of gas in the water." She credits the watchful presence of the piezometer for making the discovery: "Gas burps that have a periodicity of several hours won't be identified unless there is a permanent monitoring tool in place, such as the piezometer."

Enthuses Knies, "What we found was unexpected and the implications are big. This is a deep-water site. Small changes in pressure can increase the gas emissions but the methane will still stay in the ocean due to the water depth."

Of course, not all the Earth's waters are equally deep, and there may not be enough water weight in some places to contain the methane below. "But what happens in shallower sites?" asks Knies. "This approach needs to be done in shallow Arctic waters as well, over a longer period. In shallow water, the possibility that methane will reach the atmosphere is greater."

The weight of water

The basic mechanics at play are simple. Higher tides mean more water pressing down on the methane, and this increased pressure keeps it from rising away from the sea floor. Low tide means less water, less pressure, and a greater opportunity for the methane to escape.

The researchers note in their study that this simple relationship may actually offer a silver lining to the rising of the world's ocean as the planet cools. There will be more water, and thus more pressure to keep methane from escaping up and into the atmosphere. In essence, higher sea levels may have something of a cooling effect by keeping methane out of the atmosphere.

In the end, there's not much we can do about the Moon and its tides, but the more knowledge we have of the mechanisms behind climate change the better.

As Plaza Faverola puts it:

"Earth systems are interconnected in ways that we are still deciphering, and our study reveals one of such interconnections in the Arctic: The moon causes tidal forces, the tides generate pressure changes, and bottom currents that in turn shape the seafloor and impact submarine methane emissions. Fascinating!"

This story originally appeared on: Big Think - Author:Robby Berman

In science fiction they have it all figured out: Former inhabitants of Earth roaming the galaxies in massive space stations that waste nothing — everything, and everyone, is recycled. Now though, there remains a lot to be figured out. Real-world solutions have to be invented that can come together to create the sustainable closed environments that will be required for spaceships and space colonies, not to mention unwelcoming terrestrial environments we hope to explore.

Researchers at the Tokyo University of Science, led by Norihiro Suzuki, have just published a study in the form of a letter in New Journal of Chemistry. It proposes an innovative system for deriving ammonia-based liquid fertilizer from human urine, a win-win that would simultaneously deal with waste as it benefits agriculture.

The basic idea

In the past, we've built communities in areas that provide the resources we need to sustain us. When we've needed to grow food, we've populated locations that have water, land on which to grow food and raise livestock, a decent climate, enough space for us to live, and so on. As we leave such cozy environs, all of that goes out the airlock. As things stand now, all we have will be what we bring with us as we step out among the stars.

Among the most successful types of fertilizer traditionally has been animal waste that's rich in nitrogen. With this in mind, Suzuki's team has been working on the production of ammonia—which is made up of nitrogen and oxygen—derived from the compound urea found in urine.

Says Suzuki, "I joined the 'Space Agriteam' involved in food production, and my research specialization is in physical chemistry; therefore, I came up with the idea of 'electrochemically' making a liquid fertilizer."

"This process is of interest from the perspective of making a useful product," asserts Suzuki, "i.e., ammonia, from a waste product, i.e., urine, using common equipment at atmospheric pressure and room temperature."

How it works

The researchers' experiments so far have used artificial urine.

The electrochemical process the scientists invented works at room temperature.

One one side, a reaction cell held both 50 milliliters of an artificial urine sample and a boron-doped diamond (BDD) electrode in a photocatalyst of titanium oxide that was continually stirred throughout the process. On the other was a counter cell in which a platinum electrode was immersed in salty water. When a steady current of 70 mA was introduced to the BDD electrode, the urea oxidized and formed ammonia atoms.

As part of the experiment, the researchers also exposed the photocatalyst-immersed BDD to light to see if that affected the process, and found that it actually led to less ammonia being oxidized.

Next up, says Suzuki, "We are planning to perform the experiment with actual urine samples, because it contains not only primary elements (phosphorus, nitrogen, potassium) but also secondary elements (sulfur, calcium, magnesium) that are vital for plant nutrition!"

Counting down

Tokyo University's Space Agriteam is part of the school's Research Center for Space Colony. Obviously, agriculture in space is a key element in developing humankind's off-planet future. Their emphasis is finding technological solutions toward the development of safe, sustainable space agriculture that can thrive in a totally closed-off environment.

