Jingszo !

The first seeds are thought to have evolved around 372-359 million years ago in a period known as the Famennian (belonging to the Late Devonian). Fossil records indicate that almost all these seeds were surrounded by an additional protective structure known as the cupule and did not have wings. To date, only two groups of Famennian seeds have been reported to bear wings or wing-like structures, and one of these groups did not have cupules. These Famennian seeds all had four wings.

Wang et al. examined fossils of seed plants collected in Anhui province, China, which date to the Famennian period. The team identified a new group of seed plants named the Alasemenia genus. The seeds of these plants each had three wings but no cupules. The seeds formed on branches that did not have any leaves, which indicates the seeds may have performed photosynthesis (the process by which plants generate energy from sunlight). Mathematical modelling suggested that these three-winged seeds were better adapted to being dispersed by the wind than other seeds with one, two or four wings.

These findings suggest that during the Famennian the outer layer of some seeds that lacked cupules evolved wings to help the seeds disperse in the wind. It also indicates that seeds with four or three wings evolved first, followed by other groups of seed plants with fewer seed wings. Future studies may find more winged seeds and further our understanding of their evolutionary roles in the early history of seed plants.

But a study by Saul Newman from University College London, which is now being peer reviewed, suggests much data on human centenarians is bogus.

“I tracked down 80% of the people in the world who were older than 110,” says Newman, who found almost none of them had a birth certificate. “It’s a statistical garbage pile.”

Alarm bells have been ringing for a while. In 2010, a Japanese government review discovered 230,000 of the country’s centenarians were missing – presumably dead. And Newman says data suggests that some 72% of Greek centenarians are dead or missing, but their relatives haven’t declared as much, possibly to keep collecting their pensions.

Newman believes this is why blue zones appear in poor, rural areas, places where there’s substandard record-keeping and pressure to commit pension fraud. In the UK, the relatively poor London borough of Tower Hamlets has the highest proportion of 105-year-olds in the country, despite having a lower-than-average life expectancy overall. And longevity is linked to wealth – the countries in the world with the highest average life expectancy are rich ones.

Deep down, in an ocean beneath its ice shell, Jupiter’s moon Europa might be temperate and nutrient-rich, an ideal environment for some form of life — what scientists would call “habitable.” NASA’s Europa Clipper mission aims to find out.

Europa Clipper’s elongated, looping orbit around Jupiter will minimize the spacecraft’s exposure to intense radiation while allowing it to dive in for close passes by Europa. Using a formidable array of instruments for each of the mission’s 49 flybys, scientists will be able to “see” how thick the moon’s icy shell is and gain a deeper understanding of the vast ocean beneath. They’ll inventory material on the surface that might have come up from below, search for the fingerprints of organic compounds that form life’s building blocks, and sample any gases ejected from the moon for evidence of habitability.

Highly reactive complex molecules finding some sort of stability was a necessary step towards life getting started on Earth. Scientists think they've just discovered how these first began to stay intact and spark the journey towards organisms.

We haven't been able to explain how the simple molecules that would've been floating around in the primordial waters of early Earth eventually latched on to each other long enough to form something as complex as RNA (ribonucleic acid).

So researchers in Germany created conditions to match ancient Earth in their laboratory. They focused on RNA-like units, synthetic chemical components capable of combining with each other in different combinations to create evolving strings of 'information', just like our own genetic material.

Source:

Template-based copying in chemically fuelled dynamic combinatorial libraries

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41557-024-01570-5

Frederick Valentich was an Australian pilot who disappeared while on a 125-nautical-mile (232 km) training flight in a Cessna 182L light aircraft, registered VH-DSJ, over Bass Strait.

On the evening of Saturday 21 October 1978, twenty-year-old Valentich informed Melbourne air traffic control that he was being accompanied by an aircraft about 1,000 feet (300 m) above him and that his engine had begun running roughly, before finally reporting: "It's not an aircraft."

Valentich radioed Melbourne Flight Service at 7:06 pm to report that an unidentified aircraft was following him at 4,500 feet (1,400 m). He was told there was no known traffic at that level. Valentich said he could see a large unknown aircraft which appeared to be illuminated by four bright landing lights. He was unable to confirm its type, but said it had passed about 1,000 feet (300 m) overhead and was moving at high speed. Valentich then reported that the aircraft was approaching him from the east and said the other pilot might be purposely toying with him. Valentich said the aircraft was "orbiting" above him and that it had a shiny metal surface and a green light on it. Valentich further reported that he was experiencing engine problems. Asked to identify the aircraft, Valentich radioed: "It's not an aircraft." His transmission was then interrupted by unidentified noise described as "metallic, scraping sounds" before all contact was lost.

