Science

A recent book challenges humans’ common ancestry with primates.

Ever since Darwin, biologists have believed that much could be learned about human nature from apes and monkeys, the primates with which we share common ancestry. Chimpanzees, in particular, our closest living relatives, are likely to reflect many features of our early primate nature given that we and they shared a common ancestor who lived some 7 million years ago, not so long on evolution’s time scale.

‘It’s identical in taste, requires a fraction of the resources and is 100 percent cruelty-free,’ the company says.

Shoppers could soon see a new type of milk in their local supermarkets, one that promises the taste and texture of dairy without involving a single cow.

Food-tech startup Remilk has announced it will begin selling its lab-produced milk products early next year, marking a significant step into the consumer market for the animal-free dairy industry.

The cartel will be angry!

Rolling across the rugged, rusty red terrain on Mars, NASA’s Perseverance rover came upon some rocks with peculiar green, blue, black and white dots. After detailed image analysis, scientists have come to a potentially encouraging conclusion: If those speckled rocks were formed like they are on Earth, they might be evidence of past life on the dusty planet.

The rocks “very well could be the clearest sign of life that we’ve ever found on Mars, which is incredibly exciting,” acting NASA administrator Sean P. Duffy said in a news conference Wednesday. The findings were published in the journal Nature on Wednesday.

The Anthropic Principle, a concept at the intersection of science and philosophy, has long served as a fallback explanation for perplexing questions about the universe. Why is the cosmological constant so small yet positive? Why does dark matter exist in the precise abundance needed for galaxies and life to form?

First articulated in its modern form by physicist Brandon Carter in 1974, the Anthropic Principle attempts to explain why the universe’s physical constants fall within the narrow range required for life. It comes in two flavors: the “Weak Anthropic Principle,” which observes that the universe must allow for observers, and the “Strong Anthropic Principle,” which suggests the universe is fine-tuned for life.

TORONTO—Canadian neurosurgeons in partnership with Elon Musk’s Neuralink have regulatory approval to recruit six patients with paralysis willing to have a thousand electrode contacts in their brains.

The trial, called CAN-PRIME, has started recruiting patients for a study that will test the safety and efficacy of a device that allows people to move cursors with their minds, a surgeon leading the trial said.

Neuralink announced regulator Health Canada’s approval this week. Neuralink has implanted two such devices in patients in the United States.

Spiritually inclined scientists are rediscovering a vision imbued with a sense of human values—and mystery.

Suzie Bohlson sits in a sun-drenched California plaza, a pale, slight 53-year-old with a Ph.D. in biology from Notre Dame. Fifteen years ago, she converted to Catholicism, a surprising choice, perhaps, for a young woman from Los Angeles raised in a family of materialist scientists.

Though her grandfather was a Lutheran minister in rural Pennsylvania, religion was seldom discussed in her family’s Los Angeles home. Her father taught at UCLA, where her mother earned four degrees. “Physics was my father’s religion,” she says with a slight smile. “I was raised with the belief that reality was physics, chemistry, and biology.”

Sex is binary, according to the majority of British scientists in a poll.

The difference between sex and gender has become an increasingly incendiary topic as activists, scientists and politicians all debate the terms and the implications they have for policy.

But a survey of almost 200 scientists at British universities, conducted by The Telegraph and Censuswide, found 58 per cent of respondents think sex is binary, except in rare cases such as intersex individuals.

Those who have lived through the last two decades will be well acquainted with the increasing rigidity applied to scientific theories that also hold political value.

We have returned to an age where the truth of a theory comes second to its significance as scaffolding maintaining the validity of lucrative ideological and economic causes. This is what happens when the proverb ‘knowledge is power’ becomes corrupted by the idea of ‘divine knowledge used by the powerful’ – the latter being little more than a cynical dogma protected by a mixture of censorship and propaganda.

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Scientists near Chicago say they may be getting closer to discovering the existence of a new force of nature.

They have found more evidence that sub-atomic particles, called muons, are not behaving in the way predicted by the current theory of sub-atomic physics.

Scientists believe that an unknown force could be acting on the muons.

More data will be needed to confirm these results, but if they are verified, it could mark the beginning of a revolution in physics.

Solid-state physics very rarely goes viral. But that is what happened when a group of researchers at Korea University, in Seoul, announced on July 22nd that they had discovered a “room-temperature superconductor”, a material dubbed lk-99. They published a pair of preliminary, non-peer-reviewed papers. If the researchers are right, it would be one of the biggest discoveries in physics in the past few decades. A Nobel prize would be a mere formality. But history provides plenty of reasons for caution. Labs around the world are rushing to test the results. What exactly is so exciting?

This Reuters article offers additional skepticism, apparently even the best scientists can be fooled: Superconductor claims spark investor frenzy, but scientists are skeptical

In the early 20th century, Serbian inventor Nikola Tesla dreamed of pulling limitless free electricity from the air around us. Ever ambitious, Tesla was thinking on a vast scale, effectively looking at the Earth and upper atmosphere as two ends of an enormous battery. Needless to say, his dreams were never realised, but the promise of air-derived electricity – hygroelectricity – is now capturing researchers’ imaginations again. The difference: they’re not thinking big, but very, very small.

The creation of synthetic, human-like embryos is an awe-inspiring scientific breakthrough.

Truly groundbreaking advances in science are sadly rare occurrences. So when they happen, we should celebrate them. The announcement that scientists have successfully created synthetic embryos from stem cells is one such advance.

It sounds like science fiction: Scientists deploy a spacecraft to a speeding asteroid, scoop dirt from the space rock and drop the fragments back on Earth somewhere in the Australian outback — all in pursuit of learning how life was, and could be, formed.

That was the seven-year quest of Japan’s Hayabusa2 mission, a spacecraft that collected five grams of material from a near-Earth asteroid named Ryugu, roughly meaning “dragon palace” in Japanese. In a Japanese folk tale, Ryugu refers to a magical underwater palace where a fisherman receives a mysterious box.