The earliest bones, however, were very different from human skeletons today. In the prehistoric past, bone was more like concrete, growing on the exterior of fish to provide a protective shell. But according to a new study in the journal Science Advances, the first bones with living cells—like those found in humans—evolved about 400 million years ago and acted as skeletal batteries: They supplied prehistoric fish with minerals needed to travel over greater distances.
The fossilized creatures in the analysis are known as osteostracans. “I affectionately call them beetle mermaids,” says Yara Haridy, a doctoral candidate at the Berlin Museum of Nature and lead author of the study. These fish had a hard, armor-encased front end and a flexible tail growing out the back. They had no jaws, and their bone tissue encased their bodies. These kinds of fish are critical to understanding the origins of the hard parts that shaped vertebrate evolution.
In autism, male-female imbalance is especially pronounced. Boys are as much as four times more likely to have some form of autism and are also more likely to have severe symptoms.
HAMILTON, ON, March 3, 2021 — Evolutionary forces drive a glaring gender imbalance in the occurrence of many health conditions, including autism, a team of genetics researchers has concluded.
The human genome has evolved to favour the inheritance of very different characteristics in males and females, which in turn makes men more vulnerable to a host of physical and mental health conditions, say the researchers responsible for a new paper published in the Journal of Molecular Evolution.
Their analysis shows that while there are certain conditions that occur only in women (cervical cancer and ovarian cancer, for example), or much more frequently in women (such as multiple sclerosis), men are more prone to medical conditions overall and, as a result, on average die sooner than women.
The lives of infomorphs (or ‘cyberhumans’) who have no permanent bodies but possess near-perfect information-handling abilities, will be dramatically different from ours. Infomorphs will achieve the ultimate morphological freedom. Any infomorph will be able to have multiple cybernetic bodies which can be assembled and dissembled at will by nanobots in the physical world if deemed necessary, otherwise most time will be spent in the multitude of virtual bodies in virtual enviro… See More.
“I am not a thing — a noun. I seem to be a verb, an evolutionary process — an integral function of the Universe.” — Buckminster Fuller
The term ‘Infomorph’ was first introduced in “The Silicon Man” by Charles Platt in 1991 and later popularized by Alexander Chislenko in his paper “Networking in the Mind Age”: “The growing reliance of system connections on functional, rather than physical, proximity of their elements will dramatically transform the notions of personhood and identity and create a new community of distributed ‘infomorphs’ — advanced informational entities — that will bring the ongoing process of liberation of functional structures from material dependence to its logical conclusions. The infomorph society will be built on new organizational principles and will represent a blend of a superliquid economy, cyberspace anarchy and advanced consciousness.”
The new post-Singularity system will inherit many of today’s structures but at the same time will develop new traits beyond our current human comprehension. The ability of future machines and posthumans alike to instantly transfer knowledge and directly share experiences with each other will lead to evolution of intelligence from the hive ontology of individual biological minds to the global hyperconnected society of digital minds.
Three-dimensional (3D), submillimeter-scale constructs of neural cells, known as cortical spheroids, are of rapidly growing importance in biological research because these systems reproduce complex features of the brain in vitro. Despite their great potential for studies of neurodevelopment and neurological disease modeling, 3D living objects cannot be studied easily using conventional approaches to neuromodulation, sensing, and manipulation. Here, we introduce classes of microfabricated 3D frameworks as compliant, multifunctional neural interfaces to spheroids and to assembloids. Electrical, optical, chemical, and thermal interfaces to cortical spheroids demonstrate some of the capabilities. Complex architectures and high-resolution features highlight the design versatility. Detailed studies of the spreading of coordinated bursting events across the surface of an isolated cortical spheroid and of the cascade of processes associated with formation and regrowth of bridging tissues across a pair of such spheroids represent two of the many opportunities in basic neuroscience research enabled by these platforms.
Progress in elucidating the development of the human brain increasingly relies on the use of biosystems produced by three-dimensional (3D) neural cultures, in the form of cortical spheroids, organoids, and assembloids (1–3). Precisely monitoring the physiological properties of these and other types of 3D biosystems, especially their electrophysiological behaviors, promises to enhance our understanding of the interactions associated with development of the nervous system, as well as the evolution and origins of aberrant behaviors and disease states (4–8). Conventional multielectrode array (MEA) technologies exist only in rigid, planar, and 2D formats, thereby limiting their functional interfaces to small areas of 3D cultures, typically confined to regions near the bottom contacting surfaces.
Summary: A new technique which involves fusing human and chimpanzee skin cells that have been modified to act like stem cells, allowed researchers to identify two novel genetic differences between humans and chimps.
Source: Stanford University.
