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Category: biological

Scientists uncover what delayed Earth’s oxygen boom for a billion years

Billions of years ago, cyanobacteria began releasing oxygen through photosynthesis, but the atmosphere stayed oxygen-poor for ages. Researchers uncovered that trace compounds like nickel and urea may have delayed Earth’s oxygenation for millions of years. Experiments mimicking early Earth revealed how their concentrations controlled cyanobacterial growth, dictating when oxygen began to accumulate. As nickel declined and urea stabilized, photosynthetic life thrived, sparking the Great Oxidation Event. The findings could also guide the search for biosignatures on distant worlds.

The arrival of oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere marked a defining moment in the planet’s history, transforming it into a world capable of supporting complex life. This major shift, known as the Great Oxidation Event (GOE), took place approximately 2.1 to 2.4 billion years ago. However, oxygenic photosynthesis — produced by cyanobacteria — had likely evolved hundreds of millions of years before this event. Despite this early ability to generate oxygen, atmospheric levels remained low for a surprisingly long time. Scientists have long debated the cause of this delay, considering explanations such as volcanic emissions, chemical sinks, and biological interactions. Yet no single factor has fully explained why it took so long for oxygen to build up in Earth’s air.

To tackle this enduring question, researchers focused on an often overlooked element of early Earth chemistry: the role of trace compounds such as nickel and urea in cyanobacterial growth.

Nano-bio interfaces for electrical and biochemical signal transduction

Nano-bio interfaces enable communication between synthetic materials and biological systems at the nanoscale, with their functionality shaped by material properties, surface chemistry and topography. This Review discusses the key considerations and methods for engineering nano-bio interfaces for bioelectrical signal detection and biochemical signal transduction.

Can brainless animals think?

Creatures like sea stars, jellyfish, sea urchins and sea anemones don’t have brains, yet they can capture prey, sense danger and react to their surroundings.

So does that mean brainless animals can think?

“Brainless does not necessarily mean neuron-less,” Simon Sprecher, a professor of neurobiology at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland, told Live Science in an email. Apart from marine sponges and the blob-like placozoans, all animals have neurons, he said.

Creatures like jellyfish, sea anemones and hydras possess diffuse nerve nets — webs of interconnected neurons distributed throughout the body and tentacles, said Tamar Lotan, head of the Cnidarian Developmental Biology and Molecular Ecology Lab at the University of Haifa in Israel.

“The nerve net can process sensory input and generate organized motor responses (e.g., swimming, contraction, feeding, and stinging), effectively performing information integration without a brain,” she told Live Science in an email.

This simple setup can support surprisingly advanced behavior. Sprecher’s team showed that the starlet sea anemone (Nematostella vectensis) can form associative memories — learning to link two unrelated stimuli. In the experiment, the researchers trained sea anemones to associate a harmless flash of light with a mild shock. Eventually, the light alone made them retract.

Another experiment showed that sea anemones can learn to recognize genetically identical neighbors after repeated encounters and curb their usual territorial aggression. The fact that anemones change their behavior toward genetically identical neighbors suggests they can distinguish between “self” and “non-self”

Continue reading “Can brainless animals think?” | >

Scientists Recreate Rare Pigment Behind Octopus ‘Superpowers’

Octopuses and other cephalopods are masters of camouflage, thanks largely to color-changing skin that can help them seemingly vanish into the background. Now, researchers report a big step towards being able to recreate their superpower.

A team led by UC San Diego was able to mass-produce a key pigment, xanthommatin, that occurs in the psychedelic skin of many cephalopods. Until now, xanthommatin has proven impractical to collect from animals or make in a lab.

The researchers technically didn’t make the pigment. They bioengineered bacteria to make it, coaxing microbes to not only produce this rare substance, but to do so with unprecedented efficiency, yielding up to 1,000 times more xanthommatin than previous methods.

A genetic switch lets plants accept nitrogen-fixing bacteria

Researchers are one step closer to understanding how some plants survive without nitrogen. Their work could eventually reduce the need for artificial fertilizer in crops such as wheat, maize, or rice.

“We are one step closer to greener and climate-friendlier food production,” say Kasper Røjkjær Andersen and Simona Radutoiu, both professors of molecular biology at Aarhus University. The findings are published in the journal Nature.

The two researchers led a new study where they discovered an important key to understanding how we can reduce agriculture’s need for artificial fertilizer.

Super recognizers’ unique eye patterns give AI an edge in face matching tasks

What is it that makes a super recognizer —someone with extraordinary face recognition abilities—better at remembering faces than the rest of us?

According to new research carried out by cognitive scientists at UNSW Sydney, it’s not how much of a face they can take in—it comes down to the quality of the information their eyes focus on.

“Super-recognizers don’t just look harder, they look smarter. They choose the most useful parts of a face to take in,” says Dr. James Dunn, lead author on the research that was published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

Photoinduced non-reciprocal magnetism effectively violates Newton’s third law

A theoretical framework predicts the emergence of non-reciprocal interactions that effectively violate Newton’s third law in solids using light, report researchers from Japan. They demonstrate that by irradiating light of a carefully tuned frequency onto a magnetic metal, one can induce a torque that drives two magnetic layers into a spontaneous, persistent “chase-and-run” rotation. This work opens a new frontier in non-equilibrium materials science and suggests novel applications in light-controlled quantum materials.

In equilibrium, obey the law of action and reaction as per the free energy minimization principle. However, in non-equilibrium systems such as biological or active matter—interactions that effectively violate this law—the so-called non-reciprocal interactions are common.

For instance, the brain comprises inhibitory and excitatory neurons that interact non-reciprocally; the interaction between predator and prey is asymmetric, and colloids immersed in an optically active media demonstrate non-reciprocal interactions as well. A natural question arises: Can one implement such non-reciprocal interaction in solid-state electronic systems?

Mycobacterium tuberculosis biology, pathogenicity and interaction with the host

In this Review, Warner, Barczak, Gutierrez and Mizrahi explore essential aspects of Mycobacterium tuberculosis physiology and biology, present recent advances related to its pathogenesis, metabolism and immune evasion mechanisms, and propose future directions for research.

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