Lab News [original papers]

[...] According to his first biographer Giorgio Vasari, Leonardo died lamenting ‘that he had offended God and mankind in not having worked at his art as he should have done’ (Vasari, 1996; Nicholl, 2004; Vecce, 2006).

The story of Da Vinci is one of a paradox—a great mind that has compassed the wonders of anatomy, natural philosophy and art, but also failed to complete so many projects (Freud, 1922; Kemp, 2006). The excessive time dedicated to idea planning and the lack of perseverance seems to have been particularly detrimental to finalize tasks that at first had attracted his enthusiasm. Leonardo’s chronic struggle to distill his extraordinary creativity into concrete results and deliver on commitments was proverbial in his lifetime and present since early childhood
[...]
[...] His contemporaries could never understand or forgive his lack of discipline, not his visionary mind. In his psychoanalytical essay on Leonardo, Freud viewed what he defined Leonardo’s ‘artistic sterility’ as an infantile sexual repression caused by ‘his illegitimate birth and the pampering of his mother’ (Freud, 1922). But modern neuropsychiatry might have a different explanation.

Could Leonardo have had attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)? ADHD is a highly heritable childhood behavioural disorder characterized by continuous procrastination, the inability to complete tasks, mind wandering and a restlessness of the body and mind (Demontis et al., 2018). [...]
[...]

Grey Matter Leonardo da Vinci: a genius driven to distraction
Marco Catani, Paolo Mazzarello
Brain, Volume 142, Issue 6, June 2019, Pages 1842–1846,
https://doi.org/10.1093/brain/awz131

The Tragic Physics of the Deadly Explosion in Beirut
Rachel Lance
06.08.2020
A blast injury specialist explores the chemistry—and history—of explosions like the one captured in videos that swept across the world.
[...]
https://www.wired.com/story/tragic-physics-deadly-explosion-beirut/

Genetic variation, brain, and intelligence differences
Abstract
Individual differences in human intelligence, as assessed using cognitive test scores, have a well-replicated, hierarchical phenotypic covariance structure. They are substantially stable across the life course, and are predictive of educational, social, and health outcomes. From this solid phenotypic foundation and importance for life, comes an interest in the environmental, social, and genetic aetiologies of intelligence, and in the foundations of intelligence differences in brain structure and functioning. Here, we summarise and critique the last 10 years or so of molecular genetic (DNA-based) research on intelligence, including the discovery of genetic loci associated with intelligence, DNA-based heritability, and intelligence’s genetic correlations with other traits. We summarise new brain imaging-intelligence findings, including whole-brain associations and grey and white matter associations. We summarise regional brain imaging associations with intelligence and interpret these with respect to theoretical accounts. We address research that combines genetics and brain imaging in studying intelligence differences. There are new, though modest, associations in all these areas, and mechanistic accounts are lacking. We attempt to identify growing points that might contribute toward a more integrated ‘systems biology’ account of some of the between-individual differences in intelligence.

Deary, I.J., Cox, S.R. & Hill, W.D. Genetic variation, brain, and intelligence differences. Mol Psychiatry (2021).
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41380-021-01027-y

traduction Deepl:

Genetic patterns offer clues to evolution of homosexuality
Massive study finds that genetic markers associated with same-sex encounters might aid reproduction. But some scientists question the conclusions.
Sara Reardon
[...]
The team analysed the genomes of 477,522 people who said they had had sex at least once with someone of the same sex, then compared these genomes with those of 358,426 people who said they’d only had heterosexual sex. The study looked only at biological sex, not gender, and excluded participants whose gender and sex did not match.

In earlier research, the researchers had found that people who’d had at least one same-sex partner tended to share patterns of small genetic differences scattered throughout the genome. None of these variations seemed to greatly affect sexual behaviour on its own, backing up previous research that has found no sign of a ‘gay gene’. But the collection of variants seemed to have a small effect overall, explaining between 8% and 25% of heritability.

Next, the researchers used a computer algorithm to simulate human evolution over 60 generations. They found that the array of genetic variations associated with same-sex behaviour would have eventually disappeared, unless it somehow helped people to survive or reproduce.
[...]
The authors acknowledge many limitations of the study. All of the participants lived in the United Kingdom or United States, and were of European descent. And the databases’ questionnaires asked about sexual behaviour, not sexual attraction. Most of the participants were born during a time when homosexuality was either illegal or culturally taboo in their countries, so many people who were attracted to others of the same sex might never have actually acted on their attraction, and could therefore have ended up in the wrong group in the study.