In 1898, two male lions terrorized an encampment of bridge builders on the Tsavo River in Kenya. The lions, which were massive and maneless, crept into the camp at night, raided the tents and dragged off their victims. The infamous Tsavo "man-eaters" killed at least 28 people before Lt. Col. John Henry Patterson, the civil engineer on the project, shot them dead. Patterson sold the lions' remains to the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago in 1925.

There were thousands of hairs embedded in the lions' teeth, compacted over a period of years, the researchers said. Further analyses will allow the scientists to at least partially reconstruct the lions' diet over time and perhaps pinpoint when their habit of preying on humans began.

Source :

Compacted hair in broken teeth reveals dietary prey of historic lions

Highlights

• Prey hair in the Tsavo lions’ tooth cavities contains complete mitogenomes

• Cavities contained hair from giraffe, human, oryx, waterbuck, wildebeest, and zebra

• A comparison of hair DNA to endogenous lion DNA indicates self- or allogrooming

• At least two giraffes from a subspecies typical of Tsavo were eaten

https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(24)01240-5

Fossil and gene discoveries paint an ever-more-intertwined history of humans combining with vanished species like Neandertals

At the heart of scientific questions about the origins of humanity lie questions of human nature. Are Homo sapiens intrinsically lovers or fighters, predators or prey, lucky survivors or inevitable conquerors?

The friendlier answers to those queries keep coming, seen in a spate of genetic findings and some recent fossil discoveries. They also underline how tough life was for our prehistoric ancestors. Despite the eight billion people on Earth today, and counting, just surviving was winning for most of humanity’s history.

Not everyone did. Only 200,000 years ago, our ancestors lived on a planet teeming with varied human relatives: Neandertals lived in Europe and the Middle East. Denisovans, known today only from bone fragments, teeth and DNA, dwelled across Asia and perhaps even in the Pacific. “Hobbits,” or Homo floresiensis, a diminutive species, lived in Indonesia, as another short-statured species, called Homo luzonensis, did in the Philippines. Even Homo erectus, the grandparent of early human species, was still running around as recently as 112,000 years ago.

Now they are all gone. Except in our genes. Denisovans interbred with Neandertals, and both mated with modern humans. Genes from “an unknown hominin in Africa” also mark modern humans’ genomes. The initial discovery of these admixtures, starting in 2010, shook up the once-conventional “Out of Africa” picture of human origins, which saw a small, singular group of human ancestors developing language and then replacing all others worldwide within the last 100,000 years.

Skoltech researchers and their colleagues from the University of Granada, Spain, have determined the most efficient ways to reinforce vaults and domes in architecture. The team compared how well various traditional and unconventional patterns of stiffening ribs enable a structure to withstand both evenly distributed and asymmetric loads.

Published in Thin-Walled Structures, the study relied on numerical analysis and physical experiments, and led its authors to propose an unprecedented rib pattern inspired by dragonfly wings, which surprisingly outperformed every other layout examined in the paper.

Stiffening ribs have been used in vaults and domes since ancient Roman times to enable thinner structures for both engineering and aesthetic reasons. This solution conserves material and allows for more intricate designs, bigger column-free floor spans, and larger windows—like those in Gothic cathedrals.

Source:

Stiffening patterns for freeform composite shell structures

Highlights

• The paper investigates rib-based reinforcement strategies for improving structural integrity of form-found shell structures.

• The study introduces diverse stiffening patterns for shell structures, designed with geometric, biomimetic, and optimization-derived methodologies.

• The paper demonstrates through mechanical testing and numerical simulations that these patterns significantly improve stiffness and buckling resistance of form-found shells.

• The study validates that integrating form-finding with targeted rib-based reinforcements can lead to sustainable and structurally resilient solutions.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0263823124004804?via%3Dihub

When a supermassive black hole consumes a star, it doesn’t just swallow it whole. It shreds the star, ripping it apart bit by bit before consuming the remains. It’s a messy process known as a tidal disruption event (TDE). Astronomers occasionally catch a glimpse of TDEs, and one recent one has helped solve a mystery about a type of transient X-ray source.