The potential for the researchers' new invention is clear to Suzuki, who predicts "it will turn out to be useful for sustaining long-term stay in extremely closed spaces such as space stations."

This story originally appeared on: Big Think - Author:Robby Berman

This week, researchers from China published a study in which an intriguing behavior of russet swallows was described. The birds apparently administer what amounts to preventative medicine to their offspring: wormwood that kills parasites and promotes growth. This suggests two things: that they understand the beneficial properties of the plant, and that they are aware of and invest in their chicks' future.

Remarkable as this may seem, the sparrows are just the latest addition to an already long list of animals that self-medicate, a capability that raises big questions. Is this behavior learned or is it instinctual? Is the knowledge shared among animal communities and families? Do animals try out different substances until they feel better? Does illness simply induce a physical taste for beneficial plants? Has natural selection favored the survival of animals who just happen to ingest medicinal substances?

The field of study that looks at animals who self-medicate is called zoopharmacognosy. "I believe every species alive today is self-medicating in one way or another," Michael Huffman of the Primate Research Institute at Kyoto University told the New York Times in 2017. "It's just a fact of life."

Animal pharmacists

In that New York Times article, Huffman tells the story of a chimp he observed named Chausiku who treated a malaise by chewing the juice from the Vernonia amygdalina plant. According to a local ranger, the plant contains potent medicine but is also deadly at larger doses. Chausiku somehow knew just how much juice to ingest, and she recovered her energy in a few days. She recovered with a powerful appetite, suggesting the resolution of some manner of intestinal distress. Subsequent testing of the plant revealed it has multiple compounds with strong anti-parasitic qualities.

It seems clear that this sort of medicinal savvy is widespread throughout the animal kingdom. A PNAS article was shared by the National Center for Biotechnology Information in 2014. It noted, among other examples:

• Reports of bears, deer, and elk consuming medical plants.
• Elephants in Kenya that induce delivery of their calves by eating certain leaves.
• Lizards that eat a particular anti-venom root when bit by a snake.
• Red and green macaws that ingest clay that calms their digestion (dirt antacids!) and kills bacteria.
• Female wooly spider monkeys in Brazil whose fertility is enhanced by eating certain plants.

It may be primates who are most adept at self-medicating. Chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas are often seen swallowing rough leaves that clear their digestive tracts of parasites. Chimps with roundworms will also eat terrible-tasting plants that cure such infestations.

Numerous animals—such as the sparrows noted earlier and certain caterpillars—eat plants that kill or repel parasites.

Those russet sparrows aren't the only ones who seem to be planning head, either. There are ants that use antibacterial spruce-tree resin to keep their nests germ free. Finches and sparrow line their nests with cigarette butts that keep mites under control.

Animal science, luck, and/or instinct?

If science is the practice of making observations, particularly of cause and effect, it may be that these animals are practicing a science of their own. As psychologist Robin Dunbar tell the Times, this method is simply how people and other living beings work out the way things work: "Science is a genuine universal, characteristic of all advanced life-forms."

An animal's source of medical knowledge may be as simple as that which comes to an individual with digestive issues who just happens to eat a plant that makes them feel better, a bit of knowledge that will come in handy when it once again gets sick. Perhaps others nearby see what's happened and learn the trick to recovering from a stomach ache themselves. Perhaps offspring learn the medicine by observing their adults. Emory University's Jaap de Roode, speaking with NPR, says that "primates are not so different from us. They can learn from each other and they can make associations between ... taking medicinal plants and feeling better."

On the other hand, it could also be natural selection at work. An animal with a natural inclination toward this kind of plant may ingest it when its tummy hurts. It then survives to reproduce while other individuals with tummy aches don't. The animal uses the plant medicinally without any particular knowledge or understanding.

"People used to believe that you had to be very smart to [self-medicate]," says de Roode, but this may not be so. He cites the example of parasite-infected monarch butterflies who will lay their eggs in anti-parasitic milkweed, given the option. "I wouldn't say it's a conscious choice, but it's a choice," he says, since healthy monarchs don't exhibit such a preference.

However this works, experts say we would be wise to keep an eye on all these non-human practitioners — there may be cures they know about that human physicians haven't yet caught onto. As de Roode says, animals "have been studying medicine much longer than we have."

This story originally appeared on: Big Think - Author:Robby Berman