Julia Monk, an ecologist and evolutionary biologist at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, thinks that these caveats are so important that the paper can’t draw any real conclusions about genetics and sexual orientation. Sexual behaviour and reproduction, she says, occupy a different place in modern societies than they did for human ancestors, so it’s difficult to infer their role in our evolution. For instance, people might engage with more sexual partners now that sexually transmitted diseases can be cured. And the existence of birth control and fertility treatments negates many of the reproductive advantages that genes might provide. “It’s clear that people’s behaviour when it comes to sex and reproduction is highly culturally informed, and maybe digging into genetics is next to impossible,” Monk says.
[...]
Hamer acknowledges that linking a complex behaviour to genetics is extremely difficult, but says he is glad the team is researching sexual orientation. “It’s vastly understudied considering it’s a driving force for the human race,” he says. “It’s a good question, they just didn’t find an answer.”
https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-02312-0

L'article dont il est question :
Zietsch, B.P., Sidari, M.J., Abdellaoui, A. et al. Genomic evidence consistent with antagonistic pleiotropy may help explain the evolutionary maintenance of same-sex sexual behaviour in humans. Nat Hum Behav (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-021-01168-8

Do animals suffer from post-traumatic stress?
By Sharon Levy, 30th August 2021, from Knowable Magazine

Commonly thought of as a human response to danger, injury and loss, there is growing evidence that many animals show lasting changes in their behaviour after traumatic events. Can they point to an evolutionary source for PTSD?

Every few years, snowshoe hare numbers in the Canadian Yukon climb to a peak. As hare populations increase, so do those of their predators, lynx and coyotes. Then the hare population plummets and predators start to die off. The cycle is a famous phenomenon among ecologists and has been studied since the 1920s.

In recent years, though, researchers have come to a startling conclusion – hare numbers fall from their peak not just because predators eat too many of them. There's another factor: chronic stress from living surrounded by killers causes mother hares to eat less food and bear fewer babies. The trauma of living through repeated predator chases triggers lasting changes in brain chemistry that parallel those seen in the brains of traumatised people. Those changes keep the hares from reproducing at normal levels, even after their predators have died off.
[...]

Topsy Turvy a écrit:J'ai regardé un instant les stat sur la part de population "homosexuelle", mais c'est trop le bordel.
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statistiques_d%C3%A9mographiques_sur_l%27orientation_sexuelle

What’s next for lab-grown human embryos?
Researchers are now permitted to grow human embryos in the lab for longer than 14 days. Here’s what they could learn.
Kendall Powell
[...]
Nature 597, 22-24 (2021)
https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-02343-7

Mutation fingerprints encode cellular histories
Cells continually acquire mutations and pass them on to their progeny. The mutation profiles of human cells shine a light on the cells’ developmental history and their dynamics in adult tissue.
Kamila Naxerova
[...]
From the point of view of human health, tissue evolution during later life is probably an even more pressing topic than embryonic development. Already, our conceptual understanding of how cancer develops has been shifted profoundly by the recognition that healthy tissues can contain mutations that were previously thought to be relatively specific to cancers8. It is becoming clear that some of these alterations might not drive cancer at all, but might simply be inherited from normal cells by cancer cells. Some mutations that spread throughout normal tissues might even protect against cancer9,10.

Li et al. report that a notable fraction of tissue samples across different sites, such as the oesophagus and the rectum, contained three or more mutations thought to drive cancer — although it is not clear whether these driver mutations were present together in the same cell. This is consistent with previous work demonstrating the presence of up to three driver mutations in normal airway cells from people who smoke11. Three driver mutations is uncomfortably close to the average four or five that are found in cancers12, particularly given the limited sampling of normal tissue so far. Indeed, if cells with three driver mutations can easily be found in a small tissue sample, cells with four or five drivers probably exist in that tissue as well — without necessarily giving rise to cancer.

These new insights invite us to reconsider how we genetically define cancer. If having multiple driver mutations does not make a cancer, what does? Is a particular, tissue-specific combination of mutations required? Or is the presence of such mutations required in addition to permissive environmental conditions? Chromosomal abnormalities have often been cited as being specific to cancer cells, but both Li et al. and Park et al. report that normal cells in some tissues contain chromosomal changes as well.

It is likely that full clarification will be possible only with the generation of a ‘normal-tissue genome atlas’, in which the mutational composition of different tissues is carefully mapped across many individuals as a function of age, medical history and lifestyle. Only then can we hope to answer the foundational question about the genetic definition of cancer with some rigour.
https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-02269-0

Encoding memory in tube diameter hierarchy of living flow network

Significance
Simple organisms manage to thrive in complex environments. Having memory about the environment is key in taking informed decisions. Physarum polycephalum excels as a giant unicellular eukaryote, being even able to solve optimization problems despite the lack of a nervous system. Here, we follow experimentally the organism’s response to a nutrient source and find that memory about nutrient location is encoded in the morphology of the network-shaped organism. Our theoretical predictions in line with our observations unveil the mechanism behind memory encoding and demonstrate the P. polycephalum’s ability to read out previously stored information.