Known as quasi-periodic eruptions (QPEs), they are soft X-rays that emanate from the centers of galaxies every few hours or a few weeks. QPEs are rare, so they are difficult to study, and we aren’t sure what causes them. One idea is that they are caused by a large star or stellar black hole orbiting the supermassive black hole in such a way that its orbit intersects with the accretion disk of the supermassive black hole. Each time the smaller object passes through the disk, it triggers superheated plasma to release X-rays. We’ve seen a similar effect with blazars, for example.

Given the short periodicity of QPEs the companion object would need to orbit the black hole very closely, just on the edge of a stable orbit distance. And when it starts intersecting with accretion disk material, its orbit will decay on a short cosmic timescale. This would explain why QPEs are so rare. But to prove this model, astronomers would need to observe this happening in real time, which is what a team of astronomers has recently done. The results will be published in Nature later this month.

The death of Prince Oleg of Novgorod and the involvement of his horse in this tragic event provides the historian with an opportunity to glimpse the ideal relationship between the princely warrior and his horse through the chronicler’s denunciation of its opposite, the betrayal of the faithful horse by the selfish and superstitious owner.

Everyone familiar with classical literature, as the chronicler apparently is, would know that it is at this exact point that Oleg should be most careful, because the prophecy may be fulfilled in a most unexpected manner. And it is.

Oleg orders that he be taken to the place where the horse has died and, in an uncanny way, sees its bare bones lying on the ground. To complete his triumph against pagan priests – and against death, Oleg places his foot on the horse’s skull, only to be bitten by a snake that has been lurking inside the skull. He dies from its poisonous bite.

Losos summarized genetic research that traces domestic cats back to, most likely, North African wild cats, between 35,000 and 10,000 years ago. This meshes with the beginnings of agriculture, and Losos outlined the common theory that wild cats were drawn to the rodents that fed on grain stores — and that humans welcomed these predators in.

“People would see the advantage of having these cats around and would put out a bowl of milk or let them into the hut where it was warm and dry,” he said. “The next thing you know, you have the domestic cat.”

Their dispersal around the world (to every continent except Antarctica) was aided by their new human friends, including, it seems, Vikings. DNA sequencing of a cat found at a burial site in the Viking village of Ralswiek, now in Northern Germany, has revealed a striking similarity to that of Egyptian cats.

Presumably, Vikings picked up and helped disseminate these domestic creatures as they sailed around Europe, Iceland, and possibly North America, while travelers along the sea routes to India and overland along the Silk Road to China did the same.

Researchers have used the chemical fingerprints of zinc contained in meteorites to determine the origin of volatile elements on Earth. The results suggest that without 'unmelted' asteroids, there may not have been enough of these compounds on Earth for life to emerge.

The researchers, from the University of Cambridge and Imperial College London, have previously found that Earth's zinc came from different parts of our solar system: about half came from beyond Jupiter and half originated closer to Earth...

Planetesimals are the main building blocks of rocky planets, such as Earth. These small bodies are formed through a process called accretion, where particles around a young star start to stick together, and form progressively larger bodies...

The researchers measured the zinc from a large sample of meteorites originating from different planetesimals and used this data to model how Earth got its zinc, by tracing the entire period of the Earth's accretion, which took tens of millions of years.

Their results show that while these 'melted' planetesimals contributed about 70% of Earth's overall mass, they only provided around 10% of its zinc.

According to the model, the rest of Earth's zinc came from materials that didn't melt and lose their volatile elements. Their findings suggest that unmelted, or 'primitive' materials were an essential source of volatiles for Earth.

Source:

Primitive asteroids as a major source of terrestrial volatiles

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.ado4121

Though the comet is very old, it was just discovered in 2023, when it approached the inner solar system on its highly elliptical orbit for the first time in documented human history. Beginning in mid-October 2024, Comet C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan-ATLAS) will become visible low in the west following sunset. If the comet’s tail is well-illuminated by sunlight, it could be visible to the unaided eye. Oct. 14-24 is the best time to observe, using binoculars or a small telescope.

Congress plans UFO hearings for November

• A hearing on UAPs last year garnered bipartisan support

• A whistleblower has named an alleged program to reverse-engineer UAPs

• Both the House and Senate plan to hold UAP hearings

Shellenberger said the whistleblower claims the program is currently being run and is designed to reverse-engineer UAPs.

