This week’s biggest stories
It looks like a hell-beast from the depth of Lovecraft’s imagination, but this creature with its huge mouth and no anus this could be our earliest known ancestor. Thought to have lived 540 million years ago, the discovery of Saccorhytus coronarious fossils sheds light on the early stages of evolution. And if you need more nighttime fear-fuel, how about contemplating what makes a frog’s tongue a near inescapable trap. Apparently frog saliva has special properties: it switches between being thin and watery as the whip-like tongue hits its target, to thick and sticky as the insect is reeled in. Yum. But if understanding frog tongues doesn’t seem like a big deal, here’s something that definitely is. A groundbreaking “brain reading” system has allowed patients with completely locked-in syndrome to communicate for the first time in years. Patients paralysed by ALS were able to answer “yes” or “no” – and told doctors they are happy with life. Far out, right? And speaking of which, have you seen these amazing pics of Saturn’s rings? The new images from Nasa’s Cassini spacecraft are the most detailed ever taken and raise the possibility that the rings could contain millions of “moonlets”. And if that doesn’t blow your mind, there’s news about our home galaxy too. It is known that the Milky Way is being pulled through space, but cosmologists suspected it was being pushed as well. New research points to a cosmic dead zone that might be providing that push.
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Friday fascinator
The fashion world has bought into the idea that wearing La La Land yellow and head-to-toe colour will act as an antidote to these dark days. Now here comes the science part …
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Straight from the lab – top picks from our experts on the blog network
Will turtles and tourism always be at loggerheads? | Notes & Theories
The sand is warm and moist (the temperature determines the sex of the hatchlings) and is more compact than ideal; we soon find a few hatchlings that have perished as they attempted to dig their way out. It is looking as though this will be recorded as a ‘failed nest’ – one less mature adult to return in 20-30 years. That is until we see a hint of movement and slowly, with far less energy than they should have, a few tired, dark grey hatchlings emerge.
The ‘punch a Nazi’ meme: what are the ethics of punching Nazis? | Brain flapping
As many South Africans who’ve fought against racist oppression have noted, fighting for justice doesn’t just mean undermining racist laws. It also means undermining a social climate that breeds and accepts racist beliefs. This climate leads to harmful actions later. A climate where such beliefs are normalised is worth undermining (note how this reads like a moral rule). This is not about censoring racists, but about whether we want racists to feel comfortable in our society.
Sleep may help us to forget by rebalancing brain synapses | Neurophilosophy
We do know that sleep is important for consolidating newly formed memories. During waking hours, we learn all kinds of new information, both consciously and unconsciously. To store it, the brain modifies large numbers of synaptic connections, making some of them stronger and larger, and it’s now thought that as we sleep other synapses are weakened or destroyed, so that the important new information is stored for later use, while irrelevant material, which could interfere with learning, is not.
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Alex Bellos’s Monday puzzle
Lewis Carroll is best known as the author of Alice in Wonderland, but his mathematical work, Symbolic Logic, was the inspiration for this week’s puzzle. Did your guesses become curiouser and curiouser, or did you solve it?
Visit Alex Bellos’s Adventures in Numberland blog for more marvellous maths
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Science Weekly podcast
This week, Nicola Davis sits down with Professor Uta Frith to talk autism, passion, rebellion and the role of women in science.
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Eye on science – this week’s top video
How do we match up against machine intelligence? Professors Anil Seth and Alan Winfield peer into the future of AI and question how human we want our robots to be. Will there be a time when we’ll treat our robot companions as equals with consciousness rather than powerful machines?