Abstract
The concept of memory is traditionally associated with organisms possessing a nervous system. However, even very simple organisms store information about past experiences to thrive in a complex environment—successfully exploiting nutrient sources, avoiding danger, and warding off predators. How can simple organisms encode information about their environment? We here follow how the giant unicellular slime mold Physarum polycephalum responds to a nutrient source. We find that the network-like body plan of the organism itself serves to encode the location of a nutrient source. The organism entirely consists of interlaced tubes of varying diameters. Now, we observe that these tubes grow and shrink in diameter in response to a nutrient source, thereby imprinting the nutrient’s location in the tube diameter hierarchy. Combining theoretical model and experimental data, we reveal how memory is encoded: a nutrient source locally releases a softening agent that gets transported by the cytoplasmic flows within the tubular network. Tubes receiving a lot of softening agent grow in diameter at the expense of other tubes shrinking. Thereby, the tubes’ capacities for flow-based transport get permanently upgraded toward the nutrient location, redirecting future decisions and migration. This demonstrates that nutrient location is stored in and retrieved from the networks’ tube diameter hierarchy. Our findings explain how network-forming organisms like slime molds and fungi thrive in complex environments. We here identify a flow networks’ version of associative memory—very likely of relevance for the plethora of living flow networks as well as for bioinspired design.

Encoding memory in tube diameter hierarchy of living flow network
Mirna Kramar, Karen Alim
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Mar 2021, 118 (10) e2007815118
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2007815118

Missing evidence for memory in the monocellular slime mold

The well-conducted study of chemotaxis in the slime mold Physarum polycephalum (1) shows how its mold tube network aligns and reorganizes tube diameters in response to glucose and leucine. The mathematical approach gives evidence for a flow-based signal propagation as the cause of tube diameter growth or shrinkage.

We question the conclusions about a memory function in the slime mold, missing an experimental reasoning for statements such as “encoding of the location of a nutrition stimulus” or “the key to why tube hierarchy represents memory and impacts organism behavior is the flow.” [...]

Missing evidence for memory in the monocellular slime mold
H. Reiber, A. F. Nogueira Júnior
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Sep 2021, 118 (36) e2105928118
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2105928118

A group at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, Canada, trained a neural network to produce 3D ‘depth maps’ for paintings, such as this fresco by Raphael in the Vatican City, by determining the size and relative positions of recognizable objects in the picture. The AI doesn’t always generate perfect results, but it is already being used in combination with other tools to create 3D visualizations of photographs and artwork.

Fuzz
Reviewed by Katherine E. Himes

In her latest book, Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law, Mary Roach seeks to answer a question that has confronted humankind for centuries and evades resolution: What is the proper course when wildlife breaks laws intended for people?

Over 2 years, Roach dutifully investigated the myriad dimensions of human–wildlife conflict, researching related science, law, history, and cultural practices and meeting with wildlife managers, conflict specialists, forensics gurus, attack experts, poison testers, and others in the US, Canada, India, New Zealand, and Vatican City. “Felony crimes,” such as murder, assault, and robbery, committed by the likes of bears, elephants, leopards, monkeys, cougars, legumes, and trees encompass the first half of the book, with more commonplace violations—vandalism and jaywalking by birds and other lawbreaking species—revealed in the second half.

Each chapter is packed with the results of these detailed investigations. Roach uses footnotes to add both depth and lightness to the topic at hand by capturing misfit studies, asides, and hilarious tangents. Here, the reader learns the average weight of Asian elephant droppings (4 pounds), is introduced to a moose taser prototype, and more.

The book opens with the first records Roach can find of wildlife on trial. In 1545, vintners legally prosecuted weevils, while caterpillars were summoned to court in 1659 for trespassing and damaging orchards.

Having laid out a historical context for human–wildlife conflict, Roach’s first stop is a forensics training seminar in a Reno casino conference room, taught by the British Columbia Conservation Officer Service and hosted by the Nevada Department of Wildlife, where the training manikins, meant to simulate bodies attacked by animals, are named after Canadian beers—an effort on the part of the trainers to lighten the otherwise grim mood. In the classroom, she and other participants learn to identify species-specific attack patterns and integrate victim and animal evidence.

Later, in India, Roach discovers the difficulties of managing aggressive monkeys that, among other antics, enter hospitals and pull IVs out of patients to suck on the glucose. Government agencies debate jurisdiction (are the monkeys wild or not?), attempt to effectively sequester the offenders in a wildlife sanctuary, and grapple with accommodating religious beliefs (can fines be administered if monkeys are at a temple?).

Roach relates examples of how science has informed, and continues to inform, decision-making with respect to human–wildlife conflict. She elucidates how experts have found that translocating repeat offenders can increase rather than decrease an animal’s aggressive behavior; the difficulty of addressing troublesome monkey populations owing to the complexity of administering birth control to such groups; and the importance of establishing guidelines for the use of CRISPR to control rodents. Rather than requiring nature to bend to human rule, peaceful coexistence may be possible, argues Roach.

Yet the book rarely steps back to examine larger factors at play, and some animal outlaws receive a great deal of attention while others receive none. The actions of avian offenders extend over three chapters, for example, while the various crimes of mosquitoes and ticks go unmentioned. That said, Fuzz is a refreshing addition to the nonfiction science genre, illuminating a historically niche topic for a broader audience and helping to bring it to the fore.

