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Category: evolution – Page 3

Lost Primal Eye Paradigm scientific review and update August 2026

A growing body of research across paleoneurology, evolutionary biology, and chronobiology now supports the core mechanisms of Steve Nichols’s Lost Primal Eye paradigm aka Median Vision Theory (MVT). This is a regular scientific review and update posted for The Posthuman University Journal on academia.edu August 2026 Palaeoneurology and Therapsid Evolution Benoit et al. (2016) (Acta Palaeontologica Polonica): Examined over 800 therapsid fossil skulls, documenting the convergent, gradual reduction and complete loss of the parietal foramen across Permo-Triassic eutheriodonts. The study directly links the degeneration of the physical pineal eye to the evolution of mammalian endothermy, nocturnal adaptation, and the transfer of photoreception to paired lateral eyes.

Astronomers catch massive galaxy assembling piece by piece 1.2 billion years after Big Bang

Astronomers have discovered a remarkably tiny group of six young galaxies just 1.2 billion years after the Big Bang. This may be a rare glimpse of how some of the universe’s largest galaxies formed. The paper outlining the findings was submitted to the arXiv preprint server on July 13.

Chaotic patches The widely accepted cosmological model of the universe known as the Lambda Cold Dark Matter Model suggests that galaxies primarily form hierarchically through mergers. That means they grow piece by piece, as smaller galaxies merge over billions of years. In this context, dense regions in the early universe serve as natural laboratories to test this idea.

These dense patches, known as protoclusters and proto-groups, are young clusters of galaxies packed into a region just tens of thousands of light-years across and represent an especially brief and extreme stage in galaxy evolution. Spotting them requires telescopes sensitive enough to detect faint, low-mass galaxies at extreme distances, and precise enough to confirm that the galaxies are truly bound together.

Cells share universal on switches but evolve unique strategy to silence genes

The signals that cells use to switch genes on have remained almost unchanged across two billion years of evolution, but the ones used to switch genes off vary dramatically from one branch of life to another, according to a new study from the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) in Barcelona.

Reversal of protein chemical aging by enzymatic deglycation

et al. used an innovative series of screening and directed evolution steps to produce a new enzyme (CMLase) which can remove a pernicious form of advanced glycation end product (AGE) linkage from proteins. AGEs contribute to biological aging, so CMLase may possess therapeutic potential to combat parts of the aging process.

Advanced glycation end products (AGEs) in proteins, a hallmark of aging, are considered irreversible. Here, authors report the development of CMLase — an enzyme that specifically oxidizes Nε-carboxymethyl-lysine (CML) and restores the native lysine residues in vitro and in human tissue samples.

Broth Optical DensityBased Assessment for Phage Therapy: Turbidity Reduction, Antibacterial Virulence, and TimeKill

Phage therapy is the use of bacterial viruses, or bacteriophages, as antibacterial agents. It has been in use for over 100 years and is becoming increasingly common clinically. The first steps of phage therapy include identification of bacteria to be targeted and then obtaining phages with appropriate host ranges. This is followed by various approaches to in vitro phage characterization. Increasingly common for phage phenotypic characterization is the use of kinetic microtiter plate readers. They can both decrease workloads and increase throughput, especially relative to analyses that require plating on agar-based media. These colorimetric/turbidimetric/optical density approaches primarily assess phage-induced culture-wide bacterial lysis, in the shorter term, or instead the phage potential to suppress phage-resistance evolution over longer time frames. Considered here are methods relevant to phage characterization especially for phage-therapy purposes. Discussed are turbidity-reduction assays, determinations of phage antibacterial virulence, and related time-kill curve analysis. All are or can be optical density-based approaches to assessing phage-based bacterial reduction. Emphasis is placed on consideration of the utilities, limitations, and intersections of these similar methods. Emphasized is that the start of “Deviation”—where phage-treated culture turbidity diverges from phage-free controls—may represent a superior endpoint for such optical density-based bacterial-reduction protocols.

A cooperative approach to reproductive success

Fertilization is often imagined as a frantic race, with millions of sperm competing for a single prize. But new research by a team of evolutionary biologists from Syracuse University, the University of Siena in Italy and the University of Szeged in Hungary reveals a more surprising reality, where success can depend less on competition and more on cooperation.

The group focused its study on organisms called arthropods, a large and diverse part of the animal kingdom that includes spiders, crabs, insects and centipedes. The scientists explored instances throughout evolutionary history where arthropod sperm worked together in coordinated groups, forming structures to improve their chances of reaching and fertilizing an egg. This process, known as sperm conjugation, is reshaping what researchers thought they understood about reproduction and evolution.

Ancient Protein AIDS in Anti-Cancer Immunity

Scientists have advanced the field of cancer treatment by leveraging the body’s immune system to recognize and target tumors. The study of the immune system helps better advance these treatments and boost immune responses. The evolution of immune cells and different aspects of the immune system has helped fight aggressive forms of disease. More importantly, as ancient populations become exposed to different diseases over time, heredity can protect future generations from these specific viruses and bacteria.

One specific part of the immune system, known as ‘complement’, is crucial to aiding a robust immune response. Complement is part of the innate immune system and consists of over 50 plasma proteins. Complement proteins rapidly target foreign pathogens and trigger inflammation from infection. Specifically, these proteins help puncture infected cell membranes to eliminate disease. While complement is a unified system, it takes several pathways to function: Classical, Lectin, and Alternative. These three functions trigger complement in different ways but converge into a single innate immune defense. There are also different types of complement proteins. One of the most abundant is complement C3, which acts as a critical surveyor and defense against pathogens. Compliment C3 is an ancient protein and is found in organisms such as jellyfish, playing a pivotal role in the immune system. It specifically tags infected cells with molecules for immune cells to identify and target.

70millionyearold mammal fossil discovered in Mongolia rewrites the story of early mammal evolution

The fossil record has a habit of reshaping ideas that once seemed settled. In the Late Cretaceous, long before the extinction of the dinosaurs, small mammals occupied a world dominated by much larger reptiles.

Moon’s thick crust could amplify elusive gravitational-wave signals

Gravitational waves are tiny ripples in the fabric of spacetime that are produced when massive objects in the cosmos accelerate or collide. By detecting these waves, astrophysicists can study various cosmic events, including black hole mergers, neutron star collisions and the early evolution of the universe.

There are several gravitational-wave observatories in different geographic regions worldwide. While these detectors are highly sensitive to the tiny changes associated with ripples in spacetime, they cannot yet detect waves across all frequency ranges.

Researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Peking University recently revisited the possibility of using the moon to amplify gravitational waves with frequencies between 0.01 and 1 hertz (Hz), a range that remains largely inaccessible to current gravitational-wave detectors.

The global biogeography of passerine songs

Although bird songs are classic models for understanding the evolution of vocal communication, their global diversity has long made the development of a unifying framework challenging. By analyzing the acoustic architecture of songs from more than 3,000 passerine species worldwide, we show that this acoustic space can be structured around eight elemental motifs. The differential use of these motifs is driven by a combination of species’ biological traits (social organization, morphology, and mating system) and the physics of sound propagation. In tropical rainforests, environmental filtering for transmission efficiency favors structurally simple motifs, such as flat whistles.

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