“Whether or not you think there are extraterrestrial or nonhuman intelligence, even if you think that all of this is just some sort of advanced craft, the allegation here by a new whistleblower, verified by other sources in a position to know, is that the Defense Department has kept secret this information from Congress, which is a violation of the Constitution,”

Every kid who has read a comic book or watched a Spider-Man movie has tried to imagine what it would be like to shoot a web from their wrist, fly over streets, and pin down villains. Researchers at Tufts University took those imaginary scenes seriously and created the first web-slinging technology in which a fluid material can shoot from a needle, immediately solidify as a string, and adhere to and lift objects.

The accidental discovery overcame several engineering challenges to replicating spider threads. Silk fibroin solutions can slowly form a semi-solid hydrogel over a period of hours when exposed to organic solvents like ethanol or acetone, but the presence of dopamine, which is used in making the adhesives, allowed the solidification process to occur almost immediately.

SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket launched the X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle on December 29, 2023, marking the first time it carried the spacecraft. This is the spaceplane’s seventh time in orbit, and the Space Force has big plans for the last leg of its test vehicle’s journey around Earth. The spaceplane will begin a series of orbital maneuvers known as aerobraking, which uses the drag of Earth’s atmosphere to change orbit while expending minimal fuel, the Space Force announced on Thursday.

The X-37B, built by Boeing, will dispose of its service module before completing its remaining mission objectives, which the Space Force has not disclosed, and then de-orbit to conclude its seventh mission in space. “This novel and efficient series of maneuvers demonstrates the Space Force’s commitment to achieving groundbreaking innovation as it conducts national security missions in space,” Frank Kendall, secretary of the U.S. Air Force, said in a statement.

The Space Force has remained fairly secretive regarding its test vehicle, keeping its capabilities and specifics under wraps as it competes with China to develop the next generation of reusable spacecraft. There was little information shared about the spaceplane’s ongoing mission, with the Space Force only revealing that its vehicle would operate in new orbital alignments and carry out experiments with “space domain awareness technologies.” It remains unclear what those technologies are, or what they would be used for.

As if the largest bug to ever live—a monster nearly 9 feet long with several dozen legs—wasn't terrifying enough, scientists could only just imagine what the extinct beast's head looked like.

That's because many of the fossils of these creatures are headless shells that were left behind when they molted, squirming out of their exoskeletons through the head opening as they grew ever bigger—up to 8 to 9 feet (2.6 meters) and more than 100 pounds (50 kilograms).

Now, scientists have produced a mug shot after studying fossils of juveniles that were complete and very well preserved, if not quite cute.

The giant bug's topper was a round bulb with two short bell-shaped antennae, two protruding eyes like a crab, and a rather small mouth adapted for grinding leaves and bark

Source:

Head anatomy and phylogenomics show the Carboniferous giant Arthropleura belonged to a millipede-centipede group

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adp6362

The Pentagon has categorically denied a report claiming that a whistleblower has, for the first time, revealed the name of an ultra-secret program investigating UFOs.

The whistleblower has named an “active and highly secretive” unacknowledged special access program (USAP) being illegally withheld from US Congress, according to independent American journalist Michael Shellenberger, writing on his Public Substack blog.

‘Immaculate Constellation’ is allegedly the name of a program established by the Department of Defense in 2017 after The New York Times revealed the existence of an earlier UFO investigation effort, the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP).

Although they've never been discovered, astronomers can't rule out the existence of primordial black holes. If they do exist, they would have formed at the beginning of the Universe, at various masses. Over the age of the Universe, they could have been gravitationally captured by planets and asteroids and fallen inside them, consuming them from within - even inside Earth. Over time, the tunnels opened up by microscopic black holes could be detectable.

Ontario is considered the UFO capital of Canada given the 21,884 encounters reported, with sightings described as “orbs with 20 lights,” “black triangles moving fast,” and mysterious “spherical objects.”

So for every 667 people, one UFO has been sighted, making it the highest UFO-to-human ratio out of all the provinces and territories.

Alberta was a distant second, with residents reporting 624 sightings over the years, bringing the total to 1 UFO per 700 people.

In the third spot is British Columbia with more than 7,000 reported sightings, amounting to one per 757 people.

Manitoba was in fourth place with one UFO sighting per 943 people while Quebec rounded out the Top 5 with one per 1,080 residents.

Those who want to avoid even the slightest of encounters with a possible otherworldly being, Newfoundland and Labrador is where to go having reported only 60 sightings since 1974.