Our Biggest Experiment
Reviewed by Gifford J. Wong

Alice Bell’s Our Biggest Experiment reads like a “chocolate box of a book”—to borrow a phrase from the author—regaling readers with a curated history of the people, science, politics, and technology that have intersected with the current climate crisis. She deftly weaves subtle and lesser-known details about the brilliant (and sometimes eccentric) individuals who have worked out how to measure and describe what we, as a species, have wrought upon Earth. Bell’s focus is on the complex human story of discovery and realization, ensuring that readers appreciate both the impressive intellectual achievements that have punctuated this story and the thorny threads of racism, sexism, and colonialism that are intertwined with them.

The book begins with American amateur scientist Eunice Newton Foote, who, in 1856, published the results of an elegant experiment involving two glass cylinders filled with various substances (dry air, moist air, and carbon dioxide), a sunny window, and a thermometer. The cylinder filled with carbon dioxide became noticeably warmer than either dry or moist air, leading Foote to conclude that “an atmosphere of that gas would give to our earth a high temperature.” Although her work was presented at that year’s annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) by Joseph Henry—3 years before John Tyndall’s important work identifying the gases responsible for the greenhouse effect—her contribution to our overall understanding of the climate crisis has only recently been rediscovered.

A century after Foote’s observations were made public, oceanographer Roger Revelle—seen now as one of the pioneering researchers in the study of human influence on the atmosphere and climate—testified before Congress regarding the issue of burning fossil fuels and increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide. “Here we are making perhaps the greatest geophysical experiment in history, an experiment which could not be made in the past because we didn’t have an industrial civilization and which will be impossible to make in the future because all the fossil fuels will be gone,” he observed at the 1956 hearing. At this point, notes Bell, Revelle and his colleagues were more interested in the intellectual opportunity presented by this planetary-level experiment than in mitigating it.

It took another researcher, and the note he wrote while in a cab heading to a congressional hearing, to help move the conversation toward a push for public action. Climate modeler James Hansen had been invited to testify before the Senate in 1988, a year experiencing “yet another heatwave in the USA, yet another ‘worst drought since the dustbowl’ summer.” While the former NASA researcher’s testimony was clear—he highlighted “a cause and effect relationship between the greenhouse effect and observed warming”—it was the contents of the note to himself that he used in response to a reporter’s question that helped shape headlines: “It is time to stop waffling…the greenhouse effect is here and is affecting our climate now.”

“The story of the climate crisis has always been a choose your own adventure and continues to be,” notes Bell. As such, she remains optimistic that there is a feasible path forward, arguing that we must act now: “We owe it not just to future generations who’ll inherit whatever we do to this Earth, but also to the memory of those who came before, who gave us something to work with.”

Fear of a Black Universe
Reviewed by Kanwal Singh

One of the great joys of modern physics for the expert and the novice alike is contemplating the common sense–shattering insights from relativity and quantum mechanics. As an artist friend of mine once said, “Who needs science fiction when the real stuff is so wild?” In Fear of a Black Universe, physicist Stephon Alexander contends that the world of research physics would do well to take a lesson from the art world’s embrace of outsiders like Basquiat and Banksy. Beginning with Einstein’s and Schrödinger’s more fanciful thought experiments, he argues that free thinking is the way to make progress in our understanding of the Universe. Grinding out equations and applying logical principles to problems may give us a foundation of knowledge, he maintains, but such practices are not all there is to physics.

The book is divided into two sections. In the first part, Alexander attempts to do three things at once: explain the fundamental principles of invariance, quantum superposition, and emergence; illustrate the leaps in thinking that led to these three principles; and argue for greater diversity in the field. Along the way, he uses anecdotes from his own journey as a Black physicist to personalize and illustrate his major point: To successfully understand our mysterious Universe, we must not only accept but also embrace the wild, “far-out” ideas that come from those considered to be outsiders.

The second part of the book is, in Alexander’s words, structured “like a jazz album.” (Alexander is also a jazz musician.) In this section, he takes the reader through many of the central phenomena in cosmology, including the Big Bang, the cosmic microwave background, and loop quantum gravity, explaining the models themselves and the histories of their development. Throughout this section, he touches on a recurring metaphysical theme: the potential connection between consciousness and the existence of the Universe.

Fear of a Black Universe packs in a lot of information and moves quickly from illustrative analogies to complex explanations of some of the most sophisticated models in cosmology and quantum physics. For example, the chapter “The Zen of Quantum Fields,” despite its soothing title, contains a dense description of how individual particles arise from quantum fields. As do several other chapters, this one begins casually but may ultimately be difficult to comprehend without some fundamental understanding of quantum principles.

This book is very ambitious—perhaps overly so. Alexander has a vast intellect, and his attempt to construct a framework that incorporates both the development of fundamental principles of physics and a case for diversity, all while ruminating on the field’s connections to consciousness, could have easily comprised multiple volumes. Readers with a strong background in physics and an appetite for connecting the physical world to sociological and metaphysical questions, however, will find much to appreciate in this book.

Climate science is supporting lawsuits that could help save the world
Quirin Schiermeier

Governments have failed to slow climate change quickly enough, so activists are using courts to compel countries and companies to act — increasingly with help from forefront science.