One of the best ways to study human evolution is by comparing us with nonhuman species that, evolutionarily speaking, are closely related to us. That closeness can help scientists narrow down precisely what makes us human, but that scope is so narrow it can also be extremely hard to define. To address this complication, researchers from Stanford University have developed a new technique for comparing genetic differences.
A project to teach threatened marsupials to avoid feral cats is among a host of “assisted evolution” efforts to help animals in the face of climate change.
Photosynthetic light-harvesting antennae transfer energy toward reaction centers with high efficiency, but in high light or oxidative environments, the antennae divert energy to protect the photosynthetic apparatus. For a decade, quantum effects driven by vibronic coupling, where electronic and vibrational states couple, have been suggested to explain the energy transfer efficiency, but questions remain whether quantum effects are merely consequences of molecular systems. Here, we show evidence that biology tunes interpigment vibronic coupling, indicating that the quantum mechanism is operative in the efficient transfer regime and exploited by evolution for photoprotection. Specifically, the Fenna–Matthews–Olson complex uses redox-active cysteine residues to tune the resonance between its excitons and a pigment vibration to steer excess excitation toward a quenching site.
Photosynthetic species evolved to protect their light-harvesting apparatus from photoxidative damage driven by intracellular redox conditions or environmental conditions. The Fenna–Matthews–Olson (FMO) pigment–protein complex from green sulfur bacteria exhibits redox-dependent quenching behavior partially due to two internal cysteine residues. Here, we show evidence that a photosynthetic complex exploits the quantum mechanics of vibronic mixing to activate an oxidative photoprotective mechanism. We use two-dimensional electronic spectroscopy (2DES) to capture energy transfer dynamics in wild-type and cysteine-deficient FMO mutant proteins under both reducing and oxidizing conditions. Under reducing conditions, we find equal energy transfer through the exciton 4–1 and 4–2–1 pathways because the exciton 4–1 energy gap is vibronically coupled with a bacteriochlorophyll-a vibrational mode.
How can you possibly use simulations to reconstruct the history of the entire universe using only a small sample of galaxy observations? Through big data, that’s how.
Theoretically, we understand a lot of the physics of the history and evolution of the universe. We know that the universe used to be a lot smaller, denser, and hotter in the past. We know that its expansion is accelerating today. We know that the universe is made of very different things, including galaxies (which we can see) and dark matter (which we can’t).
We know that the largest structures in the universe have evolved slowly over time, starting as just small seeds and building up over billions of years through gravitational attraction.
Great new episode with evolutionary paleobiologist Bruce Lieberman; the discussion covers the gamut from very ancient intertidal RNA pools to Trilobites to the emergence of Hominids on the East African savannas. Well worth a listen.
I welcome renowned evolutionary paleobiologist Bruce S. Lieberman, a professor at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, who is an expert on how cosmic cataclysms have impacted the evolution of life here on Earth. Massive nearby supernovae, gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) as well as asteroidal and cometary impactors have each played a role in our planet’s long tape of life. And if we were able to rewind that tape and roll the die once more? Would intelligent life have manifested itself here at all? This lively episode delves into our long road from Trilobite to Human Intelligence.
Dr. John Torday, Ph.D. is an Investigator at The Lundquist Institute of Biomedical Innovation, a Professor of Pediatrics and Obstetrics/Gynecology, and Faculty, Evolutionary Medicine, at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, and Director of the Perinatal Research Training Program, the Guenther Laboratory for Cell-Molecular Biology, and Faculty in the Division of Neonatology, at Harbor-UCLA Medical Center.
Dr. Torday studies the cellular-molecular development of the lung and other visceral organs, and using the well-established principles of cell-cell communication as the basis for determining the patterns of physiologic development, his laboratory was the first to determine the complete repertoire of lung alveolar morphogenesis. This highly regulated structure offered the opportunity to trace the evolution of the lung from its unicellular origins forward, developmentally and phylogenetically. The lung is an algorithm for understanding the evolution of other physiologic properties, such as in the kidney, skin, liver, gut, and central nervous system. Such basic knowledge of the how and why of physiologic evolution is useful in the effective diagnosis and treatment of disease.
Dr. Torday received his undergraduate degree in Biology and English from Boston University, and his MSc and PhD in Experimental Medicine from McGill University, Montreal, Canada. He did a post-doctoral Fellowship in Reproductive Endocrinology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, WI.
Dr. Torday’s research has led to the publication of more than 150 peer-reviewed articles and 350 abstracts. More recently, he has gained an interest in the evolutionary aspects of comparative physiology and development, leading to the publication of 12 peer-reviewed articles on the cellular origins of vertebrate physiology, culminating in the book Evolutionary Biology, Cell-Cell Communication and Complex Disease.
