Carl Sagan observed that the frontal lobe of the human brain, comprising more than two-thirds of our brain mass, is where “matter is transformed into consciousness.” Maybe, suggest scientists, we’ve had the story of human evolution wrong: that language evolved before our brains started getting larger (we have brains 3x the size of apes), and language led to brain size increase instead of being a result of it?
Scientists don’t yet know if a particular piece of human DNA passed down from Neanderthal interbreeding 60,000 years ago increases the risk of severe illness from covid-19. The coronavirus, like all viruses, has made the ‘dark energy’ of evolution visible, occupying an odd “liminal space” in the life of our planet, not quite alive, but not dead –a hidden world, almost a “first Earth.” New findings, reports Carl Zimmer, author of A Planet of Viruses, for the New York Times, show how some clues to modern health stem from ancient history.
The “Planet Earth Report” connects you to headline news on the science, technology, discoveries, people and events changing our planet and the future of the human species.
The “Planet Earth Report” connects you to headline news on the science, technology, discoveries, people and events changing our planet and the future of the human species.
“What we’ve made lets us dig ten times deeper than what we’ve been able to do before, helping us to see hundreds of millions of years into the past,” says Evan Floden, a researcher at the Center for Genomic Regulation in Barcelona who led on developing a new tool that simultaneously compares 1.4 million genetic sequences. “Our technology is essentially a time machine that tells us how ancient constraints influenced genes in a way that resulted in life as we know today, much like how the Hubble Space Telescope observes things that happened millions of years ago to help us understand the Universe we live in today.”
The discovery of the language of life, an ancient, long molecule called DNA with eight nucleotide letters suitable for storing and transmitting information, was a breakthrough in our knowledge of the range of possibilities necessary for life on Earth and beyond. Now, new studies suggest that alternatives to DNA-based life, as we know it on Earth, may be possible on other worlds.
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