Friederike Otto hadn’t really thought much about the legal world when she answered the phone one day in 2018. On the other end of the line was Petra Minnerop, a scholar of international law at the University of Durham, UK, who was exploring how the legal system might help to save the planet.

Minnerop had developed an interest in climate litigation — efforts to hold governments and companies legally responsible for contributing to global warming. Following the success of several climate lawsuits, she was seeking to get involved and thought Otto’s research might help. Otto, a climate modeller at the University of Oxford, UK, is one of the world’s leaders in attribution science — a field that has developed tools to assess how much human activities drive extreme weather events, including the heatwaves, fires and floods that have ravaged parts of the globe this year. In their telephone call, the pair realized that they had similar aims and they set about thinking how science and environmental law might trigger more action to limit climate change.

Minnerop and Otto are in the vanguard of scientists and legal scholars who are assisting in lawsuits to force governments and companies to take action against climate change. Over the past few decades, environmental groups and citizens around the world have filed more than 1,800 climate suits. Science has been central to supporting the arguments in these cases, but the vast majority have relied on the most basic conclusions of climate research. Now, Otto, Minnerop and others are seeking to bring in the latest science to improve lawsuits’ chances of driving substantial reductions in greenhouse-gas pollution.

“There’s a really big gap in many cases between what can be said scientifically and what is brought to courts,” says Otto.

The number of climate suits has surged in recent years, thanks in part to a growing youth climate movement that has injected fresh energy into activism aimed at protecting the planet. Since 2015, plaintiffs, including children, have filed more than 1,000 climate cases, according to an analysis published in July by researchers at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment in London (see ‘Climate cases on the rise’). In 37 cases, lawsuits allege that governments have not lived up to their promises to lower the risks of climate change or to set goals that are ambitious enough. These cases, which target systemic problems, have generated the most attention, and could have some of the most far-reaching consequences if they are successful. Other cases focus on specific projects or practices, such as coal mining in Australia or deforestation in Brazil.



[...]
[...] recent wins inspire hope that courts could help to tackle a planetary crisis — one that governments’ legislative and executive branches have so far failed to avert. “The judiciary is less subject to political haggling and horse trade,” says Hansen. “Court victories against governments are forcing them to think about and work on actual actions rather than promises for the distant future.”

But law on its own won’t be enough, cautions Rotmans. “Courts cannot force the global energy transition needed to stabilize the climate,” he says. “Winning a lawsuit is one thing; getting rid of fossil fuels is another.”

Nature 597, 169-171 (2021)
https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-02424-7

The 2021 Ig Nobel Prize winners

BIOLOGY PRIZE [SWEDEN]:
Susanne Schötz for analyzing variations in purring, chirping, chattering, trilling, tweedling, murmuring, meowing, moaning, squeaking, hissing, yowling, howling, growling, and other modes of cat–human communication.
[...]
ECOLOGY PRIZE [SPAIN. IRAN]:
Leila Satari, Alba Guillén, Àngela Vidal-Verdú, and Manuel Porcar, for using genetic analysis to identify the different species of bacteria that reside in wads of discarded chewing gum stuck on pavements in various countries.
[...]
CHEMISTRY PRIZE [GERMANY, UK, NEW ZEALAND, GREECE, CYPRUS, AUSTRIA]:
Jörg Wicker, Nicolas Krauter, Bettina Derstroff, Christof Stönner, Efstratios Bourtsoukidis, Achim Edtbauer, Jochen Wulf, Thomas Klüpfel, Stefan Kramer, and Jonathan Williams, for chemically analyzing the air inside movie theaters, to test whether the odors produced by an audience reliably indicate the levels of violence, sex, antisocial behavior, drug use, and bad language in the movie the audience is watching.
[...]
ECONOMICS PRIZE [FRANCE, SWITZERLAND, AUSTRALIA, AUSTRIA, CZECH REPUBLIC, UK]:
Pavlo Blavatskyy, for discovering that the obesity of a country’s politicians may be a good indicator of that country’s corruption.
[...]
MEDICINE PRIZE [GERMANY, TURKEY, UK]:
Olcay Cem Bulut, Dare Oladokun, Burkard Lippert, and Ralph Hohenberger, for demonstrating that sexual orgasms can be as effective as decongestant medicines at improving nasal breathing.
[...]
PEACE PRIZE [USA]:
Ethan Beseris, Steven Naleway, and David Carrier, for testing the hypothesis that humans evolved beards to protect themselves from punches to the face.
[...]
PHYSICS PRIZE [THE NETHERLANDS, ITALY, TAIWAN, USA]:
Alessandro Corbetta, Jasper Meeusen, Chung-min Lee, Roberto Benzi, and Federico Toschi, for conducting experiments to learn why pedestrians do not constantly collide with other pedestrians.
[...]
KINETICS PRIZE [JAPAN, SWITZERLAND, ITALY]:
Hisashi Murakami, Claudio Feliciani, Yuta Nishiyama, and Katsuhiro Nishinari, for conducting experiments to learn why pedestrians do sometimes collide with other pedestrians.
[...]
ENTOMOLOGY PRIZE [USA]:
John Mulrennan, Jr., Roger Grothaus, Charles Hammond, and Jay Lamdin, for their research study “A New Method of Cockroach Control on Submarines”.
[...]
TRANSPORTATION PRIZE [NAMIBIA, SOUTH AFRICA, TANZANIA, ZIMBABWE, BRAZIL, UK, USA]:
Robin Radcliffe, Mark Jago, Peter Morkel, Estelle Morkel, Pierre du Preez, Piet Beytell, Birgit Kotting, Bakker Manuel, Jan Hendrik du Preez, Michele Miller, Julia Felippe, Stephen Parry, and Robin Gleed, for determining by experiment whether it is safer to transport an airborne rhinoceros upside-down.
[...]
https://www.improbable.com/