That’s a meagre one UFO per 8,692 people, according to the data.

The biological properties of rats show much greater similarities to human cells and organs than most people would expect. In simplified terms, nearly 90% of the genes in humans and rats share significant similarities.

The rats were color-coded so that the automated system could track them 24 hours a day for eight months. The researchers at ELTE observed varied patterns of dominance and coexistence, challenging preconceived notions about rats and potentially human social interactions.

In some instances, hierarchies stabilized only after numerous conflicts, while peaceful cohabitation was the norm in other scenarios. These dynamics were influenced significantly by the composition and reorganization of the rat groups, showcasing the profound impact of the social environment on behavior.

When rats from a hierarchical group were mixed with those from a non-hierarchical group, the outcome was sometimes a hierarchical group, and sometimes a peaceful one. Another unexpected result was that there was relatively little correlation between the "personality" traits defined in standard personality and social tests (commonly used in drug or behavioral research) and the actual behavior observed within the real groups.

Theory suggests sinking tropical air masses, not rising ones, lead to dead calms

Water, water, every where,

And all the boards did shrink;

Water, water, every where,

Nor any drop to drink.

So goes the plight of sailors marooned in the windless doldrums of the tropical seas, never sure when—or whether—a gust would send them home. Although Samuel Taylor Coleridge encapsulated the phenomenon in the poem quoted above, 1834’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” scientifically, doldrums have largely been ignored and the textbook explanation for them taken at face value. Now, a study turns that explanation on its head, arguing the phenomenon is caused not by rising masses of sea air, but rather by sinking ones.

The result, published recently in Geophysical Research Letters, revealed a big flaw in the conventional explanation: Averaged over long timescales of days or weeks, the doldrums appear to coincide with big rainstorms. But in reality, over short, hourlong timescales, the rain and windless episodes occur separately.

It turned out a clue had been hiding in Coleridge’s poem all along. Stranded sailors were usually dry, not wet:

Water, water, every where,

And all the boards did shrink;

Water, water, every where,

Nor any drop to drink.

That means the standing theory for the doldrums is backward.

Although rainfall generally depends on rising parcels of moist air, the doldrums are better described by sinking masses of air.

The latest numbers from the Dark Energy Survey (DES) indicate that 31.5% of the universe is matter (a combination of dark and normal), with the remainder being dark energy assuming a cosmological constant. The error on this measurement is just 3%.

Knowing these numbers to higher precision will hopefully help cosmologists understand why the universe is like this. Why would we expect to have 70% of the universe today as “dark” (can’t be seen via electromagnetic radiation) and not associated with “matter” like everything else in the universe?

The origin of this dark energy remains the biggest challenge to physics, even after 20 years of intense study.

Scientists describe two new species of birds that lived alongside these dinosaurs 68 million years ago. The researchers were able to name these new species from just one bone each: the powerful foot bone that suggests these birds could have captured and carried off prey.

While they might not be the first birds of prey to ever evolve, their fossils are the earliest known examples of predatory birds.

The math corroborated the researchers' hypothesis that these feet would have been strong enough for these hawk-sized birds to pick up small mammals and even baby dinosaurs.

All of these birds are part of a group called the avisaurids. They belong to a larger group of birds called the enantiornithines, which went extinct with most of their fellow dinosaurs when the asteroid hit 66 million years ago.

Science’s inside outsiders

Riess is sharing random emails from his inbox to help me understand why physicists are ignoring a theory in cosmology put forward by theoretical biologist Stuart Kauffman.

In 1971, Kauffman theorized a way for matter to transform into life.

He proposed that life emerges as spontaneous self-organizing molecular networks called collectively autocatalytic sets (CAS) at "the edge of chaos,” a transitional boundary between order and disorder. In CAS, components of the network interact by mutually creating and constraining each other, shaping and animating a living organism as a system distinct from its environment. The whole organism then influences all its components in a circular causal loop.

Kauffman suggests that trillions of such systems emerge and co-evolve in our biosphere through an open-ended process of circular, sideways and interdependent causation constantly moving forward in time.

This makes it impossible to fully predict all the ways any one organism will evolve and behave in relation to all others in the environment, despite adhering to physical laws.

He argues this unpredictability necessitated the evolution of intuition and creativity—emergent capabilities that aid survival in a world that can’t be navigated by reason, formal logic and linear approaches alone.