COVID advances win US$3-million Breakthrough prizes
Pioneers of mRNA vaccines and next-generation sequencing techniques are among the winners of science’s most lucrative awards.
Zeeya Merali
[...]
[...] for decades, mRNA vaccines were considered unfeasible because injecting mRNA triggered an unwanted immune response that immediately broke down the mRNA. The award’s winners — Katalin Karikó at the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) in Philadelphia and at BioNTech in Mainz, Germany, and Drew Weissman, also at UPenn — demonstrated in the mid-2000s that swapping one type of molecule in mRNA, called uridine, with a similar one called pseudouridine by-passes this immune reaction.
[...]
Karikó hopes to funnel some of the prize money back into research into future mRNA vaccines and therapies, for instance, for tackling cancer. “I am happy to be one of the people who has contributed to this [vaccine], but it is mind-boggling how many advances needed to be made over the decades, in many fields,” says Karikó. “My respect goes to the hundreds of people involved.”

Shankar Balasubramanian and David Klenerman at the University of Cambridge, UK, and Pascal Mayer at the research firm Alphanosos in Riom, France, share a prize for inventing a technique in the mid-2000s that allows billions of DNA fragments to be imaged and read in parallel, speeding up sequencing by 10 million times. “I was shocked, and deeply honoured that we won,” says Balasubramanian.
[...]
A third life-sciences prize was awarded to the chemical biologist Jeffrey Kelly at Scripps Research in La Jolla, California, for working out the part that protein misfolding plays amyloidosis, a disease that can affect organs including the heart and can cause neurodegeneration — and for developing an effective treatment for them.

The Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics is shared by the optical physicists Hidetoshi Katori at the University of Tokyo, and Jun Ye at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colorado, for inventing the optical lattice clock — a device that would lose less than one second over 15 billion years, improving the precision of time measurements by 10,000 times.

Previous state-of-the-art caesium clocks are based on measuring microwaves emitted as the atoms transition between two energy states — a process triggered by dropping clouds of atoms and bombarding them with microwaves. Optical lattice clocks instead strike strontium atoms with optical light and measure emitted optical light, which has a frequency that is 100,000 times higher than that of microwaves. “This means you can measure faster ticks,” says Ye.

The clocks also use lasers to hold thousands of atoms still, in a lattice structure, for even greater accuracy — but this raises a new challenge. “The very act of trapping the atom can perturb it,” Ye says. Each energy state is usually distorted by a different amount. A key trick involved finding two energy states that happen to be disturbed by the same amount, so that when the difference between them is measured, this distortion cancels out.
[...]
The Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics went to Takuro Mochizuki at Kyoto University in Japan, for extending the understanding of algebraic structures called ‘holonomic D-modules’ — which are related to certain types of differential equation — to deal with points at which the equations under study are not well defined.

Yuri Milner, a Russian Israeli billionaire, founded the Breakthrough prizes in 2012. They are now sponsored by Milner and other Internet entrepreneurs, including Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg.
https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-02449-y

How far will global population rise? Researchers can’t agree
David Adam
The United Nations forecasts that nearly 11 billion people will be living on Earth at the end of the century, but other demographic research groups project that population will peak earlier and at a much lower level.
[...]
When Singapore, for example, first urged each family to have only two children at most in 1972, the fertility rate in the country was estimated at 3.04 and was forecast to rise sharply. By 1986, just ahead of its policy U-turn and plea for more babies, fertility had plummeted to 1.43. It dipped as far as 1.14 in 2018 and today remains at a worryingly low 1.23.
[...]

[...]
Nature 597, 462-465 (2021)
https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-02522-6

Inside the lawsuit that ended US gene patenting
Heidi Ledford
25 October 2021
How a win in the Supreme Court challenged a linchpin of the genetic-testing industry.
[...]
[...] by the 2000s, gene patents were common. In 2005, one team estimated that 20% of the human genome had been patented [...]. Although products of nature are not patentable under US law, some lawyers argued that isolating a gene from its surrounding chromosome fundamentally alters the DNA and therefore constitutes an invention. Another, more utilitarian, defence held that gene patents were necessary to nurture health-care innovation.

There is a reason that few thrillers have been based on patent law. Patents are difficult to digest — sometimes by design. The more ambiguous they are, the more flexibility a patent holder might have to claim that their intellectual property encompasses someone else’s invention. “The first part of a patent reads like a scientific paper written by a lawyer, and the last part reads like a legal document written by a scientist,” writes Contreras. “In both cases, you get the worst of both worlds.”

Thankfully, Contreras spares us the details, pulling out only nuggets that are needed to understand the case. He explains the science and legal arguments clearly and succinctly. (He does a better job of this than did some of the lawyers and justices involved, who trotted out painful analogies throughout the four-year process: genes were likened variously to chocolate-chip cookies, baseball bats and kidneys.)
[...]
By 2013, when the Supreme Court issued its unanimous decision in favour of the ACLU [American Civil Liberties Union], gene patents and Myriad-style testing of single genes were already falling out of fashion. Medical diagnostics had moved on to multi-gene testing, and now, increasingly, the emphasis is on whole-genome sequencing. But this story stands as a guide to the forces that shape an increasingly important industry — and to the vexed influence of patents.
Nature 598, 561-562 (2021)
https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-02905-9

Extraits:

Baleen whale prey consumption based on high-resolution foraging measurements

Baleen whales influence their ecosystems through immense prey consumption and nutrient recycling. It is difficult to accurately gauge the magnitude of their current or historic ecosystem role without measuring feeding rates and prey consumed. To date, prey consumption of the largest species has been estimated using metabolic models based on extrapolations that lack empirical validation. Here, we used tags deployed on seven baleen whale (Mysticeti) species (n = 321 tag deployments) in conjunction with acoustic measurements of prey density to calculate prey consumption at daily to annual scales from the Atlantic, Pacific, and Southern Oceans. Our results suggest that previous studies have underestimated baleen whale prey consumption by threefold or more in some ecosystems. [...] Larger whale populations may have supported higher productivity in large marine regions through enhanced nutrient recycling: our findings suggest mysticetes recycled 1.2 × 10^4 tonnes iron yr^−1 in the Southern Ocean before whaling compared to 1.2 × 10^3 tonnes iron yr^−1 recycled by whales today. The recovery of baleen whales and their nutrient recycling services could augment productivity and restore ecosystem function lost during 20th century whaling.

Savoca, M.S., Czapanskiy, M.F., Kahane-Rapport, S.R. et al. Baleen whale prey consumption based on high-resolution foraging measurements. Nature 599, 85–90 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-03991-5

The eccentric dog breeds that vanished
By Zaria Gorvett
5th November 2021
From a vegetarian dog to a walking piece of kitchen equipment, the world was once home to an abundance of strange and ancient hounds. Where have they gone – and could we bring them back?
[...]
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20211105-the-bizarre-dog-breeds-time-forgot

Friction: from fingerprints to climate change
An enthusiastic exploration of how surfaces interact both intrigues and frustrates.
Anna Novitzky

Sticky: The Secret Science of Surfaces Laurie Winkless Bloomsbury Sigma (2021)

What links geckos’ feet, plate tectonics, the winter sport curling and spacecraft re-entering the atmosphere? For physicist and science writer Laurie Winkless, the answer is: friction. Her eclectic, sometimes erratic, book Sticky touches on all these and much more as she investigates a force whose effects are felt in every moment of our lives, but which stubbornly resists attempts at theoretical explanation.
[...]
Nature 599, 367 (2021)
https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-021-03436-z

The race to understand 'immune amnesia'
By Zaria Gorvett
16th November 2021
Scientists have known for years that measles can alter the immune system – but the latest evidence suggests it's less of a mild tweaking, and more of a total reset.
[...]
Enter "immune amnesia", a mysterious phenomenon that's been with us for millennia, though it was only discovered in 2012. Essentially, when you're infected with measles, your immune system abruptly forgets every pathogen it's ever encountered before – every cold, every bout of flu, every exposure to bacteria or viruses in the environment, every vaccination. The loss is near-total and permanent. Once the measles infection is over, current evidence suggests that your body has to re-learn what's good and what's bad almost from scratch.
[...]
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20211112-the-people-with-immune-amnesia

Genes Reveal How Some Rockfish Live up to 200 Years
Scientists surveyed dozens of species’ genomes to uncover keys to longevity
By Jack Tamisiea on November 11, 2021

Few groups of animals encapsulate the extremes of longevity more than fish. While coral reef pygmy govies survive for less than ten weeks, Greenland sharks can endure more than 500 years. So when a team of biologists at the University of California, Berkeley, wanted to explore the genetics of aging, they grabbed their fishing gear.

Their preferred catch was rockfish. Found in coastal waters from California to Japan, rockfish are a colorful group of more than 120 species in the genus Sebastes. Some of these closely related species live for only a decade. Others, such as the rougheye rockfish, can live for more than 200 years.
[...]

[...]
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/genes-reveal-how-some-rockfish-live-up-to-200-years/
Le papier d'origine : S. R. R. Kolora et al., Science 374, 842 (2021) https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.abg5332

Lost Women of Science tells the remarkable stories of forgotten women of science

The Lost Women of Science Initiative is a 501(c)3 non-profit organization with two overarching and interrelated missions: To tell the story of female scientists who made groundbreaking achievements in their fields, yet remain largely unknown to the general public, and to inspire girls and young women to embark on careers in STEM.

The Initiative’s flagship is the Lost Women of Science podcast, which, through deep reporting and rich storytelling, revisits the historical record one extraordinary scientist at a time.
[...]
https://lostwomenofscience.org

The Lost Women of Science, Episode 1: The Question Mark
When physician and pathologist Dorothy Andersen confronted a slew of confounding infant deaths, she suspected the accepted diagnosis wasn’t right. Her medical sleuthing led to the world’s understanding of cystic fibrosis, a disease that affects the lungs, the pancreas and a host of other organs. But she is by no means a household name. Who was this scientist, and how did she come to quietly make such an important medical contribution? This is the Lost Women of Science podcast
[...]
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-lost-women-of-science-episode-1-the-question-mark/

The future of medicine unlocked
Michael Le Page
When the covid-19 pandemic finally showcased the power of mRNA therapies, it opened the door to a medical revolution [...]
New Scientist Volume 251, Issue 3356, 16 October 2021, Pages 38-42
https://doi.org/10.1016/S0262-4079(21)01851-0

Extraits a écrit:pull up a chair, kick back, and scroll through a year’s worth of fantastic discoveries. Then tell us which ones you think should be Science’s Breakthrough of the Year. Candidates are listed below. Happy reading—and voting!

ANCIENT ORIGINS
First footprints in the Americas?
Dragon Man skull
Ancient soil DNA
The homeland of horses

HEALTH AND MEDICINE
In vivo CRISPR
A psychedelic PTSD remedy
Early human development
Powerful pills for COVID-19

FROM MOLECULES TO SPACE
Measuring muon magnetism
Uncovering Mars’s core
Artificial intelligence predicts proteins
Fusion’s day in the Sun

Court développement de chacune sur :
https://www.science.org/content/article/choose-your-own-breakthrough-year-science-s-2021-poll

Extrait a écrit:Children often have a pragmatic view of friendship, forming close bonds with peers in the playground or classroom, says Kennedy-Moore. "It is a 'love the one you're with' approach."

"The thing that kids have as an advantage over adults is that they are in the room with 25 others in their stage of life," she says. "In adulthood it takes deliberate effort to find and cultivate friendships."

According to one study, adults must spend around 50 hours together to go from mere acquaintance to a casual friend, 90 hours together before they consider each other friends, and more than 200 hours to become close friends who share an emotional connection.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20211117-how-do-children-choose-a-best-friend

Scientists claim big advance in using DNA to store data
[...]
Scientists have said that, if formatted in DNA, every movie ever made could fit inside a volume smaller than a sugar cube.
[...]
The current record for DNA digital data storage is around 200MB, with single synthesis runs lasting about 24 hours. But the new technology could write 100 times more DNA data in the same amount of time.

The high cost of DNA storage has so far restricted the technology to "boutique customers", such as those seeking to archive information in time capsules.
[...]
DNA data storage won't initially replace server farms for information that must be accessed quickly and often. Because of the time required for reading the sequence, the technique would be most useful for information that must be kept available for a long time, but accessed infrequently.

This type of data is currently stored on magnetic tapes which should be replaced around every 10 years.

With DNA, however, "as long as you keep the temperature low enough, the data will survive for thousands of years, so the cost of ownership drops to almost zero", Dr Guise explained.

"It only costs much money to write the DNA once at the beginning and then to read the DNA at the end. If we can get the cost of this technology competitive with the cost of writing data magnetically, the cost of storing and maintaining information in DNA over many years should be lower."

DNA storage has a higher error rate than conventional hard drive storage. In collaboration with the University of Washington, GTRI researchers have come up with a way of identifying and correcting those errors.
[...]
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-59489560

Iron Man (Tony Stark)
“Genius, billionaire, playboy, philanthropist.” Tony Stark

Health assets—Tony Stark (Iron Man) is extremely wealthy, which places him in a high socioeconomic position. This, along with his superior intelligence (he graduated from university at 17), puts him at reduced risk of dementia. Iron Man’s urban lifestyle with ready access to excellent healthcare and his (eventual) marriage to Pepper Potts are additional positive drivers for a healthy ageing trajectory.

Health risks—The electromagnet and refined arc reactor in Iron Man’s armour prevent his premature death. It is, however, difficult to ascertain whether Iron Man’s advantageous lifestyle factors can counteract his multiple physical injuries and post-traumatic stress disorder. It is also unclear whether his armour offers sufficient protection from gravitational shifts and exposure to radiation during his occasional forays into space. If not, Iron Man is likely to experience accelerated bone loss and a substantial increased risk of malignancy. His most concerning characteristic is chronic heart disease, and, not fitting neatly into categories such as heart failure or cardiovascular disease, its impact on death rate and the ageing trajectory is difficult